I ask this in almost every keynote and presentation: “How many of you think on-time delivery is important to your customers?” Every hand in the room goes up.
“How many of you measure it? “About half the hands come down. “Of those still up, how many update that number every month and put it in the hands of your salespeople?”
Now I can count the hands on one of mine.
Then I keep going. “What about invoice accuracy? Response time to a complaint? Order accuracy?” By then the room has gone quiet, and people are looking at their shoes.
Each of those may be among the top three most important to a company’s customers, and each should have a corresponding metric.
Most companies are good at tracking KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). They look something like this: revenue and revenue growth, gross margin, sales per rep, inventory turns, days sales outstanding, Cost per unit, and so on.
Important numbers for sure. They tell you how the business is running. They live on the CEO’s dashboard and are reviewed internally, often weekly to yawns.
None of them help a salesperson win the next deal.
What are the metrics your customers say drive their buying decisions? We call them Customer Relevant Indicators™, created by Smart Advantage, Inc., which helps you discover, craft, validate, and track customer-relevant metrics backed by real numbers. We call them CRIs™. They’re the ones you’re least likely to be tracking and often make the difference in a sales close. They might look like this:
- On-time delivery,
- Order accuracy,
- Invoice accuracy
- Response time to a complaint
- Response time to an emergency call
- First-visit fix rate
- Time to quote
- Safety record
- Documentation accuracy
- Return rate
You probably already know some of these matter. Your customers have told you, in surveys, in complaints, in the deals you lost. Knowing isn’t the problem. Keeping score is.
In 30 years of research, the pattern is the same. Once a company learns what its customers value, it does one of three things:
- Nothing. It nods, files the report, and goes back to its KPIs.
- Measures it once. They may pull a number for a proposal, then never update it. Two years later, salespeople still quote it, and nobody knows if it’s true. We see it frequently because a number on the website never changes: 98% on-time delivery, unchanged since 2021.
- Keeps it. It tracks the CRI™ every month, keeps it clean, and puts it in the salesperson’s hands. (Agentic AI can do this for you once you provide it with accurate metrics.)
Only the third one wins sales.
A salesperson who says “we’re very responsive” sounds like every competitor. A salesperson who says “we resolved 94% of complaints last year within 24 hours last year” sounds like the only choice. (That’s an illustration. Your real number goes there.)
That number must be current and true, and the salesperson must have it and understand it. Otherwise, it’s an adjective.
KPIs aren’t enough. Neither are CRIs™ alone.
You don’t trade one scoreboard for another. KPIs keep your house in order. CRIs™ are how you prove to the buyer that you deliver what they care about. You need both, and you need the CRIs™ updated as faithfully as you update revenue.
It matters more now than ever. Everyone is feeding their sales pitch to AI. Feed it stale numbers, or irrelevant numbers, and you will be sitting on a landmine. Feed it current and relevant CRIs™ and every proposal says something nobody else can. This is more than a tie-breaker.
November, 2026