Selling@Zero Distance

What Happens When You Manage the Score

Last weekend, a salesman I know lost half his pipeline.

He sells ice cream machines and frying equipment to restaurants. He had spent months on those deals. Visits, demos, quotes, follow-ups. He did everything right.

Then the riots hit Lyon and a dozen other French cities. Shop fronts smashed. Restaurants looted or damaged. By Monday morning, half his customers had a new priority: repair, reopen, pay back what they’d lost.

A new fryer can wait.

Half his deals, suspended or cancelled. In one weekend. And nothing he did, or could have done, would have changed it.

Now here’s the question. At the end of the quarter, how will his company judge him?

The room goes quiet.

Two different things

Last week I asked what if your sales results aren’t your performance.

This week, let’s look at what actually happens when you manage as if they were.

Quick recap. The result is the score. It depends on the customer’s budget, on a competitor’s offer that day, on a decision-maker who leaves, on interest rates, on tariffs. And sometimes on a weekend of riots.

The performance is what your team does inside the conversation with the customer. It’s the only one of those variables you control.

Most companies know this. Almost none manage accordingly.

The first trap: managing what you can’t control

When you tie performance to results alone, you build something without noticing.

I’ve watched it happen in enough sales teams to name the symptoms. Stress. Burnout. Aggression between colleagues. Disappointment that never quite lifts. Conflict between sales and the rest of the company.

And one that nobody puts on a slide: injustice.

Go back to my salesman. In the same quarter, a colleague of his may close three easy deals in a city that stayed calm. Same product. Less work. Better number.

If the company manages the score, the colleague is the performer and he is the problem.

Everyone on the team can see that’s wrong. Nobody says it, because the dashboard says otherwise. And that silent gap between what people see and what the system rewards is where good salespeople start to leave.

You can’t manage pressure out of a team by asking people to handle it better. The pressure comes from being judged on something they don’t control.

That’s a design choice, not a character flaw.

The second trap: measuring everything

So a leader hears this and does the sensible thing. Fine, I’ll manage the performance instead of the result.

And the next question is: how?

This is where it goes wrong a second time.

Peter Drucker is often quoted saying that what can’t be measured can’t be improved. The quote is true. It’s also the most dangerous sentence in sales management, because nobody asks the follow-up question: what if we’re measuring the wrong things?

I once sat in front of a sales dashboard with more than thirty indicators on it. Number of calls. Number of visits. Number of quotes. New customers. Retention. Product mix. Lost deal analysis. Market share. Margin by line. Quota attainment. Competence scores. Product knowledge. Pipeline by stage. Average basket.

All of them defensible. None of them actionable on a Monday morning.

A rep looking at that dashboard knows exactly one thing: he’s probably red somewhere. He doesn’t know which conversation to have differently tomorrow.

Thirty KPIs isn’t managing performance. It’s managing the score with more decimals.

What you actually want

Before any equation, let’s agree on what good looks like.

The customer decides fast. Pays full price without asking for a discount. Nobody in the room feels they were persuaded. And the rep never has to chase.

Do you want this? Then you need a way to measure it that fits on one line, and that your team can act on in the next meeting.

Four levers, not thirty dials

That one line exists. It’s called sales velocity: the revenue your pipeline produces per day.

Sales velocity = (Number of opportunities × Win rate × Average deal size) ÷ Sales cycle time

Each variable is one lever, and each lever lives inside the conversation with the customer.

Number of opportunities: are you talking to the right customers?
Win rate: are you talking to them the right way?
Average deal size: did you see the customer’s whole budget, or just the part that fits your quote?
Cycle time: did the conversation help the customer decide, or make him think about it?

Now watch what happens when you work on all four at once.

Take a team with 100 opportunities, a 25% win rate, a 40,000 € average deal and a 90-day cycle.

100 × 25% × 40,000 € ÷ 90 days = 11,111 € a day, about 4 million a year

Improve each variable by 10%. Not 50%. Ten. 110 opportunities, 27.5%, 44,000 €, 81 days.

110 × 27.5% × 44,000 € ÷ 81 days = 16,432 € a day, about 6 million a year

Four small moves, each one inside a conversation. Plus 48%.

Try getting that out of thirty KPIs.

Back to my salesman

With velocity in hand, go back to the man who lost half his pipeline.

Managed by the score, he had a terrible quarter.

Managed by velocity, something else shows up. His win rate on the deals that did close. The size of those deals. How fast his customers decided before the weekend. All of that was his, and all of it was good.

What the riots destroyed was the number of opportunities. One variable out of four, and the one that external events hit hardest.

That’s not a story of a rep who failed. It’s a story of a market that collapsed under a rep who was performing. And a manager who can see the difference will keep him. A manager who can’t will lose him, and will deserve to.

The shortest distance

Numbers get produced in one place: the conversation between a salesperson and a customer. The dashboard, the forecast, the thirty KPIs, all of it is downstream.

Managing the score means staring downstream and shouting at the river.

Managing performance means standing where the water enters. Four levers, one conversation at a time. That’s the work behind Selling@Zero Distance™: shortening the distance between what a leader measures and the place where it actually happens.

You are responsible for your performance. You are not 100% responsible for the score.

My salesman knows that now. The question is whether his company does.

How would your dashboard have judged him?