Every quarter, sales leaders sit in front of a screen full of green boxes and make resourcing decisions that will define the next 12 months. The numbers on that screen are accurate. That is precisely the problem. Sadaf Z. Malik, who works in commercial sales in the life sciences sector, argues that the standard sales dashboard is technically honest and strategically misleading, and that the gap between those two things is where pipelines quietly die. “A dashboard tells you a story that feels true because the numbers are real,” Sadaf says. “But the story it’s telling isn’t the one that predicts whether your business is actually healthy.” Her point is not that leaders are measuring badly. It is that they are measuring a snapshot when the only thing that matters is direction, and no snapshot has ever contained a trajectory.
The Metric That Punishes Your Best Reps
Activity volume is the culprit, and its appeal is structural rather than intellectual. Calls, touches, outreach sent: all cheap to capture, all constantly in motion, all reassuringly upward when a team is busy. What the number cannot see is fit or depth. “A rep can hit every activity number working a list that was never going to convert,” Sadaf says. “Both show up as green. Only one of them is actually building a business.” Two accounts can post identical figures on the same day, one accelerating toward something real, the other in slow collapse, and the dashboard renders them identically.
The more damaging consequence is what happens to the people doing the right thing. Sadaf points out that the honest signal frequently looks like failure. Activity drops when a representative abandons the shallow sweep of 40 accounts and commits to three that matter. That is often the healthiest development on a team, and a volume-based dashboard will flag it as underperformance. Leaders then have a choice they rarely notice they are making: back the judgement or back the number. Most back the number, because the number is defensible. Do that often enough and the behavior disappears, along with the people who practiced it.
Depth and Direction, Calibrated to the Account
What replaces activity is a pair of harder measures. Penetration asks how deep the team sits inside an account, and Sadaf gives it a workable definition: the number of distinct people who have had a substantive conversation in the last 90 days. Progression asks whether the opportunity is moving on a signal that means something, a program advancing, a champion actively engaged, rather than time accumulating in a customer relationship management stage, because nobody updated it. Neither is easy to pull in five minutes, which is exactly why neither is standard.
The subtler failure is applying one benchmark across account types. A small biotechnology organization might employ a dozen people, so one or two genuine relationships can constitute real depth. At a large pharmaceutical account with thousands of employees spread across a dozen therapeutic areas, two relationships is barely a foothold, and Sadaf argues that you need coverage across multiple departments and programs before the account counts as won. There is a defensive logic here too: in a decentralized organization, one champion is never enough, and losing one should not sink the deal. Progression diverges the same way. “A small biotech can pivot its whole roadmap on a single funding round, so the window to act is short,” Sadaf says, while a large pharma program moves on budget cycles, reorganizations and internal handoffs. Flatten the two onto one line and, in her words, you will “either panic about the biotech moving too slowly or get blindsided by the pharma account moving faster than your dashboard assumed it could.” In a long scientific sale where nothing closes this month regardless, velocity is close to a distraction. Depth and progression, calibrated to the account in front of you, are what predict the outcome.
Why the Bad Metric Survives Everyone Knowing Better
Most sales leaders already suspect their dashboard is thin. They keep it anyway, and Sadaf identifies two reasons:
- The first is convenience: a call report takes five minutes, while assessing whether a relationship genuinely deepened this quarter requires judgement, and judgement is hard to defend on a board slide sitting beside a hard number.
- The second is political, and it is the one that costs teams talent. Finance and the board are often attached to the old numbers because those numbers feed forecasting models built years earlier.
“Changing the dashboard means renegotiating how the entire company thinks about pipeline health, and that’s a fight most leaders don’t want to pick mid-year,” Sadaf says. The weak metric survives not because anyone believes in it, but because replacing it means persuading people upstream who have their own reasons to keep it.
A rebuilt version, in her design, runs on three layers:
- Coverage: are the accounts that genuinely matter being reached, ranked by real potential rather than sitting on a flat list.
- Penetration & Progression: how many real relationships exist inside the accounts already open and is the opportunity moving on a meaningful signal, tracked over time rather than as a single frame.
- Segmentation: by account type before anything else, and keep activity in the corner; small, never the headline.
What changes downstream is behavioral before it is financial. Reps optimize for depth because depth is finally what gets rewarded. A stalling deal surfaces when a champion goes quiet, not at quarter’s end when nothing can be done. “Once a team knows leadership is watching direction and depth instead of raw volume, people stop performing for the dashboard and start doing the work the dashboard was supposed to measure in the first place,” Sadaf says. Her closing standard is the one worth pinning above the screen: a dashboard should tell you the truth early enough that you can still act on it. Most tell you the truth after it is already too late to matter.
Follow Sadaf Z. Malik on LinkedIn for more insights on sales in life sciences.
