Sales and Statistics

Jeff Angus, author of Management by Baseball, has a new post that caught my interest. It was about the Red Sox’ Josh Beckett and Management by Exception. The cool thing about Jeff is that he is a sabermatician and, as such, he seems to always include some really profound statistics to make his points. Today I’d like to try that too.

Bob went into Memorial Day with only 8 opportunities in his pipeline. Those 8 were 14 short of what he needed to have in his pipeline so there was a directive to fill the pipeline. By Independence Day, those 8 opportunities had been deleted – they were stale – and they were replaced by about 20 new opportunities. As we head into the home stretch of the summer and Labor Day, Bob’s pipeline now has 32 opportunities worth an estimated $362,000.

As a sales manager, we can judge Bob on any of the following metrics:

If we judged Bob on sales alone we would have to give him failing grades for the 2nd quarter. If we judged him on his effort and his willingness to change and adapt, he gets an A. How do you judge your salespeople? How you do make sure that salespeople aren’t being judged by sales alone?