Why Activity Metrics Failed Your Sales Team, and How to Recover

The Volume Playbook: Why We All Bought In

Let's be clear: Tracking your sales team's calls and emails wasn't a bad idea. It made perfect sense:

• You can't directly control revenue. But you can control how many times your reps pick up the phone.
• It's measurable. Clear numbers. Easy dashboards. No ambiguity about whether someone did the work.
• It used to actually work. 10 years ago, if you made 100 calls you'd reach 8-10 people. That's a decent conversion rate. Do that consistently, you'd fill pipeline.

The logic was simple: Sales is a numbers game. More activity = more chances = more deals. And for a while, this was true enough that everyone doubled down on it.

Why It's Failing Now

The market changed and the playbook didn't. Three big problems:

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