The Trouble With Talk Time
Published
When I worked at Dell as an Inside Sales Representative, one of my KPIs was talk time.
I never liked it.
The explanation was always simple enough: the more time you spend talking to customers, the more conversations you have. The more conversations you have, the more opportunities you uncover. And the more opportunities you uncover, presumably, the more you sell.
There is a certain logic to this. In fact, I suspect that if you took a few hundred salespeople and plotted their talk time against their sales performance, you would probably find some kind of correlation. A salesperson who spends all day avoiding the telephone is unlikely to uncover many opportunities.
But there was something about turning talk time into a KPI that always bothered me.
Imagine two salespeople.
One spends 90 minutes talking to customers and uncovers two genuine opportunities. The other spends three hours on the phone and uncovers one.
Who had the better day?
The answer seems obvious until somebody puts a dashboard in front of you.
Dashboards have a wonderful ability to turn the measurable into the important.
The second salesperson has twice the talk time. There is the number, glowing reassuringly on the screen. It can be measured, compared, graphed and discussed at the next team meeting.
The first salesperson simply got more done.
And once you tell people that the number matters, people become remarkably good at producing the number.
You can stay on the phone a little longer. You can have a pleasant conversation with somebody who isn't going to buy anything. You can hesitate before ending a call that should have ended five minutes ago.
None of this requires dishonesty. Human beings are perfectly capable of unconsciously adapting their behaviour to whatever scoreboard you put in front of them.
There is a name for this: Goodhart's law. When a measure becomes a target, it tends to stop being a good measure.
I didn't know the name for it when I was at Dell. I just knew the KPI felt wrong.
The funny thing is that Dell's explanation contained the seeds of a better measurement.
"The more conversations you have, the more opportunities you uncover."
Fine.
Then measure the opportunities.
Or measure meaningful conversations. Measure qualified opportunities. Measure pipeline created. Measure deals progressed. Measure revenue.
Talk time can still tell you something. If somebody has almost no customer contact and isn't producing any pipeline, then the lack of talk time might help explain why. It is useful as a diagnostic measure.
But that is different from making it the objective.
If somebody consistently generates more opportunities with less talk time, perhaps the system shouldn't be asking why they aren't talking enough.
Perhaps it should be asking what they're doing right.
Looking back on it now, there is another reason I find this interesting.
For years I could say that I had worked in sales. And I had. But "sales" turns out to be one of those words that conceals more than it reveals.
Inside sales at Dell meant working within a machine that already existed. I had accounts. I had customers. I had a telephone. There were orders to process, conversations to have and a funnel whose activity could be measured down to the minute.
External sales is different.
There isn't always a customer waiting on the other end of the telephone. Sometimes you have to find the person, create the reason to speak, walk into the room, start the conversation and manufacture momentum where none existed before.
I've been thinking about that distinction a lot lately.
Maybe that old talk-time KPI was measuring something after all.
It just wasn't necessarily measuring sales ability.
It was measuring activity inside a particular kind of sales system.
And sometimes, years later, you discover that the things you thought were minor annoyances at an old job were quietly teaching you something about the kind of work you actually like doing.