Sales organisations love to measure and track statistics.
Number of calls. Number of meetings. Number of proposals sent. Weekly activity. Pipeline value. Hit rate.
We collect numbers as if they carry the answer in themselves. As if enough data will eventually reveal why the results look the way they do.
But measuring does something to us as human beings that rarely gets talked about.
In the 1920s, an experiment was conducted at a factory outside Chicago in an area called Hawthorne.
The task was simple: find out how workplace lighting affected productivity.
➡️ They increased the light. Productivity went up.
➡️ They dimmed the light. Productivity went up.
➡️ They changed nothing at all. Productivity went up. 😳
The baffled researchers dug deeper. And the conclusion they reached was as simple as it was provocative:
It didn’t matter what they actually changed.
What seemed to make the difference was that the workers knew they were being noticed.
The awareness of being seen, that someone actually cared about what they were doing, changed behaviour. Regardless of the lighting.
This phenomenon would later be called the Hawthorne Effect.
And it holds a truth that matters for everyone who leads a team:
👉 We don’t measure reality. We change reality by measuring it.
Let that sink in for a moment.
Every time you introduce a new metric in a sales team, something happens. Not just in the report. But in the behaviour.
📊 Start measuring number of calls per day? Call volume goes up. But what happens to the quality of each call?
📊 Start measuring proposals sent? Proposals go up. But are they sent to the right customers, at the right time or to make the number look good in the weekly report?
📊 Start measuring activity without connecting it to results? You get activity without results.
We adapt to what gets measured. That’s human nature. But without that insight, you risk building a sales team that’s extremely good at producing numbers, and mediocre at closing deals.
That said, measuring is rarely the problem.
On the contrary, the best sales organisations I’ve encountered measure a lot of things.
But they measure the right things. And they know why they measure (and follow up on!) every single one.
✅ They don’t measure calls to check whether the salespeople are working. They measure calls to understand where in the process energy is created or lost.
✅ They don’t measure proposals to tick off activity. They measure to understand what actually leads to a deal.
✅ They don’t measure pipeline value to impress the leadership team. They measure movement in the pipeline to understand where deals get stuck.
And it makes a big difference whether your team understands that you’re measuring to understand them or to control them.
Same numbers. Same reports. Completely different feeling. Completely different results.
The best sales leaders I’ve worked with know this.
👉 They’re deliberate about what they measure. And equally deliberate about why.
🤔 The question to ask yourself: are you measuring to understand or to control? And does your team know the difference?
Here you can read about one of the USA’s best car salespersons and the secret behind his success.
