Don’t Let Your Sales Team Fool You with Revenue. You’re the One Who Taught Them How

21/07/2026

What Are the Leading Indicators Really Telling Us?

At the end of the second quarter, Türkiye's leading indicators are not telling one story. They are telling two.

In May, industrial turnover rose 36.6% year over year. In the same month, industrial production did not grow at all. Trade sales volume fell 1.4%, while the number of paid employees in manufacturing declined 3.4%. Then, in June, the Türkiye Manufacturing PMI fell to 47.1, remaining below the 50.0 no-change mark.

The invoices are getting bigger. The operating engine is not.

Sales volumes are weakening. Manufacturing employment is falling. New-order momentum is losing strength.

This is where revenue and real performance must be separated.

Revenue is a lagging indicator—and one of the easiest numbers to polish. Output, orders, collections, gross profit, inventories and employment are the leading indicators. They tell you where the company is going before revenue tells you where it has been.

So, What Exactly Is Happening?

The numbers are not lying to us.

We are simply taking the part of the truth we like and treating it as the whole truth.

Sales suddenly accelerate during the final week of the quarter. Discounts widen. Orders are pulled forward from the following month. Payment terms are extended—not by a few days, but by several months.

The revenue target is met. The sales team gets the applause.

The next quarter inherits swollen receivables, customers stuffed with inventory and a weaker appetite for new orders.

Worse still, the real cost of the sale rarely appears on the invoice.

Small production batches. Overtime. Emergency raw-material purchases. Express freight.

Operations, procurement and logistics absorb the cost. The revenue line in the sales report remains spotless.

The sales team is doing exactly what it has been asked—and paid—to do.

If you reward revenue alone, treat profitability as someone else's problem and leave collections outside the salesperson's responsibility, the resulting behaviour is not an accident.

It is your design.

The problem is not in the report. It is in the story management wants the report to tell.

"A company starts lying to itself the day it decides that revenue alone counts as success."

Let's Pull a Rabbit Out of the Hat

Profitability Is More Charismatic Than Revenue

I have a line of my own:

"Profitability is more charismatic than revenue."

— Orkun Akçasarı

I did not write that to make a presentation sound clever.

Revenue can be inflated with discounts. It can be borrowed from the future through extended payment terms. Logistics and financing costs can be pushed onto other departments.

Profitability strips away the costume.

It removes the mask from every sale and asks one unforgiving question:

What did the company actually keep?

Revenue gets applause in the boardroom. Profitability keeps the factory lights on.

One tells a growth story. The other proves whether you actually grew.

That is why profitability is more charismatic than revenue.

Not a Bonus Plan. An Incentive Architecture.

I call it incentive architecture.

I never tie variable compensation to revenue alone. I measure profitable revenue, collections, payment-term discipline and strategic account contribution as one system.

An uncollected sale is not a completed sale.

An order won by destroying the margin is not a success.

One shining metric cannot erase the damage hidden in another.

I did not build this architecture once, at one company.

I have rebuilt it in every organisation where I assumed management responsibility. And every time, I faced serious resistance at the beginning of the first quarter.

I did not flinch.

Sales teams live by incentives. Naturally, they resist a structure that challenges the habits rewarded by the old system.

The old plan asks: "How much did you sell?"

My architecture asks: "What did the company keep, and when did the cash arrive?"

If it works once, you may call it luck. If it works every time, it is a method.

Those who want to see where I applied this approach, how I applied it and what results it produced can visit my Executive Profile https://www.orkunak.com/en1/executive-profile/

The purpose of this architecture is not to cut bonuses.

Quite the opposite.

Its purpose is to help the sales team earn higher bonuses—not once, but consistently.

Unprofitable revenue may fund bonuses for a few months. Then it destroys the company's ability to pay them at all.

"A sale is not closed on the invoice. It is closed at the bank."

The Shop Has to Stay Open

Measure the sales team on revenue alone, and they will bring you revenue.

They will not feel responsible for what that revenue leaves behind.

Management's job is not to blame the salesperson. Its job is to build a system that rewards the right behaviour.

When profitability, collections and payment-term discipline become part of the incentive architecture, the sales team stops working against the company and starts working on the same side of the table.

Because variable pay is the price you place on behaviour.

Whatever you pay for, you multiply.

My grandfather explained it years ago in one sentence:

"The shop has to stay open so everyone can eat."

— My grandfather

If the shop cannot survive, high revenue is nothing more than a loud number.

It cannot pay sustainable bonuses. It cannot fund investment. And it cannot leave a company standing tomorrow.

Editorial Note

This article was prepared using the latest second-quarter 2026 indicators published by the Turkish Statistical Institute—TURKSTAT—and the Istanbul Chamber of Industry.

The turnover, production, trade sales volume and paid-employment figures refer to annual changes. The Manufacturing PMI indicates the direction of business conditions compared with the previous month.

These indicators should therefore not be treated as a single statistical series. They are used together to examine the widening gap between reported revenue growth and the underlying operating performance of companies.

The management analysis, the statement "Profitability is more charismatic than revenue," and the incentive architecture approach presented in this article belong to Orkun Akçasarı.