How to read your own funnel: from enquiry to repeat order

When orders fall, someone gets blamed: the telecaller, the ad agency, the listing site. A funnel count settles it in an afternoon, because it shows which step loses the most buyers, and that is often not the step the complaint is about. You need one group of enquiries, six counts, and a pen. The counts are enquiries, replied, qualified, quoted, ordered and ordered again. Divide each by the one before and look for the step that loses clearly more than the rest. Work there first, before you change a person or a channel.

Draw it as a bar before you divide anything

This is an invented example, and every number in it is made up. A maker of cashew-shelling and grading machines in Kollam follows one group of 50 enquiries from a single stretch, old enough to have closed, and ticks them off on paper.

Enquiry         50  ##################################################
Replied         46  ##############################################
Qualified       28  ############################
Quoted          26  ##########################
Ordered          6  ######
Ordered again    3  ###

A picture like this shows what a table hides. Two steps are steep: enquiry to qualified loses 22, and quoted to ordered loses 20, which is most of what remained. Replying is fine. Quoting nearly everyone who qualifies is fine.

Now divide. Replied is 92 per cent of enquiries, qualified 61 per cent of replied, quoted 93 per cent of qualified, ordered 23 per cent of quoted, ordered again 50 per cent of ordered. The weakest rate is quote to order, and it costs the most buyers in absolute terms.

Define the steps so two people count the same

A funnel is only as good as its definitions. Write one line for each and keep it fixed.

• Enquiry: a named person or company asked about something you sell.
• Replied: you gave a real answer, not "we will revert".
• Qualified: you know the quantity, the date and who decides.
• Quoted: a written offer left your hands.
• Ordered: an advance or a purchase order arrived.
• Ordered again: a second order from the same buyer.

Follow one group of enquiries forward in time. Do not set this month's enquiries beside this month's orders. Orders come from earlier enquiries, so any business with a delay between asking and buying gets a meaningless ratio from that comparison.

Which kind of problem lives at which step

• Enquiry to reply is low: a people and phones problem, not marketing.
• Reply to qualified is low: either you attract the wrong buyers or your questions put the right ones off. Read the dropped enquiries to tell which.
• Qualified to quoted is low: you could not meet the requirement, or capacity or pricing stopped you. Check why.
• Quoted to ordered is low: offer, price, delay or silence after the quote. Tracking a pipeline shows which.
• Ordered to ordered again is low: delivery, after-order service, or a product nobody needs twice.

When two steps look poor, start with the one that loses more buyers in absolute numbers. If the losses are close, take the earlier one, since an improvement at the front feeds every later step. In the Kollam count the quote step lost 20 buyers against 22 for the early step, so the choice was close and the quote was the easier document to fix.

What the Kollam maker found

The maker had suspected the telecaller. The counts cleared the telecaller: replies were quick, and nearly everyone qualified got a quote. The loss was between the quote and the order. Reading the 20 lost quotes, the maker saw that the processors who bought machines asked three makers for quotations and compared them side by side. Rival quotes listed the motor, throughput per hour, a delivery date and a spares list. The maker's ran to a single line and a total.

So the trouble was a document, not a person. The maker rewrote the quote to list the same items buyers compared, added a delivery date, and put a call date in the sheet against every open quote. The telecaller stayed. In the next group of 50 the orders rose from 6 to 8, too few to be sure of, and the rewrite took a week of evenings.

The other steep step, enquiry to qualified, was parked with a note, which is why the earlier-step rule above is a default and not a law. Reading dropped enquiries later, the maker found many were students and traders asking for a price list. That was a matter for the advertising words, a second job.

How the count misleads

• Too few enquiries. With twelve, one order moves a rate a lot. Pool a longer stretch, or treat the rates as clues.
• A mixed group. If tiny orders and large projects share a funnel, split them, since the large ones are where your attention should go.
• Moving definitions. If "qualified" meant one thing in April and another in June, the comparison is empty.
• Enquiries still open. Leave out any that have not had time to close, or mark them open, not lost.
• Sources mixed. A listing site and a dealer referral have different funnels. Separate them once you have enough numbers; measuring a campaign by qualified lead and by order covers it.

Keep the sheet small

A spreadsheet with one row per enquiry and a date column per step is enough. Six counts and one rate per step are plenty for a firm with a few dozen enquiries in a good stretch, and software can wait until you have counted by hand.

Count one group this week

Pick enquiries from a stretch old enough to have closed, give each a row, fill the six columns from your phone, invoices and quote folder, and underline the lowest rate. Where the lost enquiries are the real puzzle, lead leakage analysis is the service that follows them, and the sales hub shows where the count fits. If you would like a second reading of the table, tell us what you need.