Do not focus on sales. Focus on your activities, and sales will follow.

In the first two articles in this series, I examined customer orientation and the trusted advisor's role. This time, I address one of the most widely used principles in sales management: Focus on the activities you can control, and the results will follow. But is it really that simple?

You cannot control whether the customer buys.

But you can control how many customers you contact, how many meetings you book and how consistently you follow up.

Therefore, you should focus on your activities rather than your results.

It sounds reasonable.

And there is an important truth in that thinking.

Sales results often arrive with a delay, and the salesperson cannot control every factor influencing the customer's decision.

But there is a problem with the argument.

If the activities are wrong, doing more of them does not make them more valuable.

That should be obvious.

Yet we still see sales organisations where activity levels become a central performance measure without management sufficiently examining whether the activities actually contribute to the company's growth.

Why activity management makes sense

We should not reject the principle.

There is a good reason why sales leaders work with activities.

Revenue is the result of something that happened earlier.

An order may take months. A new customer may require several meetings, internal clarification and a lengthy decision process.

If we manage solely by revenue, we may discover problems too late.

That is why we need leading indicators.

Activities can be such indicators.

But only if they have a meaningful relationship with the results we want to create.

That last point is crucial.

Working hard is not necessarily working smart

As early as 1994, Sujan, Weitz and Kumar examined the relationship between learning orientation, motivation and selling behaviour.

The researchers distinguished between working hard and working smart.

Their results showed, among other things, that learning orientation was associated with both hard and smart work, while performance orientation in their model was mainly associated with working hard.

That is an interesting distinction.

It underlines that effort and quality are not the same thing.

One salesperson may make many customer contacts without becoming better at understanding customers' problems.

Another may spend more time identifying the right companies, understanding their current situation and developing relevant conversations.

The first may have the highest activity level.

The second may be developing a more effective sales model.

Who creates the most value?

That depends on the results — not solely on the number of activities.

The customer does not reward our activity targets

Gartner's 2025 B2B survey showed that 73% of the buyers surveyed actively avoided suppliers who approached them with irrelevant outreach.

This is an important perspective on activity management.

If a company rewards salespeople for making as many contacts as possible without equivalent requirements for relevance, management can create behaviour that directly undermines the company's commercial position.

AI makes this challenge even more relevant.

It has become easier to identify contacts, write messages and automate follow-up.

But a high activity level does not necessarily become a better customer experience.

On the contrary, technology can make it possible to create far more irrelevant activity in less time.

We need to measure what creates progress

In March 2026, Gartner recommended a more systematic approach to sales productivity, connecting leading indicators with historical results and overarching commercial goals.

The point is that indicators should be selected and tested against the specific sales model.

A relevant indicator for outbound new-customer sales is not necessarily the same as one for developing strategic accounts.

In a June 2026 analysis, Gartner also highlighted three key pipeline measures: initial pipeline value, conversion rate and the share of opportunities pushed out over time.

This shifts the focus from simply creating activity to understanding what actually happens to the opportunities that activity creates.

For me, there are three levels that sales leadership should be able to connect.

Activity: What do we do?

Which customers do we contact? Which conversations do we have? Which accounts do we work to develop?

Customer progress: What happens on the customer's side?

Have we identified a real problem? Have we agreed on next steps? Has the customer involved the relevant stakeholders? Has new evidence of purchase intent emerged?

Commercial result: What comes out of the effort?

Do the activities create qualified pipeline, better conversion, new customers, higher customer value and profitable growth?

The three levels must connect.

A meeting is an activity.

A customer deciding, as a result of the meeting, to involve their CFO in a specific business case may be a sign of progress.

That is an important difference.

More activity can conceal a strategic problem

Imagine a company whose sales organisation is not generating enough new business.

Management concludes that the salespeople need to book more meetings.

Perhaps that is right.

But perhaps the real challenge is an overly broad ICP, unclear positioning or a value proposition that is not relevant enough.

If so, more activity can amplify the problem.

The company invests more resources in a sales model that has not yet been proven effective.

That is why I believe commercial performance must be assessed through the relationship between strategy, people and execution.

We need to understand whether we are directing our efforts at the right market, have the necessary skills and carry out activities that actually bring us closer to the goal.

AI offers an interesting opportunity

In May 2026, Gartner reported that AI saved salespeople an average of 4.8 hours per week in the sales organisations studied.

But 72% of organisations reinvested that time in higher-value activities only to a limited extent.

This is an important leadership task.

If we free up five hours, should we simply produce more contacts?

Or can we use the time to improve our understanding of customers, prepare better conversations, develop existing accounts and improve decision quality?

Making the salesperson more productive is not enough.

We must ensure that productivity translates into commercial impact.

The practical leadership task

I would like to see more sales leaders ask four questions before demanding more activities:

What commercial behaviour do we want to create?

Why do we believe that this particular behaviour leads to better results?

What signs of customer progress should we be able to observe?

And what must we change if the relationship between activity and results cannot be demonstrated?

This is not an argument for fewer activities.

It is an argument for more deliberate activities.

Activity is not the goal

As a sales leader, it is tempting to focus on what we can count.

The number of calls, emails, meetings and proposals creates a sense of control.

But the customer's decision does not improve simply because we have been more active.

It improves when we have understood the customer's situation, established relevance, built trust and helped a real decision move forward.

Do not focus only on sales. Focus on the activities that demonstrably create commercial progress.

That is less catchy than the traditional sales advice.

But it is far more useful if the goal is to build a sales organisation that can create repeatable and sustainable growth.

Conclusion of the series

The three articles have examined different sides of the same challenge.

Article 1 — Is the customer always right? — explored the difference between customer orientation and uncritical compliance.

Article 2 — Is a Trusted Advisor a hidden sales category? — explored the difference between selling a solution and building trust through informed advice.

This third article explores the difference between being active and creating real commercial progress.

They share one principle:

Good sales are not about doing more of what we usually do. They are about understanding what creates value — and becoming better at repeating it.