Moneyball for Sales: Why You're Tracking the Wrong Metrics (Money Monday)

This is Jeb Blunt, and it's Money Monday on the Sales Gravy Podcast. Make money, money, money, money. Make money, money, Welcome to another edition of Money Monday. My name is Keith Lubner, and I'm filling in for my good friend and our CEO, Jeb Blunt. Jeb is always delivering insight into all things sales, and today is no different, except I'm gonna take a page from the movies. Let me ask you something straight up, though. What are you actually measuring in your sales org right now? And if you're like most sales leaders I work with, and I've worked with hundreds of them across every industry, your dashboards are full of activity metrics, calls made, emails sent, LinkedIn touches, dials per day per rep. And look, I get it. Activity is visibility. Activity is easy to track. Activity feels like progress. But here's the brutal truth. Activity without the right outcome metric is just noise. I've walked into too many sales floors where the reps are grinding and the leaders are proud of the numbers. Hundreds of calls a week, thousands of emails a month, and yet the pipeline is thin. The close rates are mediocre, and nobody can figure out why. I could tell you why. They're measuring the wrong leading indicator. There's a concept in business that separates the teams that consistently win from the teams that consistently wonder why they're not winning. It's understanding the difference between a lagging indicator and a leading indicator. Lagging indicators tell you what already happened, revenue closed, quota attained, deals won. Leading indicators tell you what's about to happen. Today, I want to give you the one leading indicator in sales that changes everything. Whenever I'm working with a group, there are always one or two people who have seen the movie Moneyball, so I use it to set the stage. In the early two thousands, the Oakland A's had a serious problem. They had a phenomenal team, guys like Jason Giambi, Jason Isringhausen, and Johnny Damon. And and they went really deep into the playoffs, but they didn't win at all. The real crisis hit after the season. Those three stars were becoming free agents. And in baseball, that means they were about to cash in. The New York Yankees were knocking on their doors with deep, deep pockets. And Oakland, well, they didn't have deep pockets. Billy Beane, played by Brad Pitt in the movie, faced a classic dilemma. He had to replace elite talent, but he couldn't afford elite prices. He had to find value where no one else was looking. There's a famous scene in the movie where Billy Beane is sitting at a long table in what they call the war Room with all his old school scouts. Now these are guys who have been looking at talent the same way for forty years. Billy walks up to the board and writes a name on a magnetic strip. He sticks it on the wall. …