An Overlooked Metric That Can Double Your Sales with Amy Traugh
- Feb 11
- 10 min read
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An Overlooked Metric That Can Double Your Sales
Most business owners track revenue, conversion rates, and lead sources. Those metrics matter. But there’s one overlooked metric quietly influencing your sales, consistency, and confidence, and almost no one is intentionally tracking it.
That metric is joy.
It might sound unexpected in a conversation about business metrics, but this isn’t a mindset pep talk. It’s grounded in neuroscience and directly impacts how motivated, consistent, and decisive you are in your business.
When joy is missing, sales feel harder. When joy is present, momentum builds faster.
Here’s why.
Why joy impacts sales performance
Your brain is wired with a negativity bias. Once a task is complete, it immediately looks for the next problem to solve.
When wins go unrecognized, your brain never registers completion. Over time, this disconnect reduces motivation and makes growth feel harder than it needs to be.
The role of dopamine in business growth
Dopamine is not about happiness. It’s about motivation and follow-through.
When you acknowledge progress, dopamine reinforces the connection between effort and results. That reinforcement supports:
• Consistency
• Confidence
• Clearer decision-making
• Sustainable momentum
When progress is ignored, effort feels unrewarded and burnout creeps in.
What happens when joy is missing
When internal rewards are absent, your brain looks for relief elsewhere. This often shows up as:
• Constantly changing strategies
• Overthinking simple decisions
• Scrolling or distraction
• Chasing what works for others
This isn’t a discipline problem. It’s a nervous system response.
Joy is a business metric
Joy is feedback. It tells your brain what worked and what to repeat.
Tracking joy supports:
• Better focus
• More consistent action
• Stronger self-trust
• Long-term business growth
A regulated nervous system leads to better strategy execution and stronger sales.
The identity shift most business owners miss
Your brain builds confidence from evidence.
If you never pause to recognize progress, your brain collects evidence that you are always behind, even when results are improving. That quiet erosion of confidence affects how you show up, sell, and lead.
A simple daily practice
At the end of the day, ask:
What did I complete today?
Completion matters. Progress matters. Follow-through counts.
This small habit trains your brain to recognize capability and builds internal motivation.
Why this matters for sustainable sales
When your nervous system feels supported, growth feels easier. Clients sense confidence and clarity.
Track your metrics, yes.
Also track:
• Progress
• Completion
• What worked
Joy is not fluff.It’s a signal.And it plays a bigger role in sales than most people realize.
If you're ready to finally ditch the data drama and create a simple, repeatable process for growth, this is exactly what we do inside Metrics Mastery.
Get started for free at amytraugh.com and let’s build a business that’s backed by strategy, not stress.
Until next time, stop guessing and start growing.
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Transcript for Episode 456. An Overlooked Metric That Can Double Your Sales
@0:04 - Amy Traugh (Amy Traugh)
Did you know that there's a metric right now that's influencing your sales that you are probably not tracking, reviewing, or even really thinking about?
And the crazier part is that ignoring this metric is actually costing you sales momentum and confidence. And it's not your conversion rate.
It's not your lead source. It's not your revenue per offer or retention rate. Today, I want to talk about a metric that almost no one is measuring, especially high achieving business owners like you.
That metric is joy. The word joy can sound really unexpected in a conversation about sales and growth, especially coming from someone like me who teaches metrics as the foundation of sustainable business growth.
But I want to... I to stay with me because this conversation is actually grounded in neuroscience and will have a very real impact on your results.
So as business owners, anytime we hit a milestone, we sign a client, we finish a launch, almost immediately our brain thinks, all right, that was awesome.
What's next? We move the goalpost. We don't pause. We don't acknowledge what we just did. We don't give ourselves any space to experience and enjoy what just happened.
We're really good at chasing the next goal. And it's not because we're ungrateful. It's actually because our brains are wired with a negativity bias.
That bias is designed to scan for what's unfinished, unresolved, or potentially wrong, right? It's detecting threats. And once a task is complete, our brain...
Our redirects our focus to the next problem that needs solving. It's wired for survival, but this creates a problem in business because when you do not take the time to celebrate your wins or feel genuine joy from the progress you just made, your brain never gets a clear completion signal.
And this is where dopamine comes in. And dopamine tends to get a really bad reputation. We label it as the pleasure chemical and we blame it for burnout, hustle culture, addictions to our phones, but it's actually kind of an incomplete picture of dopamine because dopamine is not what makes you addicted to success.
Dopamine is actually what initiates action. It's a motivation in anticipation chemical, which gets released when your brain detects a potential, a potential.
So reward and decides that something's worth the effort. So when you don't have enough dopamine, starting something and getting into action actually feels really hard.
Following through is really hard and everything in your business just feels like it requires so much more willpower. However, when you pause to acknowledge the wins and allow yourself to feel joy from the progress you just made, dopamine actually helps to close the loop.
Because what's happening is that your brain is connecting the effort you just made with a positive outcome. So those pathways, those neural pathways in your brain associated with capability, competence, and progress, they get strengthened.
And when they get strengthened, they're so much easier for your brain to access, especially during those moments when you are doubting yourself, when you just don't.
I like anything's working. And this is why business owners who regularly acknowledge their wins recover faster from setbacks because setbacks are going to happen.
It's not a matter of if a setback will happen. It's a matter of when. But because your brain has stored evidence that success is possible when you have taken the time to notice it, it makes it easier.
Your brain learns that, hey, this action led me somewhere useful. Do it again. But if you skip that step and move immediately to that next goal, your brain never closes the loop.
It never finishes the learning process. And your dopamine will spike briefly while you're in it, but it doesn't get reinforced at completion.
