Named after the Roman goddess Venus, the Venus Fly Trap lures in its prey and traps it, ultimately leading to its demise. Why Venus? Because in Greek mythology, Venus represents desire, manipulation, and addiction (among other things). In marketing, we often refer to metrics that have little to no impact on results but make people look and feel great as Vanity Metrics, but market turmoil has proven an otherwise sad fate for marketers as of late. Rather than being simply vein in nature, these metrics have become addicting and manipulative, ultimately leading to the demise of strategy and budgets. Thus, we shall now refer to them as Venus Metrics.

The Venus Metric Trap 

Let’s take a look at the trap that’s been set so you can begin to recognize if you have fallen victim to it. The shiny allure of a high lead volume makes a marketing team look like wunderkinds but doesn’t necessarily lead to a correspondingly high volume of appointments and sales. This trap will lead you down a path of misaligning your successes and crush your professional growth. To understand the trap, you have to ask yourself if you understand the difference between generating leads and capturing leads. 

To generate a lead, it takes creating awareness and interest where it didn’t previously exist. It is additive in nature. To capture leads, you’re simply plucking ripe fruit off a tree, ensuring that those who are already aware of you or who have shown interest are immediately plucked from the vine and entered into the CRM. It’s not additive, it’s consumptive. In a healthy marketing ecosystem, you’re doing both: generating and capturing, but what we see are those falling victim to Venus Metrics and relying too heavily on consumptive efforts that lead to inflated, and oftentimes low-quality, results. 

No, Not All Leads are Created Equal 

Looking at your marketing efforts through this lens can also lead to you evaluating your leads themselves differently. You begin to make the marketing metamorphosis from quantity-obsessed to quality-obsessed. Marketers who find themselves in the Venus Metric Trap, often don’t look beyond the first part of the funnel. They say, “We’ve got you the leads, the numbers speak for themselves, now it’s up to you to make something happen.” Vain. Pointed. Misguided. 

A healthy marketing ecosystem will cause you to evaluate your leads by following their every move. Not just into the funnel but as they progress through (or not). The Venus Metrics Trap will want to keep you in a box, safe from the reality that you just spent a ton of money on leads that… well… suck. The consumptive approach has you gathering leads high up in the funnel that either A. already knew about you and may already be in your system, or B. have had no time to self-educate and therefore self-qualifying before reaching out. Whereas an additive approach allows you to populate your funnel with self-qualified new blood that otherwise may not have found you or previously been aware of you. In other words, they’re true new leads. 

But Daddy, I Love Him 

“But Beth, I don’t care about quality. We want every chance we can get and every lead we can get.” Valid, and in certain markets that mentality is more than warranted. Still, it’s best practice to go about this strategically so you’re not paying more than what’s needed for leads already entering your funnel on their own. This is where the cost-per analysis comes into play because it strengthens the addictive nature of a high lead volume, makes a marketing strategy look optimized, and tightens the trap doors on the Venus Metrics Trap to a point where it feels impossible to break yourself free. 

If you’re in the trap, capturing leads with a focus on quantity over quality, and you run a cost-per analysis, you’re going to look like a rock star. High conversion rates, low cost-per lead, high lead volume. You’re going to have such stellar numbers that no one dares question your methodologies, and darn if that doesn’t feel GREAT and sound like a complete DREAM. But it’s a facade, and the data proves it. 

In tests where we compare lead generation strategies versus lead capture strategies, more often than not costs are not only similar, but awareness and traffic increase, organic traffic increases, and more appointments and sales result in the end. Your cost-per-lead may be great, but what's your cost-per-sale? More importantly, what’s your quality per-cost? How many leads are you having to capture in order to get one sale? 

The addictive nature of filling the top, looking like a rock star, and amassing lead volumes at a low cost-per-lead, has led to a broken bottom half of the funnel time and time again. Overworked online sales specialists, lost leads in the CRM, on-site sales agents with little-to-no follow-up or gorilla marketing skills. 

Time to Channel Your Inner Michael Scofield 

If you do not get the reference to Michael Scofield, I encourage you to add Prison Break to your list of binge-worthy shows. A genius in his own right, Michael purposely finds himself in prison with a planned escape for him and his brother, which he has meticulously mapped out via tattoos all over his body. No, I am not telling you to go out and get tattooed, but I am telling you - you need to do the homework and have a plan. 

The thing about Michael’s plans (re: his tattoos) is that they were intricate and showed depth, but most importantly, they accounted for mistakes (most of the time because a show still needs some aspect of drama and unexpected twists). In fact, the majority of his tattoos were simply a map or blueprint of the prison in which he planned to escape. This way, he had his main resource readily available when the need to pivot arose. You need to create your own blueprint out of your Venus Fly Trap.

Your blueprint, much like one for a building, will need to have layers. Time to shift your focus beyond the top of the funnel and run a full funnel analysis that quantifies quality of leads as well as the number of them. This is going to take you getting out of your comfort zone and, prepare yourself: talk to salespeople and dig into your CRM. To begin your blueprint, break your analysis down by customer journey to find the break and opportunity. While the list below is not extensive, it does provide a glimpse to help you get started: 

Notice how I did not include cost-per analysis in the customer journey. That’s because in homebuilding your cost-per lead, sale, etc is relative. Relative to what? To you and your strategy. Remember when we discussed being consumptive versus additive? Consumptive methods will almost always showcase linear attribution, performance ratios and cost-per leads will look great, and well - there was less work involved, therefore making this consumptive strategy addictive. But the additive method will be worth it because it was earned. These were new people entering your funnel, and we can prove that by going beyond cost, attribution, and quantities.

So what do we do? The purpose of the blueprint is to find your way out, right? Replicate your customer’s path, much like Michael replicated the map of the prison, so you can go back and redirect in order to find the best route to your final destination: sales. 

With the proper blueprint in place, you’ll be equipped with curiosity and data that will allow you to not only escape the top-of-funnel vanity metrics, but avoid them all together.