Our sales team is hitting their target for weekly discovery meetings, but the quality of these leads is garbage because they are booking anyone just to hit their number. How do we restructure this measurable without overcomplicating our Scorecard?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When people are measured on raw activity, they will inevitably game the system to make their scorecard look green. This is a classic symptom of measuring quantity without tracking quality. Your sales team is booking unqualified prospects just to hit their weekly target, which wastes your sales engineers time and hurts conversion rates.

You must tie the quantity metric to a quality gate. Instead of tracking total discovery meetings booked, change the measurable to qualified discovery meetings completed.

A meeting only counts toward the scorecard target if the prospect meets three strict, objective criteria, such as company size, budget alignment, and an active project timeline. These criteria must be defined in your sales process and agreed upon by both sales and operations.

Additionally, introduce a paired lag metric on the leadership Scorecard owned by your sales director, such as discovery-to-proposal conversion rate. If the sales team is booking dozens of meetings but the conversion rate to proposals drops below your benchmark, it indicates that the upfront filter is failing.

During your Level 10 Meeting™, look at these two numbers together. If meetings completed is green but the conversion rate is red, you have an immediate topic for IDS®. Do not blame the sales reps for gaming a poorly designed metric. Change the rules of the game by measuring qualified actions rather than raw, unchecked activity.