Stop Buying Leads, Start Closing the Ones You Have

Sales Strategy

Stop Buying Leads, Start Closing the Ones You Have

Two numbers decide where your next pound should go, and most owners have never written them down next to each other.

The first is what it costs you to get one enquiry. The second is what share of enquiries become clients.

Get both on the same page and the spending decision usually answers itself -- often in the opposite direction to the one you were about to take.

The arithmetic nobody does

Say a hundred enquiries reach you and ten become clients.

You have two routes to twenty clients. Get two hundred enquiries at the same close rate, or get the same hundred and close twenty percent instead of ten.

Identical revenue. Wildly different cost.

The first route means doubling the spend, and it means the second hundred are typically worse than the first -- you have already harvested the cheapest, most intent-heavy sources. The second route costs no media spend at all. It costs attention to what happens after an enquiry arrives.

Put a realistic cost per enquiry against route one and the comparison stops being close. For most service businesses, moving the close rate a few points is worth more than a substantial increase in advertising, and it does not have to be repurchased next month.

That is the argument. The rest of this is how to find out which points are available.

Where the leak actually is

"Improve the close rate" is not a plan, so make it specific.

Take the last thirty enquiries that did not become clients. For each one, mark the last thing that happened -- the genuine last event, not the intention.

You will get a distribution across roughly five outcomes:

Never replied to. It arrived and nothing went out.
Replied to, then nothing. One response, no second contact, no answer.
Went quiet mid-conversation. Real exchange, then silence, and nobody followed up.
Quoted, no follow-up. A price went out and was never chased.
Genuine no. They chose someone else, or the job was not real.

Only the last group is a lost sale in any honest sense. Everything above it is a sale that was never completed.

Count the proportion in that final group. If it is small -- and it usually is -- then buying more enquiries means feeding more people into the same four holes.

The dead spend hiding in this

There is a second cost most owners miss, and it is sharper than the opportunity cost.

You already paid for every enquiry in the first four groups. That money left the account. If someone enquired through an ad and nobody followed up, you did not save the cost of that lead by ignoring it -- you spent it and threw away what it bought.

Buying more leads while those four groups stay full is paying twice for the same problem: once for the new enquiries, and once again for the ones you are still not handling.

Why the dashboard says everything is fine

If this were visible, you would have fixed it. Mostly it is not.

Your marketing report stops too early. It reports cost per enquiry, volume, maybe cost per booked call -- and then goes quiet. A campaign delivering plenty of enquiries that nobody works looks, in that report, like a campaign that performed.

So the conclusion drawn at the end of a weak month is we need more leads, because more leads is the only lever the report describes. The lever that would actually work is invisible to it.

What moves the rate

Nothing exotic. Look back at the five outcomes and each one has an obvious remedy.

The never-replied group needs an immediate response on every channel, including the phone. The replied-then-nothing group needs a second and third contact to exist at all. The went-quiet group needs someone owning the record with a date against it. The quoted-no-follow-up group needs a scheduled chase -- usually the single highest-return fix on the list, because those people asked for a price, which is about as strong a signal as you get.

None of that is a new tactic. It is the same enquiries, carried further.

The mechanics are the whole path from first reply to an owned next step, and the reason it lapses is never that people do not know it matters. It lapses because it is repeat work with no owner, and a busy fortnight quietly eats it. Which is precisely the work Bizi runs so it does not depend on how the week went.

Do the sort

Thirty records, twenty minutes.

Pull the last thirty enquiries that did not convert. Mark each with the genuine last event. Count how many sit in each of the five groups.

Then work out what your close rate would be if only one of those groups had been handled -- usually the quoted-no-follow-up group, since those people were furthest along.

Compare that number to what the same increase would cost you in advertising.

You may still decide to buy more leads. But you will be deciding with both numbers in front of you, which is more than most businesses do.