When Less Is More: Why Compelling Measures Success in Minutes Not Spent

Conventional wisdom worships “stickiness.” Product teams obsess over daily active users, session length, retention curves that never dare plateau. The underlying assumption: if people spend more time inside your app, the product must be winning.

But spend a day shadowing an elite sales team and you’ll see the opposite. The moments that move revenue aren’t framed by browser tabs—they’re framed by conversations: discovery calls, Slack threads, the quiet chat between meetings when someone finally asks, “How do we get this signed?”

At Compelling we decided to measure product success by an absence—the minutes a rep doesn’t spend with us.

Research Is Scaffolding, Not the Building

Prospecting research, list orchestration, signal tracking—these are mandatory ingredients for modern outbound. Yet they’re also overhead. Every minute spent tweaking filters or coaxing an AI prompt is a minute stolen from what compounds: time with customers.

If Compelling eats an afternoon because a rep is tinkering with dashboards, that’s not engagement—that’s friction disguised as productivity. The platform’s job is to do the grunt work invisibly and surface insight exactly where the magic already happens: inside the CRM record, in the cadence tool, on the call-prep sheet that appears 90 seconds before a meeting starts.

The Reverse KPI: Minutes Per User (And Why We Cheer When It Falls)

Our internal dashboard tracks a deliberately contrarian metric: Average Daily Minutes per User inside Compelling. We celebrate when the number goes down.

That single dial forces every roadmap conversation to justify itself in seconds saved:

A flashy graph that demands five clicks? Probably out.
A silent automation that demands none? Ship it—and then automate the next thing.

The result is a product culture that treats usability debt like financial debt: compound interest you pay every single day.

Invisible Software, Invisible Friction

I don’t believe software should be invisible; great tools deserve to be loved. But their friction should vanish. When intelligence flows to the edge of the workflow, reps aren’t “using software”—they’re just selling with superpowers.

Time saved isn’t an abstract efficiency metric; it’s reclaimed capacity that can be reinvested in customer conversations, deeper discovery, and creative deal strategy. That time compounds, quarter after quarter, pipeline after pipeline.

Everything else? Just plumbing—and plumbers get paid by the leak they prevent, not the time they spend under the sink.

Your tech stack shouldn’t crave attention. It should crave obsolescence—because that’s how you know it’s working. When the most valuable feature of a platform is the time you forget it’s there, you’ve unlocked the real definition of “sticky”: revenue that sticks, relationships that deepen, and a sales team freed to spend their best hours where they matter most—face-to-face with customers.

That’s the metric we’ll keep driving to zero.

Article by