Backstory: I thought sales had good months and bad months. Really, no metric had an owner.
Mistake #6: We had no owner.
After we fixed our demos, we got really excited.
We were closing in the 60–80% range, consistently, for about 2 months.
Then it dropped to 30–40%.
I asked the team: are you following the script?
"Yes. Not sure why we're not closing anymore."
I believed sales was a numbers game. Some months you win, some months you don't.
So I watched a month of recorded meetings.
They followed the script, to some extent. But they didn't prep for the meetings. And the script had gaps: objections came up that were never documented.
What it produced:
Bad: Every metric was everybody's, so it was nobody's.
Bad: "I think it's the leads." "I think it's the season." Nobody knew.
Bad: I had to call people out on their numbers with no evidence. I hated it.
Bad: The fix was a guess, so the next month was a guess too.
Here's what I missed:
Sales isn't a numbers game. It's a system. And every metric in a system needs an owner.
When a metric drops, it's one of three things: the process needs an update, the person needs coaching, or the market is changing.
You can only tell which one if every step has a metric, a process behind it, and a name on it.
Solution: We built a scorecard for every step of the sales process.
Every step had a metric, so we could see if an automation broke or a small step got skipped, like the meeting confirmation.
The North Star metric was demo close rate, because it summed up everything: lead quality, follow-ups, value delivery.
And every metric had two extra columns:
The SOP: the process that drives the metric → proof it's repeatable
The owner: the person responsible for it → proof someone is on it
That month, the scorecard pointed at three fixes:
Better prep: the prep sheet completed before every demo
Stick to the script: no fallback to freestyle, with team coaching
Update the script: objection-handling responses documented
Why this works:
Three causes, three different fixes. A process gets updated. A person gets coached. A market gets re-targeted.
Seasonality turned out to be a big one for us. And some verticals run backwards: swimwear and beachwear brands buy and implement in winter, not summer. That became targeting information.
We went from "I think" to "I can see the trend, here's what changed, and here's who fixes it."
The results:
Close rate back in the 60–80% range
We could pinpoint the cause of any drop accurately, and each metric had an owner, responsible for the performance of that metric
Seasonality became a targeting advantage instead of an excuse
I was able to scale, not be in the trenches all day. I got to work on the business instead of in it
So write your sales process as steps.
Put a metric on each step. Next to each metric, the process that drives it and the name who owns it.
When a metric drops, ask which of the three it is: process, person, or market.
You're done when there's no metric on the sheet without an SOP and a name next to it, and "I think" is banned from the Monday meeting.
SOPs are sexy now.
They're called skills.
The SOP can be an AI skill.
The owner can be an agent.
There's no excuse anymore.
Secret Sauce: Don't just track the metric.
Define the process that drives it, and the person who owns it.
Best,
Virgil
PS: Mistake #7: I thought the signature was the finish line.