What MSP Owners Get Wrong About Sales Metrics

Most MSP owners are tracking their salespeople or their sales activity the way that they’re tracking other aspects of the business. And because of that, you don’t have the real visibility and transparency that you want into what’s happening. You don’t have visibility into what’s really working and what isn’t, and you don’t really have visibility into what you can expect from sales. You oftentimes end up spending months or quarters, in some cases years, hoping that a salesperson will turn things around, and never really finding out until the end of the road, right? Months have gone by and nothing’s happened, and all of the tracking and the reporting that we were doing wasn’t really working. So what gives? And it’s really common, by the way.

So if you give me a few minutes, what I’m going to do is break down how you track salespeople, full-cycle salespeople, and get real insights into what they’re doing, if it’s working, and what you can expect from sales. Now, real quick, I’m Ray Green. I’m founder of MSP Sales Partners. We manage outside salespeople or full-cycle salespeople specifically for MSPs. We help recruit, we help train, we help manage. And to do that, we’ve obviously got to track some numbers. I’ve run sales teams my entire life. I’ve turned around eight sales teams in my career. I’ve turned around two companies, and I’ve managed hundreds of people across a number of different industries, and been working in the MSP space for about eight years.

What I’m going to do here is just share the framework and the way that I look at reporting so that you can adopt it to however you’re doing things, whatever systems you’re using, whatever platform you’re using, whatever CRM you’re using, whatever AI platform you’ve built on your own. I’m going to give you the principles and the framework here so that you can go install that.

All right. The way that I look at sales reporting is there’s really three layers, and this is how our scorecards are built in our program. The first layer is going to be your activity metrics, pure activity. It’s volume. And I’m going to break each of these down. These are the inputs, right? It’s number of doors knocked, number of calls made, number of networking events attended. It’s the input.

Second layer is the results from that activity. So you’ve got the input, the activity, then you’ve got, did we get any results from that activity? Meaning, hey, we’ve been to a lot of networking events. Have we gotten any leads from it? Are we getting any bang for our buck from that activity that we’re investing, right? That’s layer two.

The third layer is then the results from those leads. That’s your pipeline. That’s number of qualifying calls run, number of discovery calls run, number of assessments done if you do an assessment, number of proposals given, number of deals closed, amount of MRR closed.

The reason I break it down into three layers is your activity, your results from the activity, and then the results from the leads, right? Results from the results.

At the top layer, with the activity metrics and the inputs, like I said, those are pure volume metrics. Number of emails sent, number of doors knocked, number of calls made, number of networking events, number of LinkedIn connections, number of whatever it is. It is an activity metric that, generally speaking, is almost entirely or significantly controlled by the sales rep. I can control the number of calls I make today, give or take, within a reasonable estimate. I can control, when I sit down and block four hours, roughly how many calls I’m going to make. If I choose to lollygag and I choose to jack around and I choose to slow-walk it, I’m going to get fewer calls. If I really want to blitz, I can focus. I can get after it. I can control that number. When I’m out knocking on doors, I can control that number, right? I have a lot of influence over that. If that person has control over that metric, or the vast majority of the influence over that metric, there is no reason that that number is never hit. You have the choice to pick up that phone. You may not control what happens on that call, but you control whether you pick up the phone. That’s one whole section. These are the numbers that you have. I expect those numbers to be hit all the time, right? And a lot of times what we’ll do is even assign points to each of those categories. We’ll say, “Hey, these are all worth points, and every week we expect 500 points.” I don’t give a shit how you get there. You can get there in a number of different ways. There’s no reason you’re not hitting a number of points. But that’s what we’re looking for in the top layer.

Now, the second layer, the results from that activity, the results from those inputs. What I want to know is, is that activity leading to anything worth following up on? I can control how many calls I make today. I can’t always control how many people are going to pick up the phone. I can’t always control how many people are going to talk to me, and I can’t always control what the outcome of that activity is. I may make 100 calls today and I may get no bookings. I may get no leads from it. The next day I may make 100 calls and I may get eight leads from it. Same with networking. Same with canvassing. Same with all these other categories, which is why we list them out individually. The reason I want reps to tell me how many leads came from that activity specifically is it tells me whether we’re doing the right activity and whether we’re doing it the right way. If I see networking event after networking event after networking event after networking event after networking event, and then I go look at the leads from that row or from that section, how many leads came from all those networking events, and the number is zero, then I’ve got to ask, is networking the right thing to be doing? It gives me the tools that I need to start to ask the right questions if we’re not getting the results that I want.

So we have leads from canvassing, leads from outbound calling, leads from your networking events. You take the channels that you’re using and you track those activities, score them if you want the volume. Then you look and you say, are we getting any results from those activities? The other thing that you can start to look at is, say, “Hey, half of our time is going to networking and all of our leads seem to be coming from outbound calls,” or vice versa, or something else. You start to ask, well, maybe we should just do more of that. Stop doing that one and do twice as much of that one, which is what we often do. We look at the things that are actually working. Go do more of that. That’s the second layer.

