Send yourself an enquiry from your own website, then follow it

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17 August 2026 · Aston Gapes · about 5 minutes
Part of Stop losing them

Do this now, it takes ninety seconds. Go to your own website and send yourself an enquiry, the way a customer would. Then follow it.

For most equipment businesses, this is where it goes. It becomes an email. That email lands in one person's inbox at ten to five on a Friday, in among a delivery docket, two supplier invoices and something from Xero. On Monday there are forty more above it.

That is your pipeline. An unread email, in one person's inbox, ranked by arrival time alongside a delivery docket.

Everything that can go wrong from there

None of this is hypothetical, and none of it requires anybody to be bad at their job.

That person takes two weeks off. Nobody else can see the enquiries, because they are in a personal mailbox. Two weeks of leads sit unread behind an out-of-office reply that says somebody will get back to you shortly.

That person leaves. Now every conversation in progress is inside an account that IT is about to close, and every half-finished negotiation goes with it.

Somebody replies and quotes. Excellent. Where is that recorded? In the sent folder. So the only record of a hundred-thousand-dollar quote is one person's sent items, and nobody else in the business knows it exists.

Somebody retypes it into a spreadsheet. Better, until the week they are busy, which is always the week with the most enquiries in it.

And nothing anywhere knows it went quiet. An enquiry that is never answered looks identical to one that was answered and lost. There is no state, so there is no follow up, and we have written about what that costs.

The bit that hurts to work out

Take your best guess at how many enquiries your website produced last year. Now try to list them. Not the ones that became jobs — all of them.

Almost nobody can. The information exists, technically, spread across two inboxes and a sent folder, but it cannot be counted, which means it cannot be measured, which means nobody can tell whether the website is working.

Which is why the answer to "is the website generating anything?" in most equipment businesses is a shrug and a story about one good job in 2023.

What a system does that an inbox cannot

This is not really about software, and you do not need an expensive one. It is about four properties an inbox structurally cannot have.

It is shared. More than one person can see the enquiry, so leave and resignations stop being events.

It has a state. New, quoted, waiting, won, lost. Which means the ones sitting in "waiting" since March can be listed on demand, and that list is money.

It remembers where it came from. Which page, which search, which campaign, attached to the enquiry permanently rather than guessed at in a meeting nine months later.

It can chase without a human remembering to. Not spam — a task on somebody's list, on the date the buyer themselves nominated.

Start with the ninety seconds

Before any of that, do the test at the top. Send yourself an enquiry and follow where it lands, then ask who else in the business can see it, and what happens to it if nobody replies.

Most people already suspect the answer. Doing it anyway is what turns a suspicion into a decision.