Two More Vanity Metrics I Hate

Vanity metrics are everywhere—hours on the phone, miles driven, demo slide counts—but are they creating wins? (Hint: nope.) In this video, I reveal smarter ways to measure success, using real-world examples where sales reps crushed quotas by breaking the rules.

Don't forget to check out last week's top tip: Beware of This Vanity Metric!

For more strategies like this, check out my sales tip video library on YouTube...

If you prefer to read - here is the transcript:

I need to rant a little bit more about vanity metrics, because there's another couple that are driving me crazy right now with sales managers who are insisting on either dials or talk time or drive time as a vanity metric. These numbers are irrelevant to the success of the business.

I’ll give you an example: years ago, I worked with a seller in the agricultural industrial market. He sold chemicals and fertilizers and things like that to farmers. And he was 300% of quota to one year. But you know what? The owner of the business gave him less of a bonus because he drove less. He put literally he put less miles on his truck.

Now, you might think I'm being stupid, right? And that customer is certainly being stupid. And my client no longer works for him. Any wonder why? But I see this all the time.

Demos is a great example. Marketing has put together this great demo or this product overview, and they expect you to run through every single slide. Well, a client, a software client of mine that I was working with had a sales rep who was outperforming everybody, but she was doing a 20 minute demo instead of a 30 minute demo. Marketing was really upset about that. Product was really upset about that because she was choosing randomly in different demos to show them some things and not show some things. The sales VP was at least smart enough to recognize what might be going right, and would sit down with her. What she found was that that sales rep was tailoring the demo to each prospect and keeping it short and succinct on the things at that prospect and wanted to hear about. And in doing so, she could condense a 30 minute presentation into a 20 minute presentation.

But the vanity metric that says you have to do a 30 minute demo, you need to be on the phone X number of hours a day. I think we should be looking at the best practice. Wouldn't you want your team to be so efficient that they're working to the best practice of the fewest number of dials, the fewest number of hours on the phone, the fewest number of miles, the fewest emails in order to create success. Doing so is going to drive productivity per sales rep and in each territory.

So don't get sucked into vanity metrics. Make sure that you're tailoring the approach to each territory, each person, and of course, the results that you want.