Many companies confuse activities and results. As a consequence, they make the mistake of designing a process that sets out milestones in the form of activities that must be carried out during the sales cycle. Salespeople have a genius for doing what’s compensated rather than what’s effective. If your process has an activity such as “submit proposal” or “make cold call,” then that’s just what your people will do. No matter that the calls were to the wrong customer or went nowhere. No matter that the proposal wasn’t submitted at the right point in the buying decision or contained inappropriate information. The process asked for activity, and activity was what it got. Salespeople have done what was asked for. “Garbage in, garbage out” they will delight in telling you. “It’s not our problem, it’s this dumb process.”