And then over time, what happens is this creates this pattern. plan. You Where your brain's expecting effort, but there's no payoff, which causes your motivation to drop.
And it's not because you're unmotivated. It's literally because your brain has learned that effort is not reliably rewarded. And when internal rewards are missing, the brain starts seeking dopamine from external sources that require less effort.
If this can look like scrolling on your phone, constantly changing your messaging and your offers, or switching strategies because you saw someone else swear that this was the thing that will guarantee success.
It may have worked in their business, but will it work in yours? At the end of the day, it's not a discipline issue.
It's just your nervous system is trying to find motivation in easier places. You know, dopamine is actually deeply tied to your calm.
You know, talk a lot about confidence as business owners. You need to show up. You need to be your future self now.
But when your brain repeatedly experiences effort followed by acknowledgement, it's building a sense of agency. You actually start to trust that your actions matter.
And that trust makes it so much easier to initiate the next task. Take those calculated risks and stay consistent, even when you're not getting instant results.
So at the end of the day, dopamine is not the enemy. It's the unfinished loops that are the problem.
When you don't take the time to celebrate, your brain registers effort without reward. You keep working, pushing, pushing harder and harder, but your motivation continues to drop.
And when you do experience success, It feels kind of unsatisfying. And over time, yeah, you're meant to say grow, but it just feels really hard and really exhausting.
And this is why joy is not optional in business growth. It's feedback. It's data. It's telling your brain exactly what is working and what is worth repeating.
When you give your brain clear signals that effort leads to reward, it gets easier to show up, take action, and build that momentum without forcing it.
When you allow yourself to feel joy after a win, even a small one, you're telling your brain, this worked.
This is safe. Do this again. This reinforces confidence, consistency, and follow through, which calms your nervous system. Why? Because a regulated nervous system actually supports clearer thinking, better decisions, and strategic action, all things that directly impact your sales.
And when you allow yourself to experience this, dopamine does what it's meant to do. It reinforces learning. It fuels future action and fuels motivation.
And there's also an identity cost here because your brain builds identity from evidence, not affirmations, mindset work, any of that.
Yes, it's important, but your brain truly learns through evidence. If you never stop to acknowledge the progress that you are making, the only evidence your brain is collecting is that there's always going to be more to do and you're never quite there.
But what is there? What is that end point? So even when your business is objectively growing, your internal story really truly becomes, I'm behind, or this could disappear at any moment.
And it really erodes your confidence over time, making you overthink and second guess. And you continue to chase instead of leading strategically.
And on top of that, running a business, it keeps many people in a constant low grade stress state. So when you don't ever pause to acknowledge the progress you're making, your nervous system's caught in that fight or flight response in survival mode.
And when we're in that state, your brain prioritizes urgency, leading you to be super reactive instead of proactive. But when you experience joy after a win, even briefly, you're nervous.
The is getting the signal that things are safe. And when that happens, your prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for planning, prioritizing, and strategic thinking, your prefrontal cortex works better because it feels safe.
Now, if you're like most business owners, I'm guilty of this too. We tend to end our day mentally reviewing all of the things that we didn't get done that day.
The tasks that are still unfinished, the clients we need to follow up with, the emails in our inbox, the things that didn't go to plan.
That negativity bias is there to keep us safe, right? But what happens is when this takes over, your brain starts to store these as failures, even if you did have a good day and make progress.
So a simple reflection at the end of the day, this takes literally like one minute to do. It can completely change this pattern.
So at the end of the day, I want you to start... Asking yourself, instead of, what didn't I get done?
Ask yourself, what did I accomplish today? This one little question, what did I accomplish today? It interrupts your brain's default filter, that negative filter.
It forces your brain to collect evidence of your follow through and the progress that you made. And over time, that evidence feeds your subconscious identity of someone who gets results.
Because again, the brain builds identity from evidence, not affirmations. And that identity is exactly what shapes how you show up.
You do not need massive wins for this to work. Because your brain does not rank wins the way we think it does.
Completion is completion. Handling something hard is data. Showing up consistently counts. Every time you name what you completed. What you followed through on.
What you handled well. You're feeding your subconscious proof of capability. And this is where joy sneaks back in. When you notice progress, your nervous system relaxes.
You feel more grounded. You trust yourself more. And you become less reactive and less desperate for the next win to prove something.
That energy shift is huge. It's noticeable to clients and prospects. Even if they can't name it, they just feel safer with you because you feel safe.
And again, because you feel safe, the area of the brain responsible for decision-making functions better. And here's the part most people miss.
When you don't pause to enjoy the success that you're making, the progress that you're making, your brain starts associating achievement with pressure instead of satisfaction.
And this is when burnout and self-sabotage. But when joy is part of the process, success feels reinforcing instead of draining.
And that's what makes growth more sustainable and, yeah, often faster. So at the end of the day, celebrating your wins is not about your ego, and it's not about slowing down your progress.
It's about training your brains to recognize the progress you are making, reinforcing the behaviors that lead to business growth, and creating a nervous system that can support bigger goals without constant overwhelm.
This is how you create sustainable business growth. This is how sales become easier because your energy is grounded instead of frantic.
So if you take one thing from this episode, let it be this. Track your numbers, yes, but also take the time to track those moments.
of joy. Track the progress you're making. Track what worked. Because when your brain learns that effort leads to reward, it will want to keep going.
And that is a metric that supports sustainable business growth. If this episode resonated with you, this is what I love helping clients with inside my signature program, Metrics Mastery and one-on-one.
You can get started for free over at amytraugh.com. And until next time, stop guessing and start growing.
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