Usually one of five things, and it is rarely the leads.
When enquiry volume holds and orders fall, the cause is almost always between the enquiry and the quotation, not before it. Here is how to find which part, using records you already have.
The short answer
Check these in order, because they cost nothing to check.
How fast you answer
Take last month’s enquiries and measure the gap between arrival and first human contact. If the median is hours rather than minutes, this is your answer and nothing else needs fixing first.
Whether they were ever buyers
Count how many were the wrong size, wrong city or wrong problem. If it is most of them, the problem is upstream in what the campaign promised, not in the selling.
How many times you follow up
Most SMB pipelines stop after one attempt and a note saying “follow up”. Count the attempts per lost deal. One is not a follow-up process.
What happens at the handover
Marketing counts leads, sales counts orders, and the step between belongs to nobody. Leads die in that gap and both sides report success.
Whether the offer answers them
If buyers go quiet after the quotation, the quotation is the problem — usually because it prices what you do rather than what they were worried about.
The longer answer
The reason it is hard to see from inside.
Every one of these leaves the same trace — an enquiry that went quiet — so from the owner’s desk they look identical, and the instinct is to buy more leads. More leads through the same gap produce the same conversion rate at a higher cost, which is why the second year of advertising often feels worse than the first.
The cheapest diagnostic is thirty of your own lost enquiries, read end to end, in order. It usually takes an afternoon and settles the argument.
Questions
How many leads do I need before this is worth measuring?
Thirty closed-or-lost enquiries is enough to see a pattern. Fewer than that and you are reading noise.
Our salespeople say the leads are bad. Are they?
Sometimes, and the way to settle it is to score twenty of them against a written definition of a good lead before anyone calls. Without that definition the argument cannot be resolved, because both sides are right about different leads.
Is this a marketing problem or a sales problem?
That framing is usually why it persists. The gap sits between the two, and whichever team owns it will optimise their own number rather than the order. Somebody has to own the whole path.
Talk to us
Tell us what you are trying to grow.
A short note is enough. We will come back with a straight answer about whether we can help, usually within one working day.
- No obligation and no sales script
- A reply from someone who does the work
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