Which sales and marketing metrics should you track, and why metrics get gamed
Four leaders from our podcast explain which numbers they steer on, how those numbers change as a company grows, and why every metric can be gamed. A practical way to choose and review your own.
Every commercial team has a dashboard. Fewer teams can say which three numbers on it decide what they do next week. In our podcast, Inside the Growth Engine, we asked founders and CEOs which metrics they actually use. Their answers differ by company, but they agree on a few things.
Short answer: Track the few metrics that match your stage, tie them to the result you want rather than to activity, and review them regularly. No metric is perfect and every metric can be gamed, so check from time to time whether a target is still doing its job.
The right metric depends on the stage
Jan Hollez, co-founder of Deliverect, says that in the first phase the number of locations was the most important metric. More customers meant density in a market and cheaper marketing. As the company grew, revenue per customer, churn and time to value became more important. Time to value is how quickly a new customer sees the product working.
The lesson is not to copy his list. It is to ask which number best shows progress at your stage, and to change it when the stage changes.
Margin and volume tell a story, but only if you ask why
Ben Swerts, regional director at Soudal, looks at margin, volumes and product mix by customer. When volumes drop, the question is why: did a competitor arrive, are there complaints, can something be solved? He calls “ask your customer” a question you cannot ask often enough. He also says revenue and margin are a result of the efforts made earlier, which is why he asks about the actions behind them.
His approach to targets is follow-up, not micromanagement. People take ownership of their number and customer base, and where a drop comes from something outside anyone’s control, he excludes it and does not punish the manager.
Do not optimise what is not the bottleneck
Steve Declercq, co-founder of Bizzy, makes a point about order of operations. If there is not enough pipeline, optimising later steps does not help. He gives an example: with three salespeople who each have one meeting a week, you should not tune conversion first, you should fill their calendars. He adds that the right metrics depend on the business: a model with high volume and small deals needs different numbers than one with few large deals, but in both cases sales has to reach a quota that makes the model lucrative. His sequence: pipeline, then infrastructure, then efficiency.
Why metrics get gamed
Hollez is blunt: metrics can always be gamed, and there is never a perfect metric. Salespeople respond to the carrot, and they will find the fastest way to reach it, even when it is not best for the company. In his experience, local teams that owned a market sometimes spent more on marketing because efficiency was not part of their own targets.
Thomas Van Eeckhout, co-CEO of Easi, saw a version of this. Salespeople reached their numbers with customers who then bought little else, so lifetime value was too low for the cost of the sale. The fix was not more reporting, but a shared view of which customers are worth winning.
How to review your own metrics
- Name the goal behind each metric. If you cannot say why it exists, drop it.
- Pair an activity metric with a result metric. Meetings booked next to revenue or margin per customer.
- Look for the loophole. How could someone hit this number without helping the company? Add a counter-metric where it matters.
- Match the metric to the bottleneck. Pipeline before conversion, conversion before efficiency.
- Revisit targets when they are reached in the wrong way. Hollez’s advice is to adjust the goal when people reach it in a way that is not best for the company.
- Use one source of truth. Reports from different lists lead to arguments about numbers. See is your lead score built on data you can trust and what RevOps is.
Where to start
Write down your top three commercial metrics on one page, with the goal, the owner and the loophole for each. Share it with the CRO, CCO and CMO and ask where the numbers disagree. If you want help finding the real bottleneck, the bottleneck quiz is a quick start, and a Growth Audit goes deeper. For how tests and numbers fit together, read about growth experiments.
Hear it from the people who do it
- Jan Hollez on metrics that can be gamed, around 48:00
- Ben Swerts on following up instead of micromanaging, around 20:00
- Steve Declercq on pipeline before conversion, around 33:00
- Thomas Van Eeckhout on the wrong customers and lifetime value, around 14:00
