Your Sales Dashboard Is Lying to You
Last week, we broke down a simple way to set your sales goal by working backwards, ensuring you know how many leads, proposals, and deals you need each month. If you missed that, definitely give it a look.
Within that breakdown, there’s another concept that’s essential if you want to lead a high-performance salesperson or team: the difference between leading and lagging metrics.
Leading vs. Lagging: Why It Matters
Plenty of business owners manage sales by one simple question: “Did we hit the revenue goal?”
But that’s like steering a boat by staring at the wake behind you.
Yes, end results (like calls booked or deals closed) are important—just as the wake tells you where you’ve been. But by the time you notice something’s off, you’re already miles off course.
Lagging metrics—like total deals, new revenue, or MRR—show outcomes that aren’t fully in your control.
You can influence outcomes, but prospects ultimately decide whether to buy. So it’s a metric that’s not entirely within your control.
Plus, you can’t change lagging metrics because they’re in the past.
Leading metrics, on the other hand, are your steering wheel and throttle.
These are regular activities you or your sales team control outright—calls made, emails sent, doors knocked. Your salesperson doesn’t need anyone else to do anything in order to hit these targets.
Better yet, they happen in real time. So, if you spot a dip mid-month (fewer calls than planned, for example), you can correct course immediately rather than wait for quarter’s end to find out you’ve drifted off target.
This distinction is huge for business owners because relying solely on lagging metrics gives under-performers too much leeway. You might wait a whole sales cycle—maybe months—before discovering they never did the volume of outreach needed to hit their target. Meanwhile, you’ve lost time, money, and momentum.
But when you keep an eye on leading metrics, you catch red flags early.
Maybe the rep is making plenty of calls but not converting them to appointments—that’s a script or follow-up issue.
Or maybe they’re not making calls at all—that’s a very different conversation that you can nip in the bud early.
Either way, you’ll know in weeks rather than months, so you’re not stuck hoping they magically turn it around.
Ultimately, lagging metrics confirm whether you arrived at your destination, while leading metrics help you steer the boat. Track both, and you’ll never be blindsided by lingering underperformance or guesswork about why sales dipped.
Instead, you’ll see problems in time to fix them—and know exactly when it’s time to pull the plug on a failing strategy or rep.
Quick rules of thumb
Leading Indicators: Activity metrics you can adjust on the fly because they’re fully within your control (e.g., how many cold calls you make).
Lagging Indicators: Results from those activities (e.g., deals closed) that you can influence but can’t directly change once they happen.
This can be confusing sometimes, so let’s test the concept.
Pop Quiz: Leading or Lagging?
Below are five sales metrics.
Based on leading = activity you control and lagging = outcome/result, pick which category they fall under:
Deals closed last quarter
Emails sent to new prospects
Monthly MRR added from new deals
Number of LinkedIn connections sent
Number of LinkedIn connections accepted
Number of discovery calls booked this month
Answers
Answer: Lagging—You can’t influence this in real time because it’s already happened and you don’t have control, so you need the prospect to say yes.
Answer: Leading—You have full control to influence this in real time.
Answer: Lagging—Reflects what’s been won or lost, not what you’re actively doing.
Answer: Leading—You have full control to influence this in real time.
Answer: Lagging—You can influence this with scripting, but it’s not fully within your control and can’t be influenced in real time.
Answer: Lagging—This one can be tricky, because it appears to be a leading indicator to deals closed, but it’s the result of your outreach efforts (prospect still has to say “yes”).
Putting This Into Practice
Here’s your 15-minute framework to start tracking the right metrics tomorrow:
Pick Your Leading Metrics
Start with just two numbers you can control daily. That may be calls, emails, doors knocked, connection requests sent, or something similar.
Set Your Scoreboard
Create a simple tracking system—even a tally sheet works. Track these daily numbers where you’ll actually see them, not buried in your CRM.
Define Your Minimum
What’s the least amount of activity you need daily to hit your goals? Work backwards from your target revenue to find your daily numbers.
By focusing on these daily actions, you’ll spot issues before they become trends and keep your team on track to hit those monthly targets.
Don’t overthink this—the key is to start tracking tomorrow, then refine as you go. The business owners I work with who succeed with this start simple and stay consistent.
Have questions?
Hit reply and send them over. We’ll give you feedback, and if it makes sense we can hop on a call to see if we can help.
Hasta la vista,
Ray
