The Three Sales Levers: Are You Pulling the Right One?
By Shawn Hamilton, M.S., DBA(c) Shawn Hamilton is a leading sales leadership advisor and doctoral researcher at the University of Houston, specializing in Sales Leadership.
The Three Sales Levers: Are You Pulling the Right One?
It's the beginning of Q4. A sales leader looks at the dashboard and sees a rep is 70% to plan. What's the first thing that leader says?
If you're like 90% of sales managers, your immediate, gut reaction is to say: "You need to make more calls. More emails. More activity. Go!"
This is the "Activity" lever. It's the most obvious, the easiest to measure, and, in most cases, the absolute wrong one to pull.
When a rep is failing, managers who only pull the "Activity" lever aren't leading; they're just glorified scorekeepers demanding "more." Great leaders understand they have two other, far more powerful, levers at their disposal.
The Three Levers That Drive Performance
In any sales organization, a manager can influence three distinct variables. Your ability to see and use all three is what separates you from the "Super-Rep".
Lever 1: Activity (The "More" Lever)
This is the brute-force approach: more dials, more emails, more demos.
The Problem: This lever has diminishing returns. It assumes the rep's process is perfect and the only variable is effort. It leads to burnout, lower-quality conversations, and frustrates good reps who are already working hard.
Lever 2: Focus (The "Where" Lever)
This is the "work smarter" lever. Instead of more activity, it demands better activity.
The Application: A manager pulls this lever by asking, "Are you spending your time on the right accounts?" This is a direct application of your "Ideal Customer Profile" and "Territory Plan". It stops reps from wasting time on low-probability deals and directs their effort toward high-value targets.
Lever 3: Skill (The "How" Lever)
This is the "multiplier" lever. It's the most powerful and the most neglected.
The Application: This lever improves how a rep performs their activities. It's not about if they make a call, but how they handle the objection. It's not about if they send a proposal, but how they build consensus. This is the lever of "Behavioral Coaching" and "Win-Loss Reviews”.
Why You're Getting This Wrong
Average managers live and die by Lever 1. Good managers have learned to use Lever 2. But great leaders spend their time on Lever 3.
Why? Because improving a rep's skill by 10% creates a permanent uplift in their performance. It's an investment that pays dividends on every single call they make from that day forward. In contrast, demanding 10% more activity just creates a 10% bigger burnout problem.
As Frank V. Cespedes (2014) of Harvard Business School argues, effective sales management is not about just driving effort; it's about building a system that aligns strategy (Focus) with capabilities (Skill).
Actionable Takeaways: How to Pull the Right Lever
Before you tell a struggling rep to "make more calls," stop and diagnose the real bottleneck:
Diagnose the Lever. Is this an Activity problem (they're just not doing the work), a Focus problem (they're busy on the wrong deals), or a Skill problem (they're getting in front of the right people but failing to convert)?
Audit Their "Focus." In your next 1-on-1, ask your rep to stack-rank their Top 10 target accounts and explain why they are the Top 10. If their logic is weak or based on "gut feel" instead of your ICP, you have a Focus problem.
Prioritize "Skill." Schedule time for "Game Tape" review. Find one behavior (e.g., discovery questions, objection handling) that you can improve. A rep with better skill automatically develops better focus and needs less activity to hit their goal.
Stop being an "Activity" manager. Be a leader who diagnoses the true problem and has the toolkit to pull the right lever.
References
Cespedes, F. V. (2014). Aligning strategy and sales: The choices, systems, and behaviors that drive effective commercial performance. Harvard Business Review Press.
