Do you know which step of your sales process is losing people?

Ask an owner why he is not closing more, and the answer comes quickly. The market is tight, or the competitor is cheaper, or customers only care about rate.

It might be true. The honest position is that almost nobody has the numbers to know.

The four counts

Take last month and count four things.

• Enquiries received
• Of those, how many got a real reply
• Of those, how many got a quotation
• Of those, how many ordered

Now look at the drops. Fifty to forty is one kind of business. Fifty to twelve to nine to seven is a completely different one, and the thing to fix is obvious the moment you see it.

If most of your loss is between enquiry and reply, price has nothing to do with it. You are losing people before anybody has discussed money.

If most of it is between quotation and order, then price might genuinely be the issue, or the follow-up after the quotation is not happening, which is far more common than owners expect.

Why this changes behaviour

Because it ends the argument. A sales meeting about whether we are too expensive goes nowhere. A sales meeting that starts with thirty eight of our fifty enquiries never got a same day reply goes somewhere immediately.

And it usually turns out that the biggest improvement available to a business is not a better offer. It is answering faster and following up twice instead of once.

Count your four numbers for last month. Which gap is the biggest, and is it the one you assumed?

Getting those four numbers out of a business for the first time is work we do regularly, and the answer surprises most owners. Send us last month and we will count it with you.