Our sales and account management teams are consistently hitting their weekly activity metrics, but our actual pipeline value and contract signings are flat. We suspect they are gaming the numbers by logging low-value touchpoints. How do we identify and fix gamed scorecard metrics?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When people are measured on raw activity, they will inevitably find the easiest path to hit the target. If your scorecard tracks outbound emails, your team will send bulk templates. If it tracks meetings booked, they will schedule low-quality introductory calls that lead nowhere.

To stop this behavior, you must pair activity-based leading indicators with quality-control guardrails. For every quantity metric on your scorecard, establish a qualifying standard. Instead of tracking total outbound calls, track meaningful conversations where a specific discovery questionnaire was completed. Instead of booking raw meetings, track qualified meetings where the prospect meets your ideal client profile.

If your pipeline looks full but deals are stalling, your qualifying criteria are too loose. You must also look at the relationship between your metrics. If your activity numbers are green but your conversion rates are dropping, your team is gaming the system.

Bring this data mismatch to your Level 10 Meeting™ and use IDS® to tighten your metric definitions. The goal is not to police your team, but to ensure that the weekly numbers they report actually correlate with real business growth and eventual enterprise value.