Where enquiries get lost: five leaks to check before you pay for a diagnostic

Enquiries get lost in five places: they wait too long for a reply, they are never written down, nobody chases them, the quote is too vague to compare, and nobody records why a buyer said no. You can check each one yourself, from your phone and whatever sheet you keep. Do that before you pay anyone to look. If you later pay for a diagnostic, it will read these same places across more records, and you will know what to ask it.

This post is the self-check. The paid diagnostic is the larger version, across more records. You do not need it to start.

Leak one: the reply that came too late

An enquiry that lands at 7 pm on a Saturday is a different animal from one at 11 am on a Tuesday. Some buyers send the same message to three suppliers and talk to whoever answers first.

The check: open your phone's call log and WhatsApp for the last twenty enquiries. Beside each, write when it arrived and when someone first replied with something useful. "Will call you back" does not count as a reply.

The rule: if more than a third of them waited past the end of the working day, you have this leak. The fix is a named person for each time slot, not a faster phone.

Leak two: no record, so no memory

Enquiries that live in one salesperson's phone leave when that person does, or when they forget. You find out only when a buyer says "I spoke to someone last month."

The check: ask for every enquiry from the last four weeks, from every source and every person. Count how many you can list with a name, a number, what they asked for and the date. If the list takes more than an hour to build, the record does not exist yet.

Leak three: nobody chased it

Some buyers go with the supplier still calling after the first quote, not the one who sent the lowest figure. A quote with no next date written beside it is, in practice, a quote nobody will chase.

The check: take the quotes you sent and mark the ones with a follow-up date written down before the call ended. Then see how many were chased once, twice, or never. Our post on why enquiries go quiet after the first conversation lists the usual reasons; this check tells you which one is yours.

Leak four: the quote nobody could compare

A buyer holding three quotes compares what is written. If yours says only "all inclusive, 4.5 lakh" (a made-up figure) and the others list items, freight and validity, yours looks like the odd one out, not the simple one.

The check: put your last five quotes next to each other. Could a stranger tell what is included, what is excluded, how long the price holds and what happens next? Where the answer is no, that is where the buyer's doubt was born.

Leak five: no reason logged for a lost order

This one is invisible, because it is a missing column. If you do not write down why a deal died, you cannot tell price from timing from a competitor from silence. Every lost deal then gets the same explanation: "too expensive."

The check: look at your last ten lost enquiries. For each, can you write one honest line on why? If the answer comes from memory and not from a note made at the time, treat it as a guess.

For example: a CCTV installer in Hubballi

Take an invented installer in Hubballi who sells camera systems to shops and small offices. Around forty enquiries arrive in a busy stretch, mostly by phone and from IndiaMART. The owner believes price is the problem.

The owner runs the five checks on a Sunday. Reply time: the IndiaMART leads came in during site visits and waited until evening, sometimes the next day. Record: two engineers each kept their own list. Chasing: twelve quotes had gone out, six were never followed up. Comparison: the quote was a single line per site. Lost reasons: none noted.

So three habits change. One person, the office assistant, now answers every new lead with a first message within the working day and logs it in one shared sheet. Every quote gets an itemised page and a date to call. A "why lost" column is filled in the same day. Price-led buyers are still lost. Of the six forgotten quotes, four turn into conversations and one into an order; the other two have already bought elsewhere.

When these checks are not enough

Do the self-check if one or two people answer enquiries and you can list a year's enquiries in an afternoon. Skip it, and ask for outside analysis, when records sit in several systems, when you suspect one person is the leak and cannot say so, or when the numbers are large enough that a gut feel will not do. Also skip it if you have nothing written anywhere. Start with the record first.

A tally sheet for the five checks

Draw this once on a page and tick it as you go.

The thresholds are rules of thumb of ours, not industry standards. Move them to suit your trade, and keep them fixed once you start counting.

Counting the damage

Add a last column to your twenty-enquiry list: an honest guess at the order value if it had closed. You will not trust the number, and you should not. It still shows which leak sits above the biggest orders, and that is the one to fix first.

Run the first check tonight

Open the call log and WhatsApp and write down, for the last twenty enquiries, when each arrived and when someone first replied. That single column tells you whether leak one is yours. A lead leakage analysis is the service nearest to the full set of checks, and the FAQ has other questions owners ask us. If you want a second pair of eyes after your own pass, tell us what you need.