Notes for owners · CRM, automation and RevOps
Reading your enquiry data by city before you spend
Before you advertise in a new city, sort last year's enquiries and orders by city and source. It shows where demand already exists, where buyers only browse, and where a hunch is all you have.
The GullySales team · Updated 17 Oct 2026 · 5 min read
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Someone in the office is sure the next push should be Hyderabad, and nobody has checked. Before you spend there, open your own records. Put last year's enquiries and orders into one sheet, give every row a clean city and a source, and count three things per city: enquiries, first orders and repeat orders. A city with orders and repeats already wants what you sell. A city with many enquiries and few orders is telling you about a leak, not about demand. A city that appears nowhere in your data is still a hunch, however many people repeat it.
Gather the rows before you count anything
Enquiries and orders live in different places. Enquiries sit in WhatsApp chats, a marketplace inbox, website form emails, the office phone's call log and a salesman's diary. Orders sit in the accounting software, where the sales register already carries the billing and delivery address of every invoice.
Export what you can. Type in what you cannot, for one year only. It is a dull afternoon, and nothing below works without it.
One decision before you start: bill-to or ship-to? A buyer whose head office in Mumbai orders for a plant in Silvassa is two cities. Use ship-to when you are asking where demand is, because that is where the goods go and where service will be needed. Keep bill-to in its own column, because that is where the decision gets made.
The sheet: one row per enquiry
Keep it to these columns. Every extra column adds blanks.
Date | Buyer | City as written | City (clean) | State | Source | Product | Quoted? | First order? | Order value | Second order?
Every order should trace back to an enquiry row. An order with no enquiry behind it, such as a walk-in or a referral phoned straight to the owner, gets a row of its own, with the source written down as it happened.
Clean the city column, or the count lies
The same city arrives five ways: Bangalore, Bengaluru, Blr, Peenya and a bare pin code. Gurgaon and Gurugram. Pimpri-Chinchwad, Chakan and Pune, which a supplier of industrial goods should probably treat as one market. Hosur sits in Tamil Nadu but trades with Bengaluru's industrial belt every day.
Decide your markets first, then map every spelling to one of them. Write the mapping down so the next person cleans it the same way. Skip this and the biggest city gets split into four small ones, and a smaller city overtakes it on paper.
What each pattern means
Once each city has its three counts and its main sources, it falls into one of four patterns.
| What the city shows | What it means | What to do before spending |
|---|---|---|
| Orders and repeat orders, few enquiries | Demand exists and reaches you by referral | Spend here first, modestly, and look after the referrers |
| Many enquiries, few orders | Price shoppers, or a leak you can fix | Read ten lost enquiries and find the reason |
| First orders, no repeats | The sale worked; delivery or service did not | Fix delivery before any advertising |
| A few scattered enquiries | Not enough to read either way | Do not spend on the strength of this |
Read the source column against the city. A city with many marketplace enquiries and no orders is a price-comparison crowd, and more ads there buy more of the same. A city where every order came through one contractor, consultant or existing customer is a relationship market. An advertisement may add little there, and an afternoon with that person may add a lot. Marketing attribution is the harder version of this question, for when a buyer saw several things before calling.
For example: PVC pipes from Vijayawada
A Vijayawada maker of PVC pipes and fittings, selling to dealers, plumbers and farmers, wants to advertise in Hyderabad because a rival has opened a depot there. This is an invented case, and the figures are illustrative.
The first read counts enquiries only, and Hyderabad wins easily: about sixty in the year, against fifteen from Rajahmundry and eleven from Nellore. Counting enquiries alone is what misleads. Adding orders turns it round. Hyderabad produced two orders and no repeat. Rajahmundry produced seven, five of them repeats, nearly all from buyers sent by one plumbing contractor. Nellore produced five.
Ten lost Hyderabad enquiries, read one by one, give the reason. Plumbers wanted pipes the same day from a local godown, and freight on bulky lengths from Vijayawada added about 6 percent and wiped out the price gap. The marketplace was bringing price comparisons, not buyers.
So the owner spends first in Rajahmundry and Nellore, starting with an afternoon with that contractor. Hyderabad waits until there is a stockist there. The Hyderabad answer is not "never". It is "not until the reason for losing is fixed". A season later Rajahmundry has added three orders, and Nellore, which had no contractor to lean on, has added none.
What the data cannot tell you
A year of enquiries from a small business is thin. Three orders from a city is an anecdote, and one large buyer can make a city look like a market. Seasons distort it too: an air cooler dealer's city counts say nothing outside the summer.
And the sheet only shows where you were found. A city with no enquiries may simply never have heard of you. So the rule is narrower than it looks: the data tells you where to spend first, not where never to go. If you recorded no source last year, start now and run the count after a full season; our note on tracking lead source in your CRM sets up that field.
Count ten cities first
Build the sheet for one year and count your top ten cities, with enquiries, first orders and repeats side by side. Do that before anyone books an ad. If you then want the counts kept current, management dashboards and reporting is the service for it, and our state and city pages describe how buyers choose in each place. When your ten cities are counted, tell us what you need.
