Our marketing agency has a business development rep who is consistently hitting their target for weekly discovery calls booked, but almost none of these prospects qualify for our sales pipeline. How do we redesign this metric so they cannot game their weekly scorecard numbers with low-quality leads?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When team members feel pressured to hit a single volume-based metric, they will naturally find the path of least resistance to make that number green. In this case, booking unqualified discovery calls satisfies their metric but wastes your sales team's time and hurts your bottom line. To fix this, you must pair your activity metric with a quality metric on your weekly scorecard.

Instead of tracking calls booked in isolation, introduce a secondary, linked metric that requires the prospect to meet your basic qualification criteria. For example, your business development rep should own two weekly numbers on the scorecard: total discovery calls booked, and qualified discovery calls accepted by the sales team.

By making the second metric the true gatekeeper, you align their weekly behavior with the actual health of the sales pipeline. The sales seat on your Accountability Chart must have the final say on whether a lead is qualified. This prevents gaming because the rep cannot mark their primary outcome as successful if the quality does not meet the standard.

This approach shifts their focus from mere output to actual outcome. It forces them to pre-qualify prospects before setting meetings, which protects your sales resources and increases your overall close rate. Use your weekly Level 10 Meeting™ to review the ratio between these two numbers and quickly identify if the rep needs coaching on lead qualification.