A customer asks for a quote on a Tuesday evening. On Wednesday, the person who usually replies is out on a site visit. By Thursday, the enquiry is buried under twenty others. On Friday, the customer buys elsewhere, and nobody in the company ever knew they existed.
Nobody made a mistake. An enquiry came in through a channel that nobody was watching at that moment.
The enquiry that goes cold
Enquiries arrive by email, by phone, through the website form and, more and more, on WhatsApp. Each channel has its own owner, or no owner at all. There is no single place that shows how many enquiries came in this week, how many got a reply and how many are still waiting.
People on the inside feel they reply to everything. And they do: to everything they see.
The numbers
In a company with 60 enquiries a month, it only takes 35% going unanswered for the first 48 hours for the number to get serious. With a typical conversion rate of 20% and an average value of €1,500, that is €75,600 a year in business at risk.
- 60requests coming in per month
- 12months
- 35%unanswered in the first 48 h
- 20%usual conversion
- €1,500average value
We say ‘at risk’ and not ‘lost’ on purpose. Some of those customers call back. The calculation only assumes that an enquiry left unanswered for 48 hours converts well below average, and that gap never shows up in any report.
Why nobody notices
Business that never came in leaves no trace. No invoice, no complaint, no row in a spreadsheet. The pipeline lives in the heads of two or three people, and each of them only sees their own part.
Business that never came in leaves no trace. So it never makes it into anyone's numbers.
Reports show what was sold. They don't show what could have been sold if someone had replied in time.
How to measure it
Before any system, you measure. For two weeks, every enquiry that comes in is logged in one place, with three pieces of information: which channel it came through, when it arrived and when it got its first reply. That is all you need for the first number.
Three questions to ask this week
- 1How many enquiries came in last month, across all channels?
- 2How many got a reply within the first 48 hours?
- 3Who is responsible for each of them?
If any of the answers is ‘we don't know’, the calculator's number is probably conservative.
What changes
At Myo Clinic, the referral programme now records every patient referral from the first contact. Today that means +54 referred leads a week across the network of six clinics.
In most cases there is no need to change tools. The work is bringing the channels that already exist into one place, giving every enquiry an owner and a deadline, and setting a rhythm that holds without relying on anyone's memory.
Written by
David Esposito · Business Development
First point of contact. Asks the two questions that matter.
