You know the data. Your average sales cycle, your average deal value, your average conversion rate. You live and breathe that stuff.  This post is not to say those things aren’t important. They are important for today, important for predicting revenue goals for this week or this month. But when it comes to making a change, when it comes to thinking about innovation within your sales process and improving on those data points, those averages are useless.

The problem is they don’t tell you anything. They don’t tell you that one of your sales reps booked meetings at twice the rate of everyone else last quarter. They don’t tell you that one of your sales teams produced 3 x the call volume in the last 3 weeks. They don’t tell you that last week a consultant in your team shorten the sales cycle by half on all new deals. They just tell you averages.

To improve the ‘averages’ you have to be able to spot the things that are moving the needle up and then ask how?

How is he producing double the activity of everyone else? What are that team doing to produce 3 x more call volume? How has one consultant shorted her sales cycle? Poke and question and poke some more and find a way to scale the stuff that’s really making the difference. Then watch your ‘averages’ improve. But stop looking at the spreadsheet hoping the numbers will do it themselves.

My question to you is, what are you doing to spot the people that are producing stuff above the line of average?