Are You Still Using “Zombie” Sales Metrics?

Today’s sales leaders need to stop using yesterday’s metrics…whose usefulness died long ago.

Disagree?  If you have such great metrics, why Is “No Decision” beating you so badly and so often?  

“No decision”, where the customer decides to keep muddling along with status quo, is rising rapidly:  from 18% in 2005,  all the to 40-60% now (depending on whose research you believe).  For you non-"mathletes", that means "hang fire" has roughly doubled or tripled in fifteen short years.  When you lose to no decision, you and your entire sales team lost to everybody, nobody, your customer and yourself…all at once.  

Status Quo Now Wins Half the Time. 

Maybe it's desperation, not salesmanship, that wins the other half, who need to buy from somebody, no matter how poorly everyone sells.  Isn’t it sad to think you’re only winning customers who sell themselves?  Regardless, that means your metrics don’t predict success all that well, do they?  

Old metrics clearly don’t predict success; a fact that was true before pandemic hit.  Coming out of COVID is exactly the time to perform an overdue re-assessment.  

Sales leaders:  Is your sales force using metrics that came into use before the Internet, before buyer behavior changed, and before selling had to change? 

What’s wrong with your metrics?  Well…which ones try to track “selling against status quo”, by far your biggest competitor?  I'll hang up and listen.

Here’s the key:  selling against no decision means selling value against status quo, and against competitors.  It’s age-old stuff, but sales teams have been getting worse at it, not better.  Selling, and its accompanying metrics should measure value building, development, and selling. Look at your sales management dashboard; now do you see what's missing? It's hard seeing what isn't there without guidance.

A key reason most traditional metrics are obsolete now is that they track selling activities, not customer buying activities.  Happily, the new metrics you should master are simple.  They fall into three areas.

Why Change?  Value Gap Metrics. 

Value is desirability of customer outcomes. Thus, sellers need to discover (and/or create) a gap between current outcomes experienced and outcomes achieved in some desired future state.  

Currently: above the funnel, we measure engagement with content (often feature and benefit content, not outcome content). We prospect using dialing activity metrics, which are blind, seller-activity quantity.  Even “sophisticated” AI tools track share of talk time between customer and seller, but aren’t sophisticated enough to measure value development – which means sellers aren’t given any credit for even trying.  Then, we qualify using some temporary screen like BANT: Budget, authority, need, and timing:  all of which will evaporate without a sufficient value gap.  

Worse, we sell to customer-stated (as in "customer self-diagnosed") requirements, These are:

1. A novice-level subset of all value gaps which could be generated by a trusted consultant.  Worse, they almost never have an ROI calculation included.  Sellers usually find that ROI flaw in self-informed requirements when executives kill the project sometime after a finalist presentation.
2. Communicated to every one of your competitors.  Meeting 100% of the requirement is often merely permission to compete on price…and to find out that the buying team was actually pursuing a solution with inadequate ROI all along.

Instead:  

• Focus your content on outcomes, so that customers are thinking about your value before the first conversation; tracking outcome-based content engagement yields value gap insights.
• Develop business acumen in every customer-facing role so that they can each develop a high-quality value hypothesis; track and analyze those hypotheses.
• Replicate the great ones: hypotheses that resonate with customers and secure the right kind of appointments, across your teams.  
• Teach elite value discovery, and track how much value (quantified monetarily) sellers uncover – as well as how early in the customer’s buying process.

I’ve proposed a single metric, deal-winning value, that can be used throughout the sales funnel. 

Why Now? Urgency Metrics

Your sellers' urgency to close has little to do with customer urgency to change – and “little” is steadily becoming “nothing”, which is accelerating toward “so stop irritating me with your self-centered need to close me this week”. 

Current metrics only track seller-centric timing like “when will they be making a buying decision”.  We track demo activity/date, bid date, etc. but remember: an acceptable bid that meets needs is almost meaningless if your budget was approved with a low priority.  I’m convinced that most forecasting and funnel gyrations turn into "Keystone Kops" shows because we don’t truly understand the customer’s urgency and timing. 

Instead, uncover urgency:  

• Great value discovery does this, because it draws a bright contrast between current state and desired state.  The act of value discovery actually creates value and urgency in a customer's mind.
• I’ll talk about it more in the next session, but metrics around “advocate recruitment”, which is adding strategic allies to a buying committee (to expand beyond the stated requirements your customer is sharing with competitors), show that not only is the seller engineering urgency, but a differential preference.  

Deal-winning value, when used correctly helps the customer realize how urgent their own value gap is; it inherently quantifies the cost of doing nothing, using the customer’s own figures.

Why us? Differentiated Value Metrics

What metrics that track how well your salespeople have differentiated?  I’ll wait. Crickets?  Guess why no decision is taking your lunch money.

We track the decision influencers we’re talking to and how often.  We discuss how closely our bids mimic the requirements, but…

Instead:  

• Why not track the value each persona envisions? Most methodologies already include this, but your salespeople don't know it's the most important part of your methodology, and since you don't actively track or coach to it, guess how much effort they devote.
• Do you track and measure how often customer-stated requirements were shaped by you?  Why isn’t that a closely tracked metric?  To win the specsmanship game, you need to be engaged early.  Do you measure how often your people are in early enough to shape requirements with an “early engagement” metric?   
• Even more important:  Do the additions to the customer requirements have deal-winning value  to the customer?  Why don’t you know…or track it?

What Are Your Metrics For, if Not to Manage Your Business?

Many metrics only exist is to CYA…so you can answer tough executive questions with a nice printout.  Some metrics are completely artificial: they rationalize a CRM or other expensive tool purchase. This is madness...at least when there's a better way.

Unfortunately, they’re state of the world (but not state of the art).

Want to do better? Contact me.

To Your Success!