Understanding What Really Drives Sales Performance

Sales has a reputation for being something of a dark art.

Targets are set. Activity is increased. Pressure is applied. Sometimes results improve, sometimes they do not. Two teams can put in similar effort and achieve wildly different outcomes, and it is not always obvious why.

This is what makes sales fundamentally different from many other parts of a business.

Why Sales Is Harder to Manage Than Service

In most service environments, management is relatively straightforward. Inputs tend to correlate closely with outputs.

More engineers usually means more jobs completed.
More hours worked generally means more work delivered.
Capacity and productivity are visible and predictable.

Sales does not work like that.

You can increase activity and still see flat results. You can reduce activity and still see growth. Outcomes are influenced not just by effort, but by timing, opportunity quality, customer behaviour, pricing, and countless other variables.

This is why sales performance is so often misunderstood, and why poor decisions are frequently made with good intentions.

The Role of Data in Sales Management

Because sales outcomes are less predictable, good-quality data becomes essential.

Most organisations can measure a huge number of sales inputs. Calls made. Emails sent. Meetings booked. Quotes issued. Pipeline value. CRM fields filled in. The list goes on.

The challenge is not a lack of data. It is knowing which data actually matters.

Without a clear framework, it is very easy for leadership teams to become distracted by metrics that look important on a dashboard but have little real impact on results. This often leads to overly complex reporting, increased admin burden, and very little improvement in performance.

In my experience, complexity is usually a symptom of unclear thinking.

Start With First Principles

When it comes to understanding sales performance, you always need to start with the fundamentals.

Before analysing behaviours, channels, or individuals, there are three simple questions that should be answered clearly and consistently:

1. How many sales opportunities were there?
   
   

2. What was our average conversion rate?
   
   

3. What was the average order value?

Everything else sits downstream of these three numbers.

Sales, at its simplest, is a function of opportunities multiplied by conversion rate multiplied by order value. If you do not understand how each of these behaves in your business, no amount of additional analysis will help.

Building a Foundation Before Adding Complexity

Once those headline numbers are understood, you can begin to break them down.

This is where analysis becomes genuinely useful rather than distracting.

You might look at:

• Opportunities by sales channel
  
  

• Conversion rates by salesperson
  
  

• Order value by customer segment
  
  

• Performance by product or service line
  
  

At this stage, patterns start to emerge. You begin to see where value is really created and where effort is being wasted.

Crucially, this analysis is built on a solid foundation. You are not guessing which metrics matter. You are testing hypotheses against outcomes.

From Metrics to Behaviour

The real power of good sales analysis comes when you move beyond numbers and into behaviour.

Once you know which opportunity types convert best and which generate the highest value, you can start asking better questions:

• What do customers who buy these opportunities have in common?
  
  

• What behaviours do top-performing salespeople exhibit earlier in the process?
  
  

• Which activities actually move deals forward, and which are just noise?
  
  

This is where sales stops being a dark art and starts to become more predictable.

You are no longer managing effort for the sake of it. You are shaping behaviour to maximise value.

Avoiding the Trap of Over-Analysis

One of the biggest mistakes I see in sales management is trying to analyse everything at once.

Hundreds of metrics are tracked. Reports become dense. Conversations focus on explaining numbers rather than improving performance. Salespeople spend more time updating systems than selling.

More data does not automatically lead to better decisions.

Clarity does.

By anchoring analysis in first principles and layering complexity only where it adds value, sales management becomes simpler, not harder. Teams understand what matters, leaders know where to focus, and performance becomes more consistent.

A Final Thought

Sales will always involve uncertainty. Customers are human, markets change, and timing matters.

However, confusion is not inevitable.

By starting with the fundamentals, using data intelligently, and focusing on behaviours that genuinely drive outcomes, sales performance becomes something you can understand, influence, and improve with confidence.

That is when sales stops feeling like a dark art and starts becoming a discipline.