Vanity Metrics

This is Chapter 7 in my book The Slow Sale: How Slowing Down Wins More Deals available on Amazon.

Making Every Deal Count

If you’ve got a funnel with leads and prospects coming into the top and you’re trying to take them through a process and close sales at the bottom end, then how do you use the Slow Sale concept to optimize that process?

A “fast sale” dictates that you cram as many leads into the funnel aspossible. It’s a race to see how many you can squeeze through your sales process and how quickly.

You have benchmarked your conversion percentage, and the only way to push your numbers up and “optimize” is to increase volume by generating more leads, qualifying more prospects, and converting more prospects into paying customers faster, always faster. It’s a numbers game, and the math proves the need for speed, right?

While the “fast sale” can certainly work, it isn’t the only way to optimize sales.

In contrast, slow selling continues to work when the flow is not consistent. It can help you get more sales out of the bottom of your funnel and ultimately change the math itself.

The Slow Sale does not promote slowness for its own sake. It’s not about turning off lead generation and allowing all imminent deals to grind to a halt.

No, it’s about permission.

The Slow Sale methodology gives permission to treat each deal as important. Under the right circumstances, intentional slowness enables you to pay more attention to the unique needs and constraints of each deal. 

You can scrutinize each one, turn it over in your hands like an unknown thing, and notice details that you would have missed in a mad dash to close (and ultimately lose) the deal.

Slow down, and you can raise your closing percentage.

That’s certainly what happened for Cirrus Insight. When we rushed certain deals, we ruined them. They never exited the funnel as closed deals.

• Maybe our prospects dug in their heels in that third stage out of five because they felt like we were being too aggressive.
• Maybe they felt like they lacked all the information they needed.
• Maybe forcing a “No” toward the end of the first quarter prevented a “Maybe” from becoming a “Yes” in the second quarter.
• Maybe we were in such a hurry, trying to power leads through the funnel and scale!, scale!, scale! our startup, that prospects fell through the cracks. We were so busy chasing the big fish that we lost out on smaller fish that could have grown with us over time.

The Slow Sale is an opportunity to think not only about pushing more prospects through the funnel at the fastest pace possible but also about how to get more closed deals out the bottom.

As long as you maintain a reasonable sales cycle speed, any strategy that helps you close more deals will be more effective than relying on a pure volume approach.

Indicators of Too Fast

Tracking vanity metrics – stats that primarily boost our ego – are a symptom of moving too quickly.

When you really are going too fast, you develop a bias. You tend to focus on metrics associated with speed.

Here’s a quick analogy: If you’re driving a car and you accelerate, you go faster, and you can’t help but focus on the speedometer. You pass 90 miles per hour, 100, and start to wonder, “Wow! How fast can I go? If I’m doing 100, how soon could I get to Nashville?”

You start doing the math in your head, and you forget to factor in the state trooper who pulls you over. In your eagerness to get to there sooner, you failed to account for the cost of the speeding ticket, the hike in your car insurance premiums, and the cost of twenty minutes while the trooper writes your ticket – not to mention your wasted day in traffic court.

A Valuable Trade-Off?

Let’s bend the analogy back to sales. Would you have closed the sale if you had focused on the closing the sale instead of vanity metrics like...

• Number of emails sent?
• Number of phone calls made?
• Number of meetings scheduled?

These metrics can provide data that may help you correlate activities with deals won or lost. And that can be very valuable. Maybe you have never closed a deal without having a live phone call with the prospect. If you don’t have a phone call with the next prospect, then there’s a high likelihood of not closing the deal.

Most metrics do indicate a degree of interest in your value proposition, but try not to mistake motion for action; or contact for impact, for that matter. Instead, arm yourself with a more pointed question: “How do I really reach this person?”

• What is the best way to get in touch?
• What is the best way to truly connect?
• What is the most effective way to communicate my value proposition?

Can you identify a clear path toward what you really want—a closed sale, not email opens?

A false security through vanity metrics is the byproduct of moving too fast. A bunch of percentages displayed in impressive charts with pretty colors on a swanky dashboard are good for sightseeing, and we might even learn a factoid or two: how many times someone has opened my email, whether or not she has clicked the link, whether or not she has opened the attachment.

But the Slow Sale says don’t stop there. Use these baseline metrics inservice of a higher order metric. Enlist the basic numbers to ask bigger questions: Did the sale close? Why? What effort led to that outcome?

Real Money in the Bank

The Slow Sale stays hyper-focused on closed sales, not sales activities. Results are the only thing that matter. While whiners focus on effort and give points for trying, winners focus on the final product.

You can probably think of someone you know who focused on how hard something was: a pregnancy, marathon, or diet. That person emphasized the effort and complained every step of the way.

You can probably also recall conversations with other people whose impressive accomplishments didn’t revolve around the work itself, but about the results:

“Becoming a mom is the best thing that has ever happened to me.”

“It felt amazing to cross the finish line.”

“I’ll admit, being thirty pounds lighter feels better. I’ve got more energy.”

Champions focus on the prize, not the practice.

Email opens won’t pay your quarterly bonus. Let’s keep track of the metrics that really matter: sales, closed opportunities, revenue coming in, real money in the bank.

What is the rhythm that pulses and drives the Slow Sale? Smart effort. Unparalleled vision. Bold action. Patient waiting.

Going slow might feel initially uncomfortable, it is such a contrary notion when compared to the frenzied pace of our world. At first, you may think you are missing out or not working hard enough. You may accuse yourself of being lazy or irresponsible. But these lies dissolve when slowness produces actual results, when inaction and patience are rewarded with more and better clients.

Get off the hamster wheel, slow down, and think. By selling slowly, you’ll get happier customers and bigger commission checks.

This is Chapter 7 in my book The Slow Sale: How Slowing Down Wins More Deals available on Amazon.