Want your sales team to be more productive? Take a closer look at your ‘watermelons’

In today’s era of data abundance, leaders have plenty of metrics to choose from to benchmark progress against their strategic initiatives. Yet even with all this data, far too many leaders focus on aggregate data, overlooking the metrics that matter most.

When you synthesize data at a high level, you risk creating metrics I call “watermelons” — numbers that are green at a glance, but under the surface are red. Watermelons hide underlying execution issues happening across your sales team — and if left on the vine for too long, can rot your business from the inside out.

Leaders that rely on averages and aggregates are doing their business a disservice by neglecting to dig deep enough to understand the status of their business goals and areas for improvement.

For instance, in a recent earnings call, Cloudflare disclosed that they had “identified more than 100 people on our sales team who have consistently missed expectations. Simply put, a significant percentage of our sales force has been repeatedly underperforming based on measurable performance targets and critical KPIs.”

How did 100 people miss the mark for so long? Leaders weren’t digging deep enough into the data. It’s important to identify the root cause of these sellers’ misses and fix it from the ground up.

Here’s what it means to look for watermelons, how to identify them and the framework that provides better insights and actions to improve your bottom line.

Finding watermelons using people-centric analysis

When looking at important performance metrics, many leaders take too limited a view of their data. Activity and outcome metrics are commonly sliced and diced by various dimensions such as industry, segment, geography, product line, customer cohort and buying persona, so leaders can answer questions like, “What is the win rate for manufacturing in the mid-market in Europe?” This is great, but almost every company misses one of the most important dimensions: people.

Failing to look at your metrics by people obscures inconsistent performance across the team, which kills overall productivity. Say your average win rate is 34% — what may seem like a wonderfully healthy metric could be a complete watermelon. Frankly, for most companies, what’s probably happening is the win rate of the top-performing quartile is above high, while the majority of your team’s win rate is low.

You won’t discover this reality unless you look at the people dimension, examining the distribution of each person’s performance against the metric. This may look something like:

Looking at distributions can be a bit complicated, so here is a way to simplify the analysis. You use participation rate as a proxy for distribution, for every single cohort that you want.

Building off the previous example, you can look at your win rate for manufacturing in mid-market in Europe, and then analyze your reps’ performance in those deals to determine the Participation Rate against the win rate metric.

Participation rate is simply the number of people who meet a certain threshold. It’s not a new concept — leaders commonly use it for their sales quota attainment metric — but it’s absolutely new for most leaders to apply it to other key metrics, including:

• Win rate
• Pipeline generation
• Pipeline conversion
• Time to first sale
• Average selling price
• Deal velocity
• Lead volume
• Conversion rate
• Bookings

When assessing quota attainment, the thresholds are typically 100% and 70%. These thresholds are based on the notion that a well-performing team exhibits a “normal distribution” centered around the goal. A cheat code for a normal distribution that leaders commonly use is “50 on 100 and 70 on 70” — where 50% of your people are hitting 100% of the metric and 70% are hitting 70% of the metric. This same code can be used for your other metrics. A normal distribution for any given metric will look like:

People-centric distributions will change the way you think about the world. They can reveal problems and opportunities:

• If no one is hitting the participation rate, you likely have a serious strategy issue.
• If your participation rate is bimodal, where some people are high-performing and others are low-performing, then you have a classic enablement problem where you have an opportunity to enable the low performers to become high performers.

Determining your participation rate across metrics gives you a roadmap of what actions to take to improve your people’s performance, which in turn increases the performance of your business.

Team performance analytics are rep-centric

Measuring sales team performance (as opposed to sales performance) can make a world of difference for revenue teams. While sales performance metrics might include outcome metrics such as lead volume, conversion, bookings and activity metrics such as calls, emails and accounts touched, sales team performance focuses on those sales funnel metrics as it relates to distribution among reps.

So while traditional sales performance analytics are funnel-centric, team performance analytics are rep-centric. This approach helps you better understand the root cause behind suboptimal performance.

Understanding this distinction, and using it to make changes on your team for the long term, helps to create a ruggedized, agile sales team that can carry the company through these critical moments and challenges. As McKinsey analysts put it, while sales is a people business — and always will be — amplifying people power with data and analytics is critical to achieving growth impact.

As a leader, you must help people reach their full potential by investing in them. But to do so, you need to know where to actually focus those efforts, and you’re flying blind if you’re looking at a bunch of watermelon data. The onus is on us as leaders to dig deeply into sales metrics and to continue the practice as the organization grows and scales. In doing so, you’ll not only find existing watermelons but also may be able to prevent future watermelons from growing into more significant issues.

There’s no such thing as the “average” sales rep, only individuals with different levels of performance. And when shortcomings and standouts are apparent, more concerted action can be taken to set your people up for success and radically improve performance. Your people are your most important asset, so nix watermelon metrics and prioritize people-centric data to truly drive healthy growth.