Your Sales Data, Analytics, Activities and Processes Are Beyond Inaccurate and Misleading. AI and Technology is Making it Worse! But There is Hope!

Honestly, I’ve never seen such a mess in my life! The sales analytics I see on dashboards are like tracking the steps and distance on someone’s Apple Watch. Since each person’s gait is different, the number of steps isn’t accurate. You can look at the miles walked to understand how far they’ve gone, but that doesn’t tell you if they actually went anywhere or just walked in a circle all day.

This is the current state of sales metrics and dashboards. When you apply AI to this data, you often uncover deeper insights—but those insights are still inaccurate, misleading, and ultimately useless. Yet, surprisingly, few people recognize why or realize that this is the case.

The reason behind this is simple, but fixing it requires change. Companies, executives, and managers tend to resist change unless they can clearly see the problem, understand the solution, and feel confident they can implement it to get real value.

So let’s start by identifying the problem. Your metrics and analytics are off base because, like the Apple Watch, you’re collecting activity data without understanding what’s actually being accomplished. You’re focusing on the seller’s activities, but the impact on the buyer is missing.

To truly understand the impact, you need a sales framework that connects your sales team’s activities with the buyer’s journey.

There are five key stages a buyer goes through when making a purchase, and these stages are universal across all sales cycles. They’re easy to identify based on what the buyer is doing, and they are:

1. Awareness: The buyer knows nothing about you.
2. Curiosity & Interest: The buyer starts engaging with your digital content or attending events.
3. Desire to Solve: The buyer wants to understand how your solution can solve their problem.
4. Conviction: The buyer is convinced that your solution will work and begins considering the details.
5. Close: The buyer makes the decision to purchase and finalizes the deal.

In the Awareness stage, the buyer isn’t doing anything, but in the Curiosity & Interest stage, they’re actively exploring your content. When they move into Desire to Solve, they want to know more about how your product works. In the Conviction stage, they want proof that your solution will solve their problem. Finally, when they’re ready to Close, they’re focused on finalizing the deal.

This is the sales cycle you should be measuring. It’s like tracking steps on an Apple Watch—only now, you also have the map showing where the person walked. You’re not just tracking the activity, but understanding where it’s leading.

The solution is straightforward. Start by aligning your CRM stages with the buyer’s journey. If the stages in your CRM don’t reflect the buyer’s state, then your metrics are ineffective, and you won’t understand the impact of the activities you're measuring. When you are measuring and creating incentives around activities that you do not know have impact, you are measuring and incentivizing non productivity. The definition of non productivity is in fact activity without impact.

Your CRM stages should reflect these buyer states: Attention (or Awareness), Curiosity & Interest, Desire to Solve, Conviction (or Proof of Solution), and Close.

Next, align your sales activities to these stages. Now, your salespeople will know exactly which activities to execute at the right time. Currently, your sales process likely provides little guidance. By aligning activities to each stage, you ensure that your team is doing the right thing at the right time. For example, instead of having SDRs cold-call accounts that are unaware of you to schedule a demo, the correct activity for those accounts is a discovery conversation, not a demo. This principle holds true throughout the cycle. The framework gives your salespeople a guide for success.

The final step is to align the resources your salespeople need with their activities. They need to know what tools, content, or support to use at each stage of the process.

By implementing this approach, your sales team will be doing the next best activity at the right time in the sales cycle, using the right resources. It’s a proven fact that when sales teams operate this way, productivity increases, and the cost of sale goes down.

When you start using this approach, your metrics will actually tell you meaningful things. For example, each stage has a dominant skill: Curiosity & Interest requires discovery and needs analysis, while Desire to Solve requires effective presentations. If a rep’s time in a particular stage is longer than average, you know they’re struggling with a specific skill. If the time is shorter, they’re excelling at that skill. If this happens across the board, you might have a systemic issue, like a lack of enablement or resources.

Finally, the key to unlocking these benefits is implementing the sales framework into your system—whether it’s Salesforce, HubSpot, or Dynamics. Once in place, the system provides real, actionable insights.

These templates are built out in SFDC and can easily be adapted to HubSpot and Dynamics. Reach out if you would like to learn more.

Invest your time and resources into this framework, and then, if necessary, use AI to analyze the data. You’ll be much better off, and you’ll see the results you’ve been missing!