Is it me or my leads? How do you tell a sales agent’s skill from the quality of their leads?

The short answer

Usually it is some of both. An agent’s sales are their skill, plus the leads they were given, plus chance. Over a few weeks the leads and chance can swamp the skill: one agent draws a batch of warm referrals and tops the board; another draws a tired list that has been called many times before and sits at the bottom, whatever their effort.

The quickest test is to look at everyone on the same kind of lead. If nobody on the floor sells it, it is almost certainly the leads. If one agent sells where the rest struggle, it is probably the agent. Beyond that, compare agents on the same lead sources, over longer periods, and use a random split of leads for any decision that matters.

Why results swing

• The leads. In our experience, where a lead came from, how fresh it is, how many times it has been called and whether the person asked to be contacted all change how likely it is to buy. In our view an agent’s sales are the agent plus the leads they were given.
• Small numbers. In our experience an agent may close only a handful of sales on any one lead source in a month. A couple of sales either way moves their numbers a lot.
• Chance, and the swing back. Where luck plays a large part, unusually good and unusually bad months tend to drift back towards the average. Michael Mauboussin’s book on skill and luck, The Success Equation (2012), covers this: in most fields skill and luck are tangled together, and results tend to revert towards the mean. In our experience, an agent with a great month, or a terrible one, will often move back towards their usual level whatever they or their manager do.

How to tell skill from the leads

1. Start with the obvious test. Look at how everyone does on the same kind of lead. If nobody is selling it, it is almost certainly the leads. If one agent stands out on leads the rest of the floor struggles with, it is probably the agent.
2. Split reaching people from selling to them. In our view poor leads show up first in reach: wrong numbers, no answer, people who never asked to be called. What happens once someone picks up says more about the agent. Track contact rate and sales per contact separately. More contacts or better conversion?
3. Compare with the floor on the same source. An agent who sells more per contact than the floor does on the same lead source is doing well, even if their total is low because their source is hard.
4. Look over months, not weeks. Read the trend, and pool similar sources where there are too few leads of one kind to judge.
5. Check what you control. How quickly you call a new lead, how many times you try, and how you handle the first doubt are yours. Speed to lead and handling objections on a sales call cover two of them. Listening back to a few of your own calls on a source where others do better usually shows something.

In our view, done this way, most agents find they are strong on some kinds of lead and weaker on others, rather than simply good or bad. Why some agents close more on the same leads.

The same leads, different results

The clearest evidence that the person on the call matters comes from studies where customers were assigned at random, so nobody hand-picked who got which call. Xueming Luo, Siliang Tong, Zheng Fang and Zhe Qu (Marketing Science, 2019) randomly assigned customers to highly structured outbound sales calls from AI chatbots or human workers. Undisclosed chatbots were as effective as proficient workers and four times as effective as inexperienced workers at getting customers to buy. The comparison that matters here is the one between the people. Put those two results together and, in our reading, the proficient workers sold far more than the inexperienced ones on customers who were not hand-picked for either. Is telesales a numbers game or a skill?

That cuts both ways. A large gap between agents on the same leads is real, and it is also the only way to see it. Without a random split, a gap between agents may simply be a gap between their lists.

When a floor blames the leads

The argument is old. Writing in Harvard Business Review in 2006, Philip Kotler, Neil Rackham and Suj Krishnaswamy described how, when sales disappoint, marketing blames the sales force’s execution, while the sales team says marketing sets prices too high and spends too much of the budget. In our experience the same argument runs on telesales floors, with the lead list in the middle.

For a manager, three things help:

• Show results by lead source. When everyone can see how the floor does on each source, an agent can tell for themselves whether a bad month was the list or their calls.
• Split leads at random for big decisions. Before letting someone go, promoting them or dropping a source, compare results on leads that were split at random, so neither side had the better list. How to prove a lead routing change worked.
• Be careful what you rank. A leaderboard on raw sales ranks the leads and the luck as much as the people. The research on what rankings do to effort is covered on our collections page, Is it the collector or the accounts?; in our view it applies just as much to a sales floor.

Where agent matching fits

Agent matching changes which agent works which lead, so results depend less on who happened to draw the better list. BestPair decides which agent works each lead from the floor’s own call and sales history. People make every call, and scripts and offers stay yours. Any gain is measured against a control group run in the same weeks. In our view that takes some of the luck of the list out of the picture; we haven’t measured its effect on morale.

Sources

• The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing: Michael J. Mauboussin, Harvard Business Review Press, 2012.
• Luo, Tong, Fang and Qu, "Frontiers: Machines vs. Humans: The Impact of Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Disclosure on Customer Purchases": a field experiment on outbound sales calls with customers assigned at random, Marketing Science, 2019.
• Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing: Philip Kotler, Neil Rackham and Suj Krishnaswamy, Harvard Business Review, July-August 2006.