A professional runner knows their sprint times. Michael Jordan knew his free throw percentage. Nobody in professional sports says I think I played pretty good this year. There is a box score, and the box score does not care about your feelings.
Now ask a rep or a small contractor their close rate. Their average job size. What a lead costs them. Most cannot answer, and here is the sentence I give my own team: if you do not have your stats, how do you expect to get any better? You cannot coach a player who has no box score. That includes you coaching yourself.
I grade my own recorded sales calls, and I will tell you where I land: I am still only a B. Twenty plus years around this game, tens of millions in projects, still a B. That grade does not depress me. That grade is the entire reason I still improve, because a man who thinks he is an A stops practicing.
Your box score is five numbers
Do not build a spreadsheet monster you abandon in two weeks. Track five numbers that describe your money machine from front to back:
- Attempts. Dials, doors, bids, applications. The work you control completely.
- Conversations. Real exchanges with a decision maker, not voicemails.
- Appointments or quotes. How many conversations turned into a concrete next step.
- Closes. Signed. Not verbal, not probably. Signed.
- Money per close. Average job size, and if you run jobs, what each one actually cost you to deliver. Job costing is just keeping score after the sale, and it is where quiet businesses go broke without noticing.
Employees, same idea, different labels. Track what you shipped, what you fixed, what you saved, what you learned. A raise conversation with a personal box score behind it is a different conversation entirely.
The ten minute Friday review
Every Friday, write the five numbers down. Sunday works too. Then ask one question: which number is the bottleneck? Plenty of attempts but few conversations means your list or your opener is broken. Plenty of quotes but few closes means your follow up or your pitch is leaking. The scoreboard points at the problem so you stop guessing.
If you want a coach that never flatters you, hand your numbers to AI:
Treat the answer as a draft. Sanity check it against what you know about your market before you change anything. But do the exercise weekly, because trends beat snapshots. One bad week is noise. Four flat weeks is a message.
You are paid in direct relation to the size of the problems you solve, and the first problem worth solving is that you have been playing this game without a scoreboard. Hang one. B players who track their stats pass A players who do not. I am living proof, and I have the numbers to show it.