Follow one enquiry all the way through
Take a single real enquiry from last month and trace it: which page, which form, which inbox, who saw it, how long until a reply, what was recorded, what happened next. Most businesses cannot complete that trace, and the gap is where the answer lives.
The four usual leaks
- Enquiries arriving somewhere unmonitored — a shared inbox, a form notification, a social message
- First response measured in days, by which time the buyer has spoken to someone else
- Source not recorded, so revenue can never be traced back to activity
- Sales and marketing counting different things and both being right
Speed is the cheapest improvement available
Response time changes outcomes more reliably than most creative decisions. An automatic acknowledgement within a minute, and a real reply within the hour, will usually improve conversion more than the next increment of spend — and it costs nothing recurring.
Attribution does not need to be perfect
It needs to be consistent. One definition of a lead, one place it is recorded, one field for source that survives to the outcome. A simple, honest model everyone accepts is far more useful than a sophisticated one nobody trusts.
If you cannot say what happened to last month’s enquiries, you cannot say whether last month’s marketing worked.
Then judge the campaign
With capture, speed and attribution in place, the numbers finally describe the marketing rather than the plumbing. Some activity will still turn out not to work — but you will be cutting it for the right reason.
A short audit you can run this week
- List every route an enquiry can take into the business
- For each, name the person who sees it and the target response time
- Check the last twenty enquiries against those targets
- Fix the worst route before spending another pound on traffic
