The Leading Indicator You’re Not Tracking
The Leading Indicator You’re Not Tracking
All sales leaders love leading indicators. Pipeline coverage, activity volume, deal velocity—and many more– are great. They help teams anticipate outcomes and intervene early. But there’s a blind spot: nearly all of these indicators track outputs of behavior, not the underlying driver of success.
The most foundational leading indicator of performance—seller competency—is rarely measured. And, without strong coaching from frontline managers, competencies do not consistently improve. Together, competency and coaching are the leading indicators that predict everything else: process execution, pipeline movement, bookings, and revenue.
Competency Matters
You can measure first calls, discovery meetings, demo conversion rates, and proposal submissions continuously. But if your reps lack the foundational skills that create those outcomes - asking the right questions, handling objections, developing champions, cultivating executive sponsors, or building a business case - those metrics won’t help you understand the real problem.
Weak sales skills distort every other data point. You might think a deal failed due to price, timing, or competition. But unless you know the rep executed the sales process skillfully, you’re just guessing. Only with competent execution can you diagnose other issues precisely and make effective adjustments.
Coaching Is the Engine
Competency doesn’t develop through training alone. Sales is a live-fire profession where skills are built through repetition, feedback, and adjustment—exactly the role of frontline managers. If managers aren’t actively coaching to a proven competency model, reps continue leaning into their comfort zones, and critical gaps are never addressed.
Yet in most sales orgs, coaching is informal at best. It’s not measured, structured, or aligned to any defined competencies. That’s a missed opportunity. Coaching is the mechanism by which reps improve, and it’s a leading indicator of whether they will.
What Elite Teams Do
The top sales organizations track and develop competencies systematically. They define the skills that matter by role, assess them regularly, and equip managers to coach against them. Over time, this creates a culture of continuous improvement.
These teams not only grow revenue—they accelerate ramp time, increase quota attainment, reduce regrettable attrition, and retain customers longer. It doesn’t happen overnight. But the organizations that commit to competency development and coaching will outperform—eventually and sustainably.
If you want to get ahead of performance problems, stop obsessing over pipeline alone. Start measuring and developing what drives it. Competency and coaching aren’t just HR topics. They’re the strongest leading indicators of sales success you’re not tracking.
