What Is Your Activity Formula for Sales Success?
Most salespeople know what they should be doing day to day, and management are often never short of telling them to hit or exceed common KPIs. Statements from leadership often demand more calls, more follow-ups, better preparation and research, and consistent pipeline management. It’s not exactly a secret.
Despite this, only 24% of sales reps met or exceeded quota in 2024 (HubSpot, 2025) with Pipedrive reporting that numbers improved in 2025 to around 61% of sales reps meeting quota (Pipedrive, 2026) and having spoken to hundreds of sales reps over recent months, I can tell you that number feels inflated. Even so, if their data is accurate, that still gives a 39% (yes, over 1 third) failure to hit quota.
It’s often argued in rooms if that is a quota problem or a rep problem. Company leadership points the finger down, and the people on the front-line point up to unrealistic targets. The truth often lies somewhere in between.
Moving away from the corporate BS that is driven by excuses, let’s get into what we know about the day-to-day that is in the control of the front line to give the best possibility of success. Those that have worked with me over the years will be sick of this statement, but in the words of Sir Dave Brailsford (Director of British Cycling 2003 – 2014), if we can impact the things we can control and train to get 1% better every day, the compounding impact is significant.
We always need to work hard, but effort gets us so far. It’s the magic formula of
Effort x Formula (activity driven by data) x Coaching = Highest Chance of Success.
Let’s talk more about the formula.
Activity Drives Results. But Only the Right Activity.
Here’s something that seems to repeat itself throughout time: reps who look busy rarely outperform reps who are intentionally busy. Years ago, there was a rep on one of my teams, reporting to an excellent sales leader, who had nailed down the effort part of the formula. They were always first to show up, often last out the (virtual) door, but even with structured and consistent coaching from both internal and external coaches, they kept slipping behind.
While the root cause had many factors, including their suitability to the role, they were spending hours on the wrong things. Their calls were averaging 22% less than the higher performers, the number of conversations per day was down, and their LinkedIn interactions were one of the lowest across multiple teams. What I learned through this experience was that busywork isn’t smart work, and driving salespeople to core KPIs without clear intentional behavior on the right things is a waste of time.
Busy is sending 50 emails to the wrong list—a list that will be unlikely to yield true performance outcomes such as revenue. Intentional is sending 15 to the right people at the right stage of the cycle with a clear reason to reply, again, with the same principle true for other activity.
The Numbers Behind a Sales Activity Formula
Let’s ground this in reality, because the data can make for harsh reading at times.
On average, reps only spend 28% of their week selling (Salesforce, State of Sales 2024), even in the AI era with tons of “efficiency tools.” The rest of the time goes to CRM data entry, internal meetings, email admin, scheduling, and research often duplicated across tools that don’t talk to each other. That’s before we burden our reps with the need to learn new skills or products in ways that are often not conducive to their fast-paced work and life.
To quantify that, there’s an average of 12 hours of active selling time in a standard 40-hour week. That. Is. Not. Enough!
Now here’s the kicker: top performers spend 34% of their time selling. Bottom performers spend 23%. (SPOTIO, 2025) That 11 percentage point gap correlates directly with quota attainment. More hours delivering prospect and customer interactions gives results. It doesn’t sound like much, but compound that time over a week, then a month and year, and there is no doubt top-performing reps are reaping the rewards of more time selling.
The first lever in your activity formula is simply protecting your selling hours.
Touchpoints in B2B Sales
It’s not just follow-up calls. In modern B2B, closing a deal is a multi-channel, multi-touchpoint journey, often with many stakeholders involved in the decision.
Research from HockeyStack, covering 150 B2B SaaS companies, found that the average deal requires 266 touchpoints across calls, emails, ads, content interactions, and more. For deals above $100k, that figure climbs past 400 (HockeyStack Labs).
Most individual reps only see a fraction of that picture, as a number of those touchpoints are done before the rep is even engaged in the buying journey. HubSpot reports that over 70% of the buying cycle now happens without a salesperson in the room. Reps are often laser-focused on managing their own calls and emails, with limited visibility into what marketing is doing, and even more blind to the closed-door conversations at the buyer company. Improving the quality of the interactions with your prospects, gaining knowledge of their buying cycle, and understanding decision makers and influencers will all give a better probability that the quality of your activity, and therefore outcomes, will improve.
While the definition of “activity” for salespeople may be open to discussion, I would argue that preparation time and investing in your learning are valuable activity metrics that can yield results when partnered with the traditional activity KPIs like number of dials, conversations, pipeline size, and more.
What good looks like.
There’s no universal formula – often people will try to give you advice when the reality is their sales process, prospects ICP, and product look very different. That said, there are some common themes across multiple business sectors and sales motions, and they consist of the points below.
- Prospecting time that’s locked in and protected. Not squeezed around meetings. Blocked in the calendar. Treated like a non-negotiable. Try setting a minimum expectation for each block. If you struggle, try this simple trick.
- Put 20 paperclips in a cup.
