Your Sales Metrics Are Lying - Ep 211

 Today we're talking about sales KPIs, but not in the track everything kind of way. We're going to focus on what actually drives decisions in a growing service business. Because if you're measuring the wrong things, you're managing the wrong problems, and most owners are chasing dashboards instead of clarity. 

Let's fix that in today's episode. 

Welcome to The Budding Entrepreneur Podcast. I'm Randy Bridges, business advisor, consultant, coach, and trusted partner to service-based business owners who are serious about performance, profit, and progress. 

This podcast exists to do one thing, help you solve the real problems that stall your growth, kill momentum, and burn out the very people who built your business. So let's get started, shall we?

All right, all right. We are on episode 211, and today is August 6th, 2025.

If you've ever asked, what should I be tracking in my sales? How do I know if my pipeline is strong or just busy? Or why does our revenue go up in one month and down the next? This episode is for you. We're going to take the mystery out of sales tracking and give you a practical lens to apply whether you're selling solo or leading a sales team. Here's what we're going to cover today.

Number one, why sales metrics get ignored or overcomplicated in most businesses. Number two, how to match your KPIs to your stage of growth using real client stories. Number three, what data actually helps you sell better and what's just noise. 

And number four, how some of our programs support this journey step-by-step. So let's jump in and find out why most sales KPIs get ignored. In theory, tracking sales metrics sounds smart. 

In practice, it's a graveyard of half-filled spreadsheets and ignored dashboards in most of the clients I've ever seen. Most service businesses fall into one of two traps. They track too little or too much. 

In the case of too little, they say things like, we just look at revenue at the end of the month. Or our CRM has the data somewhere, I think. And when they're tracking too much, they say things like, we have 38 pipeline metrics, but no one looks at them.

Or our team updates a weekly report and it doesn't change anything. Here's the reality. Metrics only matter if they lead to action. 

If you're not making different decisions based on the numbers, you're not tracking KPIs. You're just collecting trivia. So let's talk about that in a little more detail. 

When it comes to matching your KPIs to your growth stage, we can look at how sales tracking evolves across three key growth stages adapted from Alex Charfen's Billionaire Code. We start with the ramp stage. This is from startup to about 300k a year.

In this case, you're validating your offer and trying to generate consistent sales. You focus on the number of leads generated, the lead to close conversion rate, and the time from leads to close. It's a very simple process. 

You really want to just get an overview of where success is occurring. You're learning what works. And at this stage, tracking helps you focus, not optimize. 

In the second stage, this is a stabilized stage. This is where a lot of businesses see a lot of growth by dealing with this at 300k to about a million and a half a year. This is, in our business, the effective systems launchpad territory. 

Here, you're no longer validating. You're trying to standardize and free yourself from the sales seat, you as the owner. One of the best areas to really focus on is all the things that are going to drive your business forward without you. 

You're looking for win and loss reasons. You're looking for average deal size. Sales cycle consistency and revenue by source or offer. 

Those four really can make a difference when you are looking at how effective your business sales are working. And the tracking here is about efficiency and repeatability. In the third stage, the scale stage, this is about 1.5 million to 5 million a year. 

In this case, you have a sales engine, but it's time to lead from above and not inside it. You're probably spending a good deal of your time inside the sales and not handing it off to other people. In this point, you want to focus on pipeline stage velocity.

How quickly are things moving through the pipeline? You want to look at your sales team performance. You want to look at forecast versus actual and dig down into the profit per client or campaign. Here's the shift at this point. 

It's no longer, can I sell this? It becomes, can we repeatedly scale this and deliver it consistently? That's where you know you're in the scale stage. It's the point where you stop being the salesperson and start being the sales strategist. You're no longer chasing the next win. 

You're actually architecting the system that wins consistently for both you and for your people. It's less about charisma and more about clarity, and less about hustle and more about handoff. At this stage, the quality of your tracking determines the quality of your leadership, and it's where a lot of owners get hit at a wall.

They start tracking more, but actually doing less with it. Data becomes noise and the metrics become confusing. The goal here isn't more dashboards, it's more decisions from the dashboards. 

That's why your systems and your support have to evolve with your business. Now I don't want to dig into a commercial, but I do want to talk about how some of our programs support the sales KPI journey. We map all of the things that you just heard inside our Sales Partner Pro, where we walk business owners through the foundation and systemization phases of their sales process. 

We help you identify the right KPIs for your growth stage, because sometimes the ordinary is not right enough for you. We want to create decision-making dashboards that don't overwhelm, and ensure your team knows what to do with the data, not just how or whether to look at it. And as your sales maturity increases, our strategic advisory path bridges the gap from good sales process to scalable business leadership.

In SAP, we coach you on how to lead the sales team using data, how to help you shift from gut-driven to insight-driven strategy, and tie your sales tracking directly to profit and delivery capacity. These programs aren't built just to fix your sales problems. They were initially designed to grow your leadership in the process. 

That's where I started with everything when I started building these, because knowing the numbers isn't enough. You have to know what to do with them that will make all the difference for you. So now let's break into our mini case study. 

I like to call this cleaning up the chaos. My client, Kirsten, she runs a B2B marketing agency doing about $1.3 million in annual revenue. The problem? Her pipeline was full, but her projections were always off.

She couldn't tell which leads were likely to close. Her team was chasing old deals, and her revenue whiplash made it hard to hire or plan ahead. I and my team sat down and worked with her to simplify her stages down to four clear milestones.

We wanted to add forecast tracking to identify high likelihood deals, and tag the deals by lead source and by rep. You need to know who's delivering the good deals and who's not. In 90 days, her close rate didn't just go up. 

It actually became predictable. She stopped over hiring in the bad months and panicking by doing too much hiring in the slow ones. And she told me at the end, she finally felt like she could trust her pipeline again.

That's the power of tracking what matters. So let's look at a quick sales audit and see what this can do for you. Four simple questions.

Five minute check in that starts with, do you know your current close rate by lead source? Can you forecast next month's revenue with confidence? Do you know which rep or offer performs best? And are you using your metrics to make decisions and not just review data? If you answered no to any of those, you don't need more data. You need better design. Let's fix that. 

Connect with me at the address shown in the notes below and I'll be happy to see what we can do to bring this about to your benefit and move you down the path to greater sales, easier sales, and longer term deals with your clients.

That's it for this episode. I hope you picked up some valuable insights and maybe even sparked a few new ideas. 

If you want to keep the conversation going, or maybe even explore partnerships, don't hesitate to reach out. And hey, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share this with someone who needs to hear it. The steps you take today could be the start of something big tomorrow. 

For The Budding Entrepreneur, I wish you the best in your health, your wealth, your business, your family, everything about you. Take care and we'll see you back here next week.