Sales

What Inside Sales Managers Can Learn From Watching the World Cup

July 12, 2014

What’s the most important lesson sales managers can pick up this year’s World Cup? Ori Yankelev makes an insightful analogy between ball possession and sales talk-time: Neither are the best indicators of performance.

Have you ever noticed the ball possession stat that shows up on the screen multiple times per game throughout the World Cup?
Ball possessionAnd have you ever wondered whether or not it is even a relevant stat to keep track of as a predictor of who is going to win the game?
While watching a few of the matches I was wondering just that, so I decided to do some investigation. After looking at the first 62 games of the World Cup through the semi-final it turns out that in this year’s World Cup tournament ball possession was not actually a very good predictor of who was going to win the game at all.
In fact, of the 62 games that we looked at, the team with the most ball possession only won the game 46% of the time. 54% of the games they either lost, or drew, in which case the game was resolved with penalty kicks (after the group stage).
Screen shot 2014-07-11 at 1.06.03 PM
This simple fact is clearly demonstrated when you look at a team like the Netherlands and their last two games against Costa Rica and Argentina. In both cases the Netherlands were the favorite, and in both cases they maintained more ball possession than their opponents. Yet they drew against the former and lost to the latter which knocked them out of the tournament.

Talk-Time: The Ball Possession of Sales Metrics

Being a sales ops geek, this made me think about some of the stats that inside sales managers look at as predictors of their team’s performance. Metrics like calls, conversations, qualified leads and conversion rates are all really important in helping sales managers understand their model, capacity, and performance expectations. Another less ubiquitous inside sales metric is talk-time.
Like ball possession in soccer, talk-time is actually a much less useful indicator of performance than many of the other metrics typically used by inside sales teams. While talk-time might be an interesting metric to look at to know how a rep spent their time on a given day, it isn’t nearly as valuable when trying to understand the bigger picture. That is to say on any given day a rep could have spent two hours or five hours on the phone, but it actually doesn’t tell you anything useful without having more context into who they actually spoke with, or what the outcome of those calls was. That’s why most sales managers track leading and lagging indicators like number of calls, number of conversations, number of new opportunities, and number of closed deals. These are also numbers that when tracked, can be plugged into a model to understand conversion rates, and team capacity planning.


There is a great LinkedIn discussion about talk-time in which a number of inside sales managers voice their perspectives on the topic. A few seem to have used it successfully in conjunction with the other core inside sales metrics, but most have either a mixed opinion or are detractors of using talk-time as a metric. Analytics company InsightSquared even called it a “Wasted Metric” in a blog post they published on the topic. However, the post does include some good tips on how to use it if you insist on giving it a try.

The Bottom Line

Bottom line — both in soccer and in sales — is you shouldn’t be using any metrics in a vacuum. That said, some are surely more useful than others, and in a world where time is valuable and we are already swamped with more data than we know what to do with, you need to choose the metrics that you are going to focus on wisely. Put too much emphasis on the wrong metric and you are bound to wind up with a losing strategy.
Image by George

VP, Sales

Ori Yankelev is Vice President, Sales at <a href="https://www.ownbackup.com/">Own Backup</a>. He was previously a Sales and Marketing Associate for OpenView.