You're generating leads. So why aren't they turning into sales?

The ads are working. Enquiries are up a third on last quarter, forms come in most days and the phone rings more than it did. And sales are flat.

The first thing people blame is the leads: wrong people, tyre-kickers, price shoppers. Sometimes that's fair. But in my view the leads are more often fine on the day they arrive, and something between the enquiry and the quote lets them go. You can find out which in an afternoon.

Count each step

Take last quarter's enquiries and count how many got a reply, how many turned into a real conversation, how many got a quote and how many you won.

You're looking for the step where the number falls hardest. If ninety enquiries became seventy conversations, then twelve quotes, then four orders, the ads have done their job and something is going wrong between the conversation and the quote. If ninety enquiries only got thirty replies, that's a different problem, and a much cheaper one to fix.

If you can't do this count easily because the enquiries are spread across inboxes and the quotes live in someone's sent folder, that's your first finding.

Speed matters more than you'd think

There's a well-known study on this. In 2011 the Harvard Business Review published research that sent test enquiries to 2,241 US companies and timed the replies. Thirty-seven per cent replied within an hour. Twenty-three per cent never replied at all. Of the ones that replied within 30 days, the average wait was 42 hours.

It also looked at real leads, and found that firms that tried to contact a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to have a proper conversation with a decision maker as firms that waited even an hour longer, and more than sixty times as likely as firms that waited a day or more.

That's old American data, and selling forty thousand dollar machines isn't a call centre. I still think the principle holds. Someone who's just filled in your form is thinking about the problem right now. Tomorrow they're thinking about something else, and they may have already rung the next supplier on the list.

What the first reply says

Speed's only half of it. It's easy to send an automatic "thanks for your enquiry, someone will be in touch", then a brochure a day later with a two-line email. That answers nothing. The buyer asked a question, often a specific one, and got a document to dig through instead.

A good first reply answers the question if it can, asks the one or two things you need to quote, and suggests a next step with a time on it. "I can get a price to you by Thursday if you can tell me the floor area and whether it's sealed concrete" moves a sale along. "Please find attached our capability statement" usually doesn't.

Who owns it

When enquiries land in a shared inbox, everyone assumes someone else has replied. When they land with one person, they wait whenever that person's on leave or flat out on site.

Every enquiry needs one named person responsible for it, and a backup for when they're away. It sounds obvious, and it's an easy gap to miss when things are busy.

After the quote

The other place leads disappear is after the quote goes out. The buyer says they'll get back to you, and nobody follows up because nobody wants to be pushy. On a long sales cycle that can be where most of the value sits, and it deserves its own process, which I've written about separately.

Fix the right step

That's why you count first, because the fixes are completely different. Slow replies need a rule and someone keeping it. Weak first replies need better templates. Quotes going quiet need a system that remembers. And if the count shows the leads really are poor, take that to whoever runs your ads, with specifics about who's enquiring and why they don't fit.

Spending more on ads fixes none of these. It just pours more enquiries into the same gap.