Stop Managing Metrics, Start Coaching Behaviours: A New Approach to Sales Leadership
Why Coaching Sales Behaviours Beats Managing Metrics:A New Approach to Sales Leadership
The Bottom Line: Traditional sales metrics create lazy leaders and disengaged teams. The solution? Focus on behaviours that drive real results, not vanity metrics that can be gamed.
Tired of watching your sales team tick the activity boxes but miss the real targets?
You’re not alone. In many sales organisations, traditional metrics—like calls made or deals entered—create a false sense of productivity while disengaging your most capable people. This article explores a better approach: behaviour-based sales coaching. Instead of managing metrics, we show you how to coach the behaviours that actually drive results.
The Metric Trap That's Killing Your Sales Team
We live in an age of unprecedented data visibility. Every dial, every email, every opportunity stage change gets tracked, measured, and reported. Yet despite this abundance of information, many sales organisations are struggling with a fundamental problem: they're creating cultures of compliance rather than excellence.
Sound familiar? Your team hits their activity numbers but misses revenue targets. Your CRM is full of opportunities that never close. Your salespeople seem disengaged, going through the motions of hitting metrics rather than genuinely connecting with prospects.
Here's the uncomfortable truth: you've probably hired problem-solvers and innovators, then managed them like data entry clerks.
Why Traditional Sales Metrics Fail
When we obsess over dials made, opportunities added, and proposals sent, we're measuring the wrong things. These metrics are:
● Easily manipulated - Smart salespeople learn to game the system
● Disconnected from outcomes - Activity doesn't equal results
● Demotivating - They reduce complex relationship-building to simple counting exercises
● Creating the wrong culture - Focus shifts from customer value to internal compliance
The result?
Your sales team loses respect for leadership, your data becomes meaningless, and you spend more time policing than coaching. Worse yet, this approach makes sales leadership ripe for AI replacement because you're essentially doing what a computer could do better.
The Ethnographic Research Solution Improving Sales Performance
At BREWYD, we help organisations break free from this trap by starting with a simple but powerful question: What are your top performers actually doing differently?
The answer isn't found in your CRM dashboard. It's discovered through ethnographic research - a systematic study of human behaviours that uncovers the subtle, often unmeasurable actions that drive real results.
From Data Policing to Performance Coaching: The BREWYD Approach
Our AI-powered process analyses interview data to identify behavioural patterns among your best performers. Instead of measuring what salespeople do TO prospects, we measure how prospects respond TO salespeople. This shift is fundamental because:
● Behaviours are harder to fake than activity metrics
● Customer responses indicate real engagement rather than just effort
● Quality of interaction matters more than quantity of touches
The Two-Bucket Coaching Model
Once you understand what behaviours drive success, you can organize your coaching efforts into two distinct buckets:
Bucket 1: Behaviours You Coach
These are the qualitative elements that can't be measured by tools:
● How they frame problems during discovery calls
● The way they handle objections with confidence
● Their ability to create urgency without being pushy
● How they build trust through storytelling
Bucket 2: Actions You Measure
These are the quantitative elements that indicate progress:
● Quality of questions asked (not just quantity)
● Prospect engagement levels and responses
● Meeting progression rates
● Proposal-to-close conversion rates
Micro-Learning: Smarter Sales Development
Instead of generic sales training that covers everything, create targeted micro-learning programs that address specific gaps:
● Struggling with first meetings? Focus solely on meeting generation techniques
● Can't secure follow-up meetings? Drill down on post-meeting engagement strategies
● Getting to proposal but not closing? Concentrate on negotiation and closing behaviours
Each salesperson gets coaching exactly where they need it, when they need it, based on their individual behavioural patterns and pipeline progression.
How to Spot and Fix Data Manipulation in your Pipeline
Transform your pipeline from a policing tool into a smart watch for salespeople - something that helps them optimize their performance rather than something that monitors them for compliance.
When salespeople see their pipeline tool as supportive rather than punitive, they:
● Provide more accurate data
● Engage more authentically with the process
● Take ownership of their development
● Focus on behaviours that actually drive results
Dealing with the Data Manipulators
The cynics among you are thinking: "But people will still game the system!" Here's the beauty of behaviour-based coaching - it's self-correcting.
When someone manipulates their pipeline data, they'll eventually be brought in for training on a stage they claim to be succeeding at. The conversation goes like this:
Sales Rep: "Your data is wrong - I don't need help with closing." Sales Leader: "It's not my data, it's yours. Let's talk about what's really happening."
This creates accountability without creating antagonism.
The Effort Investment: Getting Off Our Backsides
This approach requires more effort from sales leadership. You'll need to:
● Spend time studying what your best performers actually do
● Conduct regular behavioural coaching sessions
● Analyse patterns rather than just looking at dashboards
● Invest in understanding your team's individual development needs
But here's the payoff: over time, your pipeline becomes more accurate, your team becomes more engaged, and your culture shifts from compliance to excellence.
Ready to Coach not Count: The Choice Is Yours
You can continue managing metrics and watching your team go through the motions, or you can invest in understanding and coaching the behaviours that actually drive results.
The path forward isn't about having better dashboards or more sophisticated tracking. It's about getting back to the fundamentals of human performance: understanding what excellent looks like, coaching to those standards, and creating an environment where your people can truly thrive.
Your team doesn't need more metrics. They need better coaching. And that starts with you.
Ready to transform your sales organisation from metric-driven to behavior-driven?
The choice is in your hands - and it starts with getting off your backside and doing the real work of leadership. We help organisations identify the behaviours that drive real pipeline movement—then coach those behaviours into every rep.
