I really care about metrics (perhaps too much).
But allow me to introduce you to a concept that can save your business hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe even millions.
Picture this far-too-common scenario: You want to motivate your solar lead appointment setters to book more appointments this month. So you dream up a fantastic bonus for whoever books the most appointments… a new iPad, expensive vouchers, maybe even a holiday.
A couple of weeks later, the team have responded, and your appointment setters are having a record month of bookings.
Cause for celebration, yes? Well, not so fast… you’ve just noticed that sales are not improving!
So you are forced to dig into the data and work out what has happened. Then you discover that, despite the increase in bookings, two other metrics have plummeted:
- Appointment Show Rate: The percentage of booked appointments that are actually sat
- Appointment Close Rate: The percentage of sat appointments that are closed / sold
You listen back to a couple of calls and realise that the team are now booking soft and unqualified appointments. Your in-home consultants are furious because they’re dealing with crappy appointments that are wasting their time.
The leads are the same. The bonus is the problem. And this article has the fix.
Incentivising a single metric, on its own, almost always gets gamed. Not because the team is acting in bad faith. They’re doing exactly what you asked. The metric you measured is the metric they optimised, and whatever wasn’t measured quietly got traded away.
Paired metrics are how you close that loophole. Custom metrics are how you turn the pair into one number that a team can compete on.
What a paired metric actually is
A paired metric is two numbers measured together, where the second number protects against the first being gamed.
You set a target on the first metric. You set a goal or tolerance band on the second. The team only wins the incentive if both stay in their assigned positions.
It works because almost every operational metric is either a volume metric or a quality metric, rarely both.
Volume metrics like appointments booked, calls made, and sales closed can be gamed by lowering quality.
Quality metrics like show rate, close rate, and job margin can be gamed by being selective on volume.
Pairing the two closes the back door.
Example 1: How To Incentivise Appointment Setting Volume
Single Metric:
Most appointments booked this month.
Potential Outcome:
Increased “soft” and/or unqualified appointments are negatively impacting the show rate and close rate. Complaining and frustrated sales reps / consultants.
How To Use Paired Metrics To Fix:
To use paired metrics, continue using a volume metric (booked appointments), but ensure you control for appointment quality by combining it with a qualitative metric (show rate or close rate).
This means your appointment setter only wins the bonus if the appointments they booked maintain a show rate and/or a close rate inside a defined tolerance band for the cohort.
The volume incentive is still there, but your setters just can’t win by booking rubbish appointments.
For example, if your team’s average show rate has been 85% over the last month, the bonus condition might be “at a show rate of above 80%.”
This shows you’re not asking for an improvement, you’re just protecting against a collapse.
Example 2: How To Incentivise Solar Sales Consultant Volume
Single Metric:
Most sales close this month.
Potential Outcome:
The winner is the rep who closed the highest number of jobs, so the lever they’ll reach for is the one that has the quickest and easiest impact on conversion rates = price!
To win more deals, they’ll discount harder, throw in extras, and drop margins to win deals against competitors you normally don’t compete with.
As I’ve heard some sales managers describe it, they will “drop their pants” to win the deal.
Not good.
How To Use Paired Metrics To Fix:
To use paired metrics, continue using a volume metric (closed sales), but ensure you control for business profitability by combining it with a qualitative metric (gross margin).
This means your solar consultant only wins the bonus if they close deals with enough margin for a profitable and sustainable business.
The volume incentive is still there, but your reps just can’t win by selling at bankruptcy prices.
For example, if your company’s average job margin is 35% over the last month, the bonus condition might be “at a gross margin rate of above 30%.”
The custom metric: turning a pair into one number
Paired metrics work when you’ve got tolerance bands and you’re comfortable disqualifying a winner who steps outside them. They work less well when you want a single league-table number the team can compete on directly.
The fix is to create custom metrics for your business by combining these pairs into a single score.
For example, let’s create a fictional custom metric called “Sales Effectiveness Score”.
This custom metric will be used to evaluate the effectiveness of your team of sales reps. To do this, you decide to incorporate two business-critical sales metrics:
- Appointment Close Rate: The percentage of sat appointments that are closed / sold
- Job Gross Margin: The percentage of gross margin per job closed
This allows you to more effectively evaluate 2 (or more reps) against each other. For example:
Rep A: Has a 40% appointment close rate and an average of 20% job margin.
To calculate their Sales Effectiveness Score, we multiply 40 x 20 (and divide by 10 to tidy it up) for a SES of 80.
Rep B: Has a significantly lower appointment close rate of 30%, but sells jobs at an average of 30% job margin.
To calculate their Sales Effectiveness Score, we multiply 30 x 30 (and divide by 10 to tidy it up) for a SES of 90.
Now run the same 100 appointments through both reps at an average job value of $20,000:
| Appointments | ACR % | Margin % | Sales | Gross Profit | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rep A | 100 | 40.00% | 20.00% | 40 | $160,000 |
| Rep B | 100 | 30.00% | 30.00% | 30 | $180,000 |
Who would you rather have in your business? Whilst Rep B has a lower close rate, you can see that they sell deals at a higher margin. Same 100 appointments. Ten fewer sales. $20,000 more gross profit. Your business makes more money with less work.
You can use custom metrics across so many areas of your business, and my guess is that once you start, you won’t be able to stop.
How to roll this out
Step 1 is to decide what you’re optimising for. What are the littlest hinges that swing the biggest doors?
Shortened lead management cadences. Soft appointments. Discounting. Cherry-picking leads. Ignoring difficult prospects. Naming the back door will help you define the paired metric to close it.
Set tolerance bands using your existing baseline. The numbers don’t need to be ambitious; they just need to be defensible. In many instances, you’re protecting against a collapse, not demanding an improvement.
Communicate the “why” behind the rule. A new or improved bonus structure that arrives without context could impact trust. Instead, communicate with your team that “we’re rewarding volume, but quality has to hold, and here’s how we’ll measure both”.
Review the structure periodically to answer the main question — is it helping?
Incentive structures commonly need adjustment. If your tolerance bands were too loose, the back door is still open. If they’re too tight, no one’s winning the bonus, and it stops motivating. Tighten or loosen based on what actually happened in the data.
What “fixed” looks like
The promised land here is a team competing on a structure that lines up with what’s actually good for the business.
Volume is rewarded without volume gaming the funnel. Margin is protected without consultants refusing to discount on the deals where it makes sense. Appointment close rate and show rate are published as rep-level KPIs alongside the bonus structure, not buried in a sales manager’s spreadsheet.
The bonus winner each month is the rep your sales manager would have picked on their own.
When that’s true, the incentive structure has stopped being a battleground and started being a tool.
Where this fits in the bigger picture
Paired and custom metrics are operational levers, not strategies in themselves.
They work when the underlying funnel is being measured properly, i.e. when you can actually see show rate, close rate, and margin by rep without doing manual maths every month.
If the measurement isn’t there yet, that’s the place to start. We’ve covered the diagnostic for that in the leadership-gap section of our contact-rate piece, and the broader funnel metrics in our 4-stage readiness checklist.
Custom metrics need data underneath them. Without measurement, you can’t pair anything.
Want a second pair of eyes on your incentive structure?
If you’re running a bonus or commission structure and you’re not sure whether the back door is open, request lead pricing and we’ll have a real conversation about where the funnel is leaking and what the metric pair would need to be.