By Doug Stovall, Study Groups Chief Growth Officer
Most leaders manage their sales team by watching one number: how much closed last month. It feels like the right number to watch. It’s also the worst one to manage by, because by the time it shows up, the outcome is already locked in. Everything that determined it happened weeks, months, or maybe even a year before, depending on sales cycles.
The leaders who manage sales well aren’t watching a different number. They’re watching earlier numbers: the activities and pipeline movements that predict the outcome instead of just reporting it. Here’s how we think about it, using our own sales operation at Study Groups as an example, and how any business, regardless of industry, can apply the same discipline.
1. Build a Pipeline You Can See Through
A sales pipeline is only useful if it tells you where something is stuck or active, not just whether it eventually closed. That means defining clear, specific stages, not “early,” “middle,” and “late,” but named checkpoints tied to something a prospect actually did: qualified, meeting scheduled, presentation delivered, decision-maker engaged, contract sent, closed.
Our own team splits responsibility across that pipeline. A dedicated SDR (Sales Development Representative) or BDR (Business Development Representative) function’s only job is to generate and qualify interest before it becomes a deal an account executive owns. That handoff point is a defined stage in our CRM (Customer Relationship Management – in our case, HubSpot), not a hallway conversation. Every deal sits in exactly one stage at any moment, and every stage has a plain-English definition of what has to be true to be there.
The benefit isn’t organizational neatness. It’s diagnostic power. When something is wrong, a visible, well-defined pipeline tells you where the breakdown is, instead of merely implying that something, somewhere isn’t working.
2. Manage the Activities, Not the Result
Closed revenue is a lagging indicator. It tells you what already happened. Calls made, connections made, emails sent, LinkedIn messages sent, LinkedIn connections sent/accepted, and meetings booked are leading indicators. They tell you what’s about to happen, and they’re the one thing a rep can control today, this week, regardless of deal size or market conditions.
We track those activity numbers weekly, by rep, right alongside pipeline value. A rep whose activity drops off gives a signal weeks before their forecast disappoints. It isn’t a mystery discovered at quarter’s end. That’s the entire argument for measuring activity: it moves the conversation from “why did we miss the number” to “what changed three weeks ago,” while there’s still time to do something about it.
3. Let Conversion Rates Point to the Coaching Conversation
The same overall shortfall can have completely different causes, and the fix only becomes obvious once you break the funnel into stage-to-stage conversion rates.
A rep who books plenty of meetings but rarely advances them has a qualification or messaging problem. A rep who converts well once in front of a decision-maker, but isn’t generating enough of those conversations in the first place, has a prospecting problem. Both reps might hit the same number of closed deals in a slow month, but one needs help with the pitch and the other needs help filling the top of the funnel. Averaging the whole team into one “close rate” hides that distinction completely.
4. Make the CRM a Coaching Tool, Not a Report Card
None of this works if the data isn’t current. A pipeline that gets updated once a month can’t be managed in real time, and reps rightly resist any system that only exists to grade them after the fact.
We run a weekly pipeline review built entirely around the leading indicators above: activity levels, stage movement, and conversion trends, rep by rep. The conversation isn’t “did you hit your number.” It’s “what does the data say is working, and what needs to change this week.” That reframing changes how reps treat the CRM: from a chore they update for management’s benefit to a tool that helps them see their own pipeline as clearly as their manager does.
The Takeaway
Here’s the plain-language version. Track those numbers long enough and you can work backward from any revenue goal to the exact activity volume it requires. At Study Groups, our own data shows it takes a known, consistent number of phone calls, emails, and other activities to produce one closed deal. Multiply that ratio by the number of deals a revenue target requires, and you know how many calls, emails, and other activities have to happen at the top of the funnel, months before the number comes due.
That base number is a starting point, not a ceiling. Once a team knows what it currently takes to close a deal, the next move is coaching: better qualifying, better pitching, better objection handling, so it takes fewer calls and emails to produce the same result. Improve the skill and you lower the inputs needed for the same revenue, or generate more revenue from the same inputs.
None of this is specific to selling professional services, memberships, or anything else. Every sales organization, in every industry, produces the same three layers of information: activities, pipeline movement, and results. The businesses that manage sales well are the ones that pay attention to the first two, because by the time the third one shows up, it’s too late to change it.
That’s a discipline, not a tool. HubSpot, Salesforce, or a spreadsheet can all support it. But the underlying habit is what separates a sales team that’s managed from one that’s just observed: defining your pipeline precisely, measuring the activities that predict outcomes, and using conversion data to guide coaching instead of judgment.
