Measure buyer progress, not seller motion

Emails sent, calls made and proposals produced are easy to count. They tell you about effort. They do not necessarily tell you whether buyers are moving toward a worthwhile purchase.

Define progress through observable commitments. A buyer shares relevant operating information, introduces an approver, agrees evaluation criteria or allocates time to a working session. The exact signals depend on the service and buying process.

Keep activity metrics where they help manage capacity or identify inactivity. The mistake is treating them as the final outcome. A team can increase outbound volume while reducing relevance and damaging future access.

Build a small chain of measures: activity, qualified conversation, buyer commitment, commercial decision and successful delivery. This helps locate where an intervention has an effect. A new message may improve responses without improving fit. A better qualification process may reduce proposals while improving the quality of work won.

Avoid rewarding a single number without context. If staff are judged only on meetings booked, they have an incentive to book weak meetings. If judged only on conversion, they may avoid difficult but valuable opportunities.

The purpose of measurement is to improve decisions about effort and quality. A metric that can be increased while the business becomes worse deserves a guardrail. Ask what unwanted behaviour the measure could encourage before making it a target.