In short
- Every old enquiry cost you money to generate.
- Across our client work, 11% to 21% of them turn into sales once followed up properly.
- Count your list before you spend another penny on new leads.
Your CRM isn't a database. It's a graveyard of revenue you've already paid for.
Almost every name in there cost you something. An ad. A referral. A quote that took an afternoon to price. A site visit on a wet Tuesday. You paid to get each of those people interested, and many of them never heard from you again.
I see it in almost every business I look at. Enquiries that came in on a busy Friday and slipped. Quotes that went out and were never chased. Website forms answered three days late, by which time the customer had moved on.
Why the list keeps growing
It isn't laziness. When the phone is ringing, new work always wins over old work. Chasing a quote from eight months ago feels awkward, so it doesn't happen. Nobody owns it, nobody measures it, and the list gets longer every month.
Meanwhile, the business spends more on ads to find new leads, while the old ones sit there.
What happens when you follow up
Across our client work, 11% to 21% of those old enquiries turn into sales once they're followed up properly. The fresher the list, and the better they remember you, the higher that goes.
All Glazing & Glass had years of quotes sitting untouched. When they were followed up, a share of the leads they'd written off as dead turned into new sales.
"+30% of leads we thought were 'dead' have resulted in new sales. That's brand new revenue without costs."
Andrew Stephens, Sales Manager, All Glazing & Glass Ltd
No new ad spend. Just revenue they'd already paid for.
Do the maths on your own list
Take an example: 500 old enquiries at a £3,000 average job. At 11% to 21%, that's 55 to 105 sales, or £165,000 to £315,000 of work. It's an estimate, not a promise. But it's a lot of money sitting still.
Your numbers will be different. That's the point of counting them. You can't decide whether old enquiries are worth chasing until you know how many you have and what they're worth.
Why this comes before more leads
More traffic won't help if the enquiries you already get are leaking away. Fix the follow-up first, and every pound you later spend on ads works harder, because nothing you pay for gets wasted.
That's the order we work in: recover what you're losing, then get found, then grow.
Put a number on yours
Our Lost Revenue Calculator takes about a minute. Answer five questions and it shows a range for what your old enquiries could be worth. If the number makes you wince, book a Found Revenue Audit/Demo and we'll replace our assumptions with your real figures.
Try this this week
Export every enquiry and quote from the last two years into one list. Count them, and note your average job value. That's the starting point for your number.
Work Out What You're Losing
