Our sales and operations teams are technically hitting their weekly Scorecard targets, but we suspect they are gaming the numbers by rushing low-quality deals or logging artificial activities. How do we audit and prevent gamified metrics?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Any metric can be gamed once it becomes a target. If you measure sales reps solely on the number of outbound calls, they will make short, useless phone calls to hit their target. If you measure customer support reps on ticket resolution speed, they will close tickets prematurely without actually solving the customer's problem.

To stop your team from gaming their weekly Scorecard, you must pair quantity metrics with quality metrics. Never track a volume metric in isolation. If you track outbound sales calls, you must also track the percentage of those calls that turn into qualified discovery meetings. If you track software code commits, you must also track the volume of bugs or rework generated by that code.

You must also establish clear, objective rules for how every metric is defined and extracted. If your sales leader manually inputs their weekly closing rates, they might wait to log lost deals until the next quarter to keep their current weekly column green. Require your data to be pulled directly from your CRM or ERP system rather than relying on self-reported spreadsheets.

During your Level 10 Meeting™, look for patterns where a metric is consistently green but the ultimate result is missing. If your marketing lead is hitting their lead-generation target every week, but sales has zero pipeline, those leads are low quality. Drop the metric to the Issues list and use IDS® to adjust the target criteria. Make it clear to your leadership team that hitting a gamed metric while the business suffers is a failure of leadership, not a success.