Stop buying leads you already lost.

A commercial sign business has room for two more installations a month. Its agency comes back with a plan to generate more enquiries. Sometimes that’s exactly the right call.

Before anyone signs it, ask one question. What happened to the enquiries you’ve already paid for?

If too few of the right businesses know you exist, put money behind reaching them. But if qualified buyers are waiting a fortnight for a site measure, you’re paying to introduce more people to the wait.

Most businesses skip this check, and I know why. Buying leads feels like action. Reading old emails feels like admin. The admin is usually where the money is.

Write the outcome down first

Start with what the business actually needs, in plain language. “Two more profitable installations a month, delivered by the existing crew” is useful. You can check capacity, estimate the contribution and work back to how many suitable opportunities you need.

“We need more growth” is not. It lets the agency, the estimator and the owner solve three different problems and all feel productive.

Find the leak before you buy more water

Take two groups of enquiries old enough to have reached a decision. Same length of time, same definition of a suitable job. This one’s illustrative.

Enquiries went up. Suitable enquiries went up. Bookings fell.

Half of everyone who got a written quote booked, in both groups, so the quote isn’t the weak point. The leak sits between a suitable enquiry and a quote. In the later group, 16 of the 28 suitable prospects never got one.

More marketing would have fed that leak. The agency would have delivered more enquiries, the report would have looked great and bookings would have stayed flat.

The numbers don’t prove the estimator is slow. Some prospects withdrew. The mix of jobs might have shifted. A builder might have asked three companies to price a project that wasn’t approved yet. The numbers tell you which files to open. That’s all they need to do.

Fact, guess or unknown

Open the files with the person who handled them. Sort every explanation into three piles.

“Customer told us they renewed their lease” is a fact. “Probably too expensive” is a guess. “Unknown” is a completely respectable entry, and far more useful than a confident guess.

Read the wins as closely as the losses. They show you what good already looks like in your own business.

Answer the Monday question

Open those files and you’ll often find a buyer trying to work out whether they can safely say yes.

Take an illustrative office move. Eighteen people, two floors, one service lift, and staff need to sit down and work on Monday. The removalist’s quote is impressively specific about cartons, crew hours and GST. Somewhere between the phone call and the estimator, the deadline became a “preferred moving date”.

The estimator priced the transport job correctly. Nobody answered the only question the office manager cared about: who gets the desks, monitors and labelled boxes to the right places in time for IT to reconnect everything on Monday morning?

A few days later, a polite email asks whether the price was acceptable. Silence. The enquiry gets marked cold, and the business decides it needs more leads.

The fix costs nothing. Put the buyer’s deadline at the top of the quote. Say what the client supplies, who places each desk and when the crew hands the floor to IT. Say what’s out of scope. If a time can’t be guaranteed, say so while the customer still has choices.

Sometimes more marketing is the answer

Change the facts and the answer changes. If quotes go out promptly, a healthy share of suitable jobs convert and delivery is profitable, but few of the builders you want have heard of you, back the agency. Then ask which builders, remembered for what, and what counts as a promising response.

Sometimes the problem sits deeper than either. Validated Property Group came to Hum with a brief to market itself more effectively. Turning up the volume at that point would have missed the bigger opportunity. From the outside, the business looked like a broad collection of property services. The work found the connected advisory model inside it and gave it a position, “A strategic property consultancy for the mid-market”, and a brand idea, “Clarity behind decisions”. Then the marketing had something worth amplifying.

That’s the order. Get it clear inside, then get loud outside. Volume amplifies whatever’s there, including the confusion.

What to do on Monday

1. Write the outcome you need in one sentence, including the constraint: capacity, margin or timing.

2. Pull two groups of enquiries old enough to have reached a decision. Count received, suitable, quoted and won.

3. Find the stage with the biggest drop. Open those files with whoever handled them and sort each reason into fact, guess or unknown.

4. Rewrite your quote template so the buyer’s deadline and biggest worry sit at the top.

5. Before the next campaign, finish this sentence: “We think this is the right investment because the evidence shows ___, and we’ll know we were wrong if ___.”

If the second blank is hard to fill, you’re not ready to spend.

Sources & notes

• Validated Property Group case study, Hum

• The sign business, the enquiry table and the office move are illustrative. A small file review shows where to look. It doesn’t measure the whole market.

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