- For every prospecting activity you do: a call, a LinkedIn message, an email – take a paperclip out of the cup.
- When the cup is empty, you can end this block. Do this twice a day.
- Raise the number of paperclips and review the data
Why do I recommend this? Protecting time and executing efficiently and effectively is just as much about habit setting as anything else. This action sets a cadence. For context, our magic number at SentientPro is 50 intentional activities per day to the right people from our ICP. That is our volume number that gives the results we want.
- A structured follow-up cadence. Know exactly how many touches, through which channels, and at what intervals. These may differ for each stage of your pipeline, and the data over time should point you in the right direction.
- Pre-call preparation. You battle to get that call, do not let under preparing kill the momentum. Before every meeting, know who you’re meeting, what their business is facing, what’s happened since the last interaction, and what outcome you’re going for. This is where the best reps separate from the rest. The trick, however, is not to overprepare (may sound crazy). There is a sweet spot, and AI technology can certainly help find this in a time-efficient way.
- Pipeline hygiene. Not once a month or quarter before the pipeline inspection or board meeting. Know which deals are stalling and why, which accounts have gone dark, and where you’re at risk. Be brutally honest with yourself—the best reps know what will make it and what will not and qualify out expertly.
- Leverage technology, but carefully. Tools can enable reps to accelerate their day-to-day. Parallel dialers can increase call volume, great contact databases can improve connection rates, conversation intelligence can capture all the to-dos and show you where a deal is going and train you on improving. Be careful not to get sucked into the multi-layer, disconnected tech stack that becomes a hindrance.
- Skill development built into the week. Not a once-a-year offsite or the odd book recommendation. Short, regular practice on topics you face every day, set up to mirror your selling world – objection handling, discovery questions, and competitive responses. Small gains that compounded over time.
The Coaching Gap Nobody Talks About
Only 17% of organizations measure the ROI of their sales coaching (Training Industry) and even fewer truly understand their reps needs and overall job satisfaction.
On top of this, companies with established sales coaching strategies achieve higher quota attainment but, importantly, also better rep retention. Organizations with formal enablement programs see 15–25% higher quota attainment than those without. (Kixie).
Think about those statistics, and they make complete sense. For many reps, fulfillment comes with winning deals and getting that commission pay. If coaching leads to better skills, and better skills improve the probability of success, then that makes logical sense. There is, however, a less obvious, rarely spoken about reason too. Reps are people, usually highly motivated and driven. Reps are people that aspire to their next promotion, to one day sit in the seat of their CRO, or even to make presidents club. The desire to be always learning and feeling progress towards those personal goals goes a long way in job satisfaction.
Losing low-performing reps may not feel painful. The cost impact on a business of losing a high-performing rep, however, is vast. Not only is there a net pipeline (revenue) cost of losing that rep, but there is also the cost of replacing them, future coaching needs, and the potential that other reps may follow them out the door.
Reps, invest in yourselves, and leaders, invest in yourselves and your people. You will thank me later for that.
If you speak to reps, which we do every day, you will often hear they crave more coaching and support. Speak to the managers, and they often feel like they are doing a fantastic job. This is a problem most companies overlook. Often if there is coaching, it is episodic. A workshop here. A lunch-and-learn there. It doesn’t compound because it’s not built into the weekly activity formula to drive success.
Think about it through the gym lens again. Imagine you went to the gym twice a year for a full day each time, then wondered why you weren’t seeing results. Nobody trains that way for physical fitness. But most sales organizations effectively do this with rep development and then wonder why performance is inconsistent.
The best reps treat skill development like a daily habit. Ten minutes between calls. Roleplay a tough objection. Practice a discovery sequence. Run through a competitive scenario. Short bursts, done consistently, build capability that lasts. Every failure or tough conversation is a learning opportunity.
Building Your Activity Formula for Sales Success
Take a 15-minute pause after reading this and see if you can answer this: What is your activity formula for sales success?
Start here:
- How many hours per week do you spend selling? Track it for one week. The number will probably surprise you. Selling is an activity linked to the winning of a deal. Identifying leads, calling them, working a deal, writing proposals, etc.
- How are you preparing for your top 2-3 deals? Is that prep structured, or are you winging it on the walk to the meeting? Again, be brutally honest with yourself.
- When did you last practice an objection response or use one of your calls to get better at the job? Not on a live call, but in a safe environment where you could fail without consequence?
- When do you prepare for your next day? Is it in the morning? If so, is that best for your territory, and does it eat into valuable prospecting time?
The formula is yours to define. But it must be deliberate. Written down. Reviewed regularly. Adjusted based on what the data tells you.
Because in sales, as in coaching, what gets measured gets improved.
And what gets improved gets closed.
SentientPro is built to help sales reps and teams answer exactly these questions. With AI-powered meeting prep, conversation intelligence, and a Sales Gym where reps practice the skills that move deals forward. Built by salespeople, for salespeople.
Try SentientPro’s Digital Sales Assistant today and start closing more deals—without the leaks.
