Chasing Numbers or Chasing Achievement? 5 Tips to Improve Your Sales Culture Around Data

What do the analytics in baseball say about the launch angle’s impact on slugging percentage? What did the quants say in the TV show?Billions?about the derivatives of options and futures? What did the TPS reports say this week??

Whether you are a baseball general manager in Moneyball, running a day trading firm, or an extra in?Office Space,?these satirical Hollywood scenes that poke fun at leaders trying to use data that nobody understands land with audiences. They land because in our own worlds, we experience the frustration and confusion around data. It plays out in front of our eyes in our own careers, especially in sales.??

There is no doubt your business is running on data. Data on customers. Financial data. Performance data against key initiatives. Industry data. You are better off with it. You can make better decisions and have better operational control over the results.??

But we have all been presented with data we do not trust, reports we do not understand, or metrics that do not align with the actual outcomes we are trying to achieve. It is often because we do not know what that data is trying to achieve. They are often presented as numbers we are trying to hit or reduce.?

As a leader driving results, you know when data makes sense to your people and when it does not. You can feel it in the room and in your voice when the data is clicking—for you and your people. But sometimes you do not. Either you confidently outlined a common goal that is simple and clear to hit, creating opportunity for a culture of achievement, or you stumbled over your words and saw a room full of blank stares, creating a group that chases numbers out of fear.?

As someone who loves data, and who has used it both effectively and poorly over the years, here are five guidelines to help you instill a culture of?Achievement?with your data—and beyond—rather than a culture of?Chasing Numbers.???

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1. Simple Lead Measures?

When you are measuring performance and looking for efficiencies, it is easy to deviate to percentages, ratios, or marginal growth as a part of organizational objectives.??

What is more important, though, is driving at simple?Lead Measures?that are core to the job of the individual or group.??

For example,?conversion percentage?is often a lead measure for sales teams. But that can be complicated to track or truly measure. Instead, drive the one behavior that you think most impacts?conversion percentage.?It could be a total number of net new client relationships, how many sales meetings were set, or another metric that tracks the behavior that helps salespeople convert.??

Drive the behavior behind the lead measure, not the desired outcome. This helps your people see the little wins, building a culture of achievement, rather than trying to gamify ratios and percentages.?

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2. Correlation of Data Driven Behaviors to Proven Successful Outcomes

When you drive a behavior or data point, you need the clear through-line between excellence in this behavior and the well-worn path many have followed to achieve optimal results. You also must be able to communicate that story and success throughout the organization. It cannot just make sense to the C-level.??

If your goal is “new accounts added,” explain how employees who added X number of accounts grew their commission by Y. It is a simple correlation to individual success. Underneath that, the company is growing in revenue, too.??

The behaviors need to be the backdrop of success and results so people can feel confident their focus will lead to achievement.??

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3. Words Matter

The words you use as a leader matter, especially around data. If your verbiage is too complicated, or there is an equation that not every can easily understand, it will not stick. And be careful with how you talk about data categorically. Words like “metrics,” especially when used to talk about simple, quantitative behaviors, can dull the real work put into achieving them. Instead, try?measurables, results?or?outcomes.?In the staffing industry, measurables like client meetings, candidate submittals, or consultants hired are not metrics—they are meaningful results on the path to achievement.?

Additionally, repeat and train on the talking points relating the data to success. People will not remember the percentage growth of a certain sales metric, however they will remember that “Salespeople who averaged X earned on average over $Y,” or, “Teams that did ___ hit their quarterly goal 80% of the time.” Remember and repeat the simple, high-level talking points describing the relationship between the data and the success.??

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4. Achieve Quality THROUGH Quantity??

Have you ever heard someone use the phrase “work smarter, not harder”? I never understood that moniker for sales. Working smarter, not harder, achieves no growth, no progress. You just expend less effort to achieve the same results. Working smarter, AND harder, increases your overall output.??

Additionally, there is a truth that lives in developmental organizations (especially like sales and recruiting) that the path to better quality and more skill is through repetition, and many of those reps are measured results. It’s really hard to get great at a specific type of client meeting without going on a lot of them. That is why books like Grit by Angela Duckworth share the concept that “effort counts twice. In Peak, Anders Ericsson lives on deliberate practice and Malcom Gladwell popularized the 10,000 hours rule in Outliners. Even the “waste of time” client interactions are only WOTs if you don’t use that meeting to hone your craft and practice your pitch.??

One of my most influential clients in my career came the week after I was with my leader on a full day of client meetings. In the middle of one meeting, I quickly recognized this lead had no potential of becoming a potential customer and, self-admittedly, mailed the rest of the meeting in. When I got back to the car, my Director at the time asked me how I thought it went. When I responded with poorly, that we shouldn’t have met, he responded with how he thought it was poor as well—but because I skipped an opportunity. I skipped an opportunity to hone my sell to the customer, describe our services, and get better in that moment.??

“You’re already there, you’re already in front of someone who resembles a client with one of your enterprise customers. Why not get better in that moment?”??

The next week, I had a similar situation when meeting an individual named Sri. But this time, I heeded my Director’s advice. That person was in a meeting at their company later that next week, shared the impression I left, and someone I had been trying to meet for weeks called me back. That person became one of my biggest customers. He said it was because of what Sri said in their team meeting.?

So, if you are feeling guilty about asking your team to produce great quantity, don’t. It is the path to greater quality as long—as they treat it as such.??

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5. Exercise Restraint in Messaging Data??

What are you?monitoring and measuring yet not messaging???

When making data-driven decisions, it is natural to get laser-focused on a couple of measurables. If you can just increase those conversions by another 1%. But if you’re overly messaging certain goals (organizational health results like turnover or promotions), you could see the wrong behaviors develop to shortcut those results. That might be all people focus on. They are chasing the numbers. Find the right balance between communicating important outcomes while not forgetting about communicating the behaviors that help achieve them.?

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Whether you have a degree in advanced statistics or just found out what Tableau is, data can and will be your friend when leading your teams. Use these points above to help them chase achievement as opposed to chasing numbers.??