“We need more enquiries.”
Fair enough. But my next question is usually: what happened to the last ones?
It’s a question worth asking before you increase your ad budget, rebuild your website or launch another campaign. Because getting an enquiry and turning it into a customer are two different jobs.
Follow an enquiry through the business
Imagine someone fills in your contact form on Monday morning.
When do they hear back? Does anyone check whether their question was answered? If they’re interested but not ready to buy, does someone follow up later? And if they decide against you, do you know why?
For some businesses, the answers are clear. For others, enquiries disappear into an inbox shared by three people, each assuming someone else has dealt with them.
That’s a difficult problem to fix with more advertising.
Look at your last 20 enquiries
You don’t need a complicated dashboard to get started. Take your last 20 enquiries and note:
- Where each one came from.
- What the person was asking for.
- How long it took to respond.
- Whether anyone followed up.
- Whether it became a sale, was lost or is still open.
A pattern may jump out. Perhaps the leads from one campaign are a poor fit. Perhaps weekend enquiries wait until Tuesday for a reply. Perhaps proposals are sent, but nobody checks back.
Each of those problems needs a different fix. “Get more leads” isn’t specific enough to tell you which one you have.
A simple example
Say you receive 100 enquiries and win 10 customers. That’s a 10% conversion rate.
If you improve the way you respond, qualify and follow up, and win 15 instead, you’ve gained five customers without increasing the number of enquiries.
That’s an illustration, of course. Your results will depend on your business. But it shows why the journey after the form submission deserves as much attention as the campaign that brought someone in.
And marketing still has a part to play. If people keep asking for something you don’t offer, or every enquiry is outside your budget, you may be attracting the wrong audience or setting the wrong expectations on your website.
Fix the part that’s leaking
You may genuinely need more leads. Many businesses do.
But find out what happens to the ones you already have first. Respond promptly, make the next step clear, follow up when it’s useful, and record why opportunities are lost.
Then, when you do spend more on lead generation, you’ll have a better chance of turning that spend into business.
More water is useful. It’s even more useful when you’ve checked the bucket.
