What are the most meaningless sales metrics you have seen?

I recently came into contact with an Executive that's using data called "Authentic Conversations" vs. "Shallow Conversations" to determine the quality of the sale. In short, he asks the Sales Rep to flag one of these boxes after each sales call and prospective sales call to gauge how the rep “felt” about the interest of the prospect. He expects to use this data as a statistically accurate way of assessing which call has or will yield quality high-yield sales and future opportunities.

I asked several reps to explain the relevance of these buttons to me. Most simply responded with blank stares.

Seems to be working just fine......

The metrics must be those that drive results, but early enough in the sales process so that leadership can make mid-course corrections. I always dispised "attempts" or "dials" as metrics because they tend to be discouraging and demotivating.

Most important, the metrics don't need to be the same for everyone. The metrics one measures for a new salesperson building a pipeline should and must be different from the metrics for an established salesperson that needs to grow their revenue. It works best when you can differentiate those roles, scenarios and challenges and identify metrics that are relevant and still drive revenue.

First of all, we should only measure what really matters - not, what can be measured!
Analyzing metrics - make sure that you distinguish between transactional sales and strategic sales.
Metrics that show us the productivity and the performance to get results are always useful - but please avoid metrics that measure activities only! That's often just a replacement for missing sales leadership.
An example I always found useless is implementing a call or meeting activity reporting in case the pipeline is weak - given a strategic selling environment!
Additionally, "likes" on sales content! They are an indicator for social sharing and acceptance, but not necessarily an indicator for success along the sales cycle!
If you want to measure sales content efficiency, you have to connect the content usage and the results of a certain opportunity - that's more helpful!

Number of logins to Sales Force! Yup, you read it right!

Oh boy. This is one of my all-time favorite questions. Back when I had a territory in Manhattan, and everybody actually shlepped around the streets with reams of product literature, we were supposed to keep track of phone calls and cold calls (actual visits). Everybody hated it, including management. Finally one of our more creative reps stomped into the office with a hammer in her hand, and actually NAILED HER SHOES to the call board, so you could see the holes she had worn in the soles.

Measuring number of calls suddenly became less important.

Oh boy. This is one of my all-time favorite questions. Back when I had a territory in Manhattan, and everybody actually shlepped around the streets with reams of product literature, we were supposed to keep track of phone calls and cold calls (actual visits). Everybody hated it, including management. Finally one of our more creative reps stomped into the office with a hammer in her hand, and actually NAILED HER SHOES to the call board, so you could see the holes she had worn in the soles.

Measuring number of calls suddenly became less important.

Yeah, I agree that number of dials is misleading at best. A couple teams I've worked with recently have converted that to measuring 10-minute calls. The rationale is that this more effectively combines dials and talk time into something that expects a 10-minute conversion goes beyond voicemails, beyond the prospect's ability to wiggle out of a bad cold call, and assumes a decent level of conversation, consultative selling, and/or discussions about next steps.

Any metric other than actual number or $ amount of closed sales, since that's the only number that matters in the end.