Our commission-driven sales team only cares about closed deals, but we need leading indicators to predict our cash flow. How do we run the Great Day or Lousy Day exercise for our sales representatives to extract weekly activity metrics that they will actually respect and track?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Commission-driven sales representatives are notoriously resistant to tracking weekly activities, often believing that as long as they hit their revenue goals, their daily processes do not matter. However, relying solely on closed deals is a high-risk strategy that leaves your leadership team blind to future pipeline drops.

To get your sales team to buy into activity tracking, run the Great Day or Lousy Day exercise. Sit down with your sales reps and ask them to describe a lousy week. They will likely describe a week where they made zero connections, had no qualified calls, and felt like they were wasting their time. Then, ask them to describe a great week.

Help them identify the exact weekly activities that lead to those great weeks. Use these insights to define their weekly leading metrics, such as:
- Number of outbound touches to qualified prospects
- Number of initial discovery calls completed
- Number of product demonstrations scheduled

Show your sales team that these leading indicators are the direct cause of their closed deals and commissions. When they see that tracking these numbers helps them identify and correct a slow pipeline weeks before it impacts their paycheck, they will start to value the data. This exercise turns activity tracking from a bureaucratic chore into a tool for their personal success.