Then the third layer, the results from those leads, which are results from the activity. That third layer tells me actual deal pipeline. It’s one thing to get leads, one thing to get meaningful conversations, one thing to get initial calls, one thing to get those things that are leading indicators for real opportunities that are going to happen. But that third one tells me what the real pipeline is, and if there is a problem, if we’re not hitting the number, then what is the problem within that pipeline. I break it out: number of qualifying, whatever your steps of the process are, but we usually recommend qualifying call, discovery call, network assessments (optional), proposal, and then follow-up. That’s how we look at the CRM. Well, how many qualifying calls did you go on? How many discovery calls did you go on? How many proposals did you give out? Of that, how many deals did you close? How much in MRR? That’s basically all the data I need to know to understand what’s happening and where we need to start troubleshooting and where we need to start working if we are not getting the result that we want.

Because I start at the bottom and then move up. Number of deals closed, amount of MRR closed. If that number is great, time over time over time over time, hey, we may not look at volume that much. If it’s working, it’s working. That’s great. Excellent. If that’s not working, then we go, okay, let’s move up this list. If we’re not closing the deals that we want, is it because our close rate sucks? From proposal to close, are we just not closing properly? Hey, we gave a ton of proposals and they’re not closing. Well, that tells me that’s the area to focus. What’s going on? That’s where we’ve diagnosed the source of the problem, or what we think is the source of the problem. Where within this process are we lacking, right? Are we talking to a bunch of people and qualifying and giving no proposals? Well, that tells me we’re talking to a lot of unqualified people. Now we can start to look into why is that and how do we change it. Are we getting a lot of people to discovery and they’re not getting a proposal? All right, what’s happening? Are we not selling the next step properly? Are we not doing BAMFAM, book a meeting from a meeting, and making sure we get that scheduled? Is there something in the execution? Let’s go listen to some discovery calls.

Now, if I’m not getting the numbers that I want, and then I look and there is no real activity, well, hell, we’ve only given one proposal in three months. Well, let’s move up. Okay, what’s the lead activity look like? Are we getting any results from our activity? I assume a full-cycle seller is out there hunting, doing their job, especially if there’s nothing in the pipeline. What’s going on? Are we getting a lot of leads that aren’t moving into the pipeline? Well, maybe we’re not counting this the right way, right? So I can start to look at that. And I can look, and if there’s no lead activity, well, shit, we don’t have any leads. That’s why we don’t have any proposals. Well, now I look at the top layer. I look at the very first layer and I say, are we investing a sufficient amount of volume to get the results that we want, to get the leads that we want? Well, if I don’t see a score of 500, or however you’re scoring it, or if I look at these numbers, these activity metrics, and I see really low, abysmal numbers, I go, boom, found our problem. That’s it. We need to turn up the volume. Or if I see a lot of volume, then I go, hm, all right, is the volume in the right place? Are we doing the right thing? Is the process with that possibly broken?

But between all of this, all the ways that all of these things work together, it gives me, as a sales manager, the data that I need to really go in and diagnose and troubleshoot from a factual standpoint. There are times where somebody is very consistent in the outcomes and their volume is lower than what you would typically expect, but that’s because they do it a specific way. Maybe they hunt smarter, maybe they have a better way of finding intent. That’s why I don’t want to start at the top and move down. If I start at the top, I start rewarding the wrong behavior. I start saying, “Hey, great job. You did a phenomenal job of getting all those calls in. I mean, there’s no pipeline and we didn’t get any leads from it, but great job.” I don’t want to reward that. I want to reward the behavior that’s driving what I really want, which is at the end of the pipeline, and I want to work my way up through the process to understand what’s going on.

There’s one thing that I’ve seen happen a few times with MSPs, with new salespeople. They ask for daily reports, give me weekly reports, and they’re written or oral, right? Like, “Yo, let’s talk about what’s going on in the pipeline.” The challenge with that is there’s so much fluff in conversations. Like, “Yeah, I hit a lot of doors yesterday.” What’s a lot? “Oh, I had some good conversations.” Okay, what’s that mean? Anything lead-wise? “We had a great proposal call.” I’m not a huge fan of the written, like, “Hey, give me,” or sit down and let’s have a conversation about stuff. That doesn’t have the backing of pure quantitative metrics, something that I can go in and actually look at and say, “These are the numbers.”

Now, if you have those things, however you track them, if you have those things in one place, it gives not just you as the sales manager, or the owner in your case, the ability to go find out what’s going on. It also gives the salesperson the ability. A good salesperson wants to get better. They want to use those numbers to get results. If they’re not getting results, most good salespeople that I know are looking for the solution, right? If they understand how these numbers are working together, and they know this isn’t just a micromanagement tool, this is how we diagnose what’s going on. It’s also how we diagnose when things are going really well, because we can look at what the numbers should be and what the baseline is, and when those numbers change, we can start to make some judgment calls on it.

So that’s from a career sales manager with a team of sales managers who is managing a dozen full-cycle salespeople right now, and I’ve managed hundreds in my career. It’s what we do for a living. So that’s my best advice for putting together a sales report. And I recommend keeping it in one report to the extent that you can, so that you’ve got a scoreboard, something simple, transparent, and this is how you’re going to get visibility, transparency, accountability, and everything that you’re looking for from a salesperson, and not relying on written reports or a bunch of activity metrics that can’t actually predict pipeline.

And by the way, if you would like help with this, that is what we do at MSP Sales Partners, and you can visit us at mspsalespartners.com. But if you want to go with this on your own, go for it. That’s a great starting point. And we’re here if you need help. Adios.