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GullySales

Notes for owners · Business growth

How to generate more enquiries

Walk the path from advertisement to recorded enquiry yourself, on a phone. The break is usually in the middle, and it costs less to fix than the next campaign.

The GullySales team · Updated 15 Sept 2026 · 6 min read

More enquiries come from three places, and they are not equally expensive. The cheapest are the visitors and callers you already get who never become a record. The next cheapest are the enquiries that arrive and are lost between a form, an inbox and somebody's phone. The dearest is new demand you pay for. So before raising the budget, walk the path yourself: advertisement, page, the way to make contact, the place it lands, the reply. The break is nearly always in the middle, and fixing it costs less than a month of media.

Walk your own path, on a phone, this week

Open your own advertisement on a mobile connection, not on office wifi. Time how long the page takes. Try to find the phone number without scrolling. Fill in your own form with a real number. Then sit and wait, and note the minute somebody responds.

Most owners discover two or three of the following in that half hour. The form takes nine fields. The number is an image, so it cannot be tapped. The WhatsApp button opens a chat with no message in it, so the buyer has to compose something. The submission goes to an address ending in info@ that one person checks on Fridays. Nobody called back at all.

None of that shows up in a campaign report. All of it is paid for by every rupee of media running above it.

Where the path breaks, and what it costs

Link in the pathThe usual breakThe fix
Advertisement to pageThe advertisement promises a product, the page is the home pageSend each campaign to a page about that product
Page to decisionNo price band, no service area, no proofState the range, the cities covered and one real example
Decision to contactOne long form and a "Submit" buttonThree fields, a tappable number, a WhatsApp button
Contact to recordIt lands in a shared inbox or a personal phoneOne place every enquiry is written down, with a source
Record to replyNobody owns evenings, Sundays and lunchA named owner per shift and a callback rule
Reply to follow-upOne attempt, then silenceThree touches across two weeks, on WhatsApp

Work top down. The first three raise the number of enquiries, and the last three decide whether they were worth generating.

Enquire the way your buyer actually enquires

Indian buyers rank their options in a clear order. Call if it is urgent. WhatsApp if it involves a price, a photograph or a question they are slightly embarrassed to ask. A form only when there is a document to attach.

Offer all three and make the WhatsApp link carry information. A click-to-chat link can open with the message already typed, so the buyer sends "I saw the modular kitchen offer on Instagram" with one tap. Now your team knows the campaign before the conversation starts, and nobody had to ask.

The phone number deserves the same treatment. Give the hoarding its own number, the newspaper insert another, and leave the main number for everything else. A board on Tumkur Road cannot report anything, but a call log can.

Tracked means you can name the source

An enquiry that arrives without a source is a sale you cannot repeat. Three small pieces of plumbing solve it for most businesses.

Tag every campaign link so the page knows where the visitor came from, and put a hidden field on the form that carries that tag into the record. Fire a conversion when the thank-you page loads, so the ad platforms learn which creative works. And keep one register, whether that is a CRM or a shared sheet. It holds the source, the date, the time of first reply and the outcome, for every enquiry from every channel, including the ones who walked in.

For example, a modular kitchen showroom in Indiranagar might find that 60 of last month's 140 enquiries have no source at all. The figure is illustrative. The consequence is not: nearly half the budget cannot be judged, so it gets renewed out of habit.

The reply is part of the enquiry

A form fill is not an enquiry. It is a person who is currently also filling in two competitors' forms.

Set two rules and hold to them. Every enquiry gets a first reply within fifteen minutes in working hours, and by the next morning if it arrives at night. Every missed call is called back the same day. The first reply does not need to be complete. Acknowledge, ask one question, and offer a time.

Then decide who owns Sunday. Most businesses advertise seven days a week and answer for five.

Then, and only then, buy more traffic

Once the path holds, more media is worth buying, and the order is usually search first, because those buyers have already decided they want what you sell. After that, the channels that reach people inside your catchment who are not yet looking.

Raising spend before the path is fixed simply moves the loss to a bigger number.

What to do next

Take one week and record every enquiry on a single sheet: where it came from, when it arrived, when somebody replied, and what happened. By Saturday you will know whether your problem is volume or handling, and most weeks it is handling. If you would like that week read with you and scored, the free audit is a 45-minute call and a written report ranked by what to fix first.

Questions

Questions owners ask.

How many fields should an enquiry form have?
Three visible ones for most businesses: name, phone number, and one line about what they need. Add a dropdown only when the answer changes who picks the enquiry up, such as a product category or a city. Everything else belongs in the first conversation, where a person can ask it properly.
Should the phone number on our hoarding be different from the one on the website?
Yes, and it is the cheapest measurement you will ever buy. A number used on one medium and nowhere else turns an unmeasurable board into a call log you can count. Keep the main number everywhere else so that repeat customers are never confused.
Is WhatsApp better than a form?
For most Indian buyers, yes, because it costs them nothing to start and they can leave and come back. Keep the form for people who want to attach a drawing or a requirement list. What matters is that the WhatsApp number sits on a business handset with a named owner, not on the proprietor's personal phone.
We get enquiries but they are poor quality. Does this still apply?
It applies more, because quality is usually decided by the page and the form, not by the channel. A page that states the price band, the minimum order or the service area filters out the wrong people before they type. Adding one qualifying dropdown does the rest.

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