Close rate cannot see it

Close rate is a percentage of appointments run. That is the entire definition, and it is where the problem starts.

It knows nothing about an opportunity that never became an appointment. The turnover that died on a sticky note is not in the numerator and it is not in the denominator. It is nowhere.

The perverse part

An advisor who closes sixty seven percent of what he sits in front of looks like a star, and he probably is one. But the better he looks, the more confident the owner becomes that the sales side of the company is handled.

Strong performance on a metric that excludes the loss is the most effective camouflage the loss has.

Three more reasons it stays invisible

Busy feels like winning. It is August in Phoenix, revenue is up, everybody is exhausted. It is close to impossible to notice money you did not make while you are drowning in money you did.

The missed one looks like a completed job. Tech went out, fixed it, collected, closed the ticket. In the record that is a finished and profitable call. The replacement that walked out behind it left no trace.

Nobody’s day got worse. The tech cleared his call. Dispatch cleared her board. The advisor had a full calendar and a great close rate. Not one person in that building had a reason to raise their hand.

Why the company does not just hire another advisor

Because the case for it is invisible. Another service tech produces revenue from day one, predictably. Another advisor only pays off if there are enough opportunities to fill his calendar, and the opportunity count is exactly the number nobody has. So the money goes to the tech, every time, correctly, on the information available.

Hiring is genuinely hard right now¹ on top of that, and a weak advisor is worse than none, because he burns the opportunities he does get.

Companies are not choosing to leave sales capacity short. They cannot see the case for fixing it, because nothing in the building counts what is being missed.

That is the whole reason this firm exists. Not to argue that the loss is large. To make it countable, so an owner can decide for himself whether it is worth anything.