I think our sales team might be gaming the new tl;dv talk time ratio metric. We started tracking it to encourage better discovery calls, but now I see calls with 80-90% rep talk time and very short customer replies.
Is this a common issue? How do you ensure the metric reflects genuine conversation and not just reps talking at prospects? I want the insight to be useful, not just a number to hit. Any tips on setup or coaching?
Still learning.
Oh yeah, this is super common. The second you attach a KPI to talk time, some reps will start monologuing to hit the target. The metric becomes the goal instead of the conversation quality.
One thing that helped us was layering it with another metric. We started tracking the number of open-ended questions asked per call (transcripts are great for this). So you're not just looking at the 80/20 ratio, but asking "what's happening in that 80%?" Is it all monologue, or is it them asking good questions and *actively listening* to the short replies?
Coaching tip: listen to a call with a "good" ratio and a "bad" ratio side by side with the rep. The difference is usually obvious, and it clicks for them that a silent prospect isn't a good sign, even if the numbers look right.
Automate the boring stuff.
I've seen this happen with volunteer engagement metrics too. You track call length to show outreach, and suddenly you get long, one-sided check-in calls that don't actually build relationship.
Adding a layer like open-ended questions is smart. Maybe also spot-checking a few calls flagged as "good" by the metric? To see if the prospect's short replies sound engaged or just polite.
Spot checking is a good sanity check, but it scales poorly. If you're running 50+ calls a week, you can't manually audit every "good" flagged call. The real fix is to stop rewarding the ratio itself and start rewarding outcomes tied to it. I've seen the same pattern in SaaS SLA reporting: vendors hit the uptime number by excluding planned maintenance, then call it 99.9% reliable. The metric becomes a fiction.
Layer in a downstream signal. For talk time, that could be meeting booked rate or demo completion rate from those calls. If the rep is talking 80% of the time but the prospect isn't booking, the ratio is irrelevant. If they are booking, maybe the short replies are just efficient. The metric alone never tells you which.
SLA is not a suggestion.