Spending your marketing budget well is only half the race.
Most marketing firms measure from the first impression to the moment a lead lands, and stop there. But lead quality only proves itself in what happens next. Whether that lead becomes a sale. Measuring that stretch is harder, and riskier, so very few agencies take it on. yet your business still pays for what nobody is watching.
The seven gaps
YOU ARE READING 05 OF 07
Every lead has a name against it and a clock on it
Pick any enquiry from last month. You can see when it came in, who picked it up, how long that took, what was quoted, and whether it ever turned into a sale or not.
The meetings where sales and marketing disagree are over, because both of them are reading the same figures.
And when the leads do get worse, you find out in the week it happens — not in the quarter when the revenue is visibly missing and nobody can tell you which month it started.
Where the measuring stops
A lead is only a good lead if it turns into a sale
Marketing counts the enquiry and calls it lead quality. Whether that enquiry was ever worth having gets decided further down the line, and almost nobody reports that far, because that is where the risk sits.
- Impression
- Click
- Enquiry
- First call
- Quote
- Sale
Every agency will show you they measured up until the enquiry stage. However, what is quality if it is not a sale? A sale can only be measured in the stages after the enquiry stage
Where the measuring fails
- Nobody called backThe enquiry arrived to only be called 2 weeks later.
- Called once, then droppedOne attempt, no answer, and the lead quietly moves to the bottom of a list nobody works on.
- Handed over with no contextSales gets a name and a number, not what the person searched for or what they were promised.
- Never counted at allIt does not show up as a lost sale, because it never became one. It shows up as a bad month.
What the gap costs
The most expensive leads are the ones you already paid for
Every enquiry in that gap was bought. The advert was paid for, the click was paid for, the page did its job, and the prospect put their hand up. The money is already spent by the time the lead is generated.
Potential clients are slipping through the cracks because the measuring of that lead stops the moment it arrives. If your leads are high quality but revenue isn’t growing, then the obvious question is, “Is our marketing truly generating high-quality leads?”. Without measuring and managing what happens after the lead landed, you are simply losing deals you have already paid to win.
A conversation we have often
Beyond the standards of marketing
The ads were not the problem. Nobody was measuring what happened after the lead arrived.
Leon du Preez
Role
Founder & Chief Executive Officer
- Revenue Engineer
What I do
I innovate and pioneer unique blueprints that changes and places companies in a position to reach beyond their limits.
Mission in Life
See businesses Grow, Expand, and Increase Revenue by spending strategically and making calculated moves that set their business on another level.
Experience
- 12 Years Helping Corporates Grow
Before you blame the leads
Tell us what happens to a lead once it reaches your CRM.
Who picks it up, how long does the lead wait before first contact, and what gets written down to send further down the process. That is all we need to start. We go and find the step where the story goes vague, and we tell you what it is costing you.
Leon du Preez
Role
Founder & Chief Executive Officer
- Revenue Engineer
What I do
I innovate and pioneer unique blueprints that changes and places companies in a position to reach beyond their limits.
Mission in Life
See businesses Grow, Expand, and Increase Revenue by spending strategically and making calculated moves that set their business on another level.
Experience
- 12 Years Helping Corporates Grow
Closing it
The same journey, measured all the way to the invoice
Nothing about the journey changes. What changes is how far down the lead is measured.
- Impression
- Click
- Enquiry
- First call
- Quote
- Sale
Same journey, same two teams. The difference is that the measuring does not stop at the enquiry, and both sides can see the clock.
Where the measuring holds
- Measure the stretchTime to first contact, attempts made, and what happened. If nobody measures it, nobody owns it.
- Hand over the contextWhat information is carried over to the next stage of the process.
- Set the follow-up ruleHow fast, how many times, and what happens after. Written down, not remembered.
- Report upon the figuresIt is important that marketing know what the figures show about the lead quality so they can spend the next month’s makreting budget accordingly.
The obvious objection
Isn’t what happens after the lead our sales team’s job?
Working the leads is their job, and it stays their job. We are not asking for it, and it is not what we are good at.
Measuring whether the process around those leads is losing money is usually nobody’s job. That is the gap. We measure it, we
put the same figures in front of both teams, and the conversation stops being about who is right.
There is a plainer reason to do it as well. You cannot know your lead quality if nothing measures what the leads became.
Quality is not what arrives. It is what closes.
Proof
The right leads, contacted a month late.
We were asked to raise the lead quality. We raised it, and the results got worse.
A property rental business could not fill its units, and the empty months were expensive. The brief was the usual one, “Raise the lead quality.” So we did and the harder we pushed the quality up, the fewer rentals they signed.
So we followed the leads past the enquiry stage, all the way to a signed rental. The answer was obvious the moment anybody looked. Leads were sitting three to four weeks before the first call. Not the wrong leads. The right leads, contacted a month late.
We had spent months improving the quality. The problem was never the quality. It was how long those leads collected ‘digital dust’ in their CRM before anyone made first contact.
A second client had the same shape of problem in a different place. Their team came back to a weekend of leads every Monday and did not get through them until midweek. Lowering the ad budget cleared the backlog, the leads got worked while they were still warm, and the closing rate moved from 5–8% to 15–23%, even reaching as high as 35% on certain days.
The payoff
What changes on your side
Four things you would notice in the first month, none of which needs anybody to change what they do all day.
- 1Nobody can say when a lead was first called→Every lead carries the time it was worked
- 2Sales and marketing bring different figures to the same meeting→Both of them read the same record
- 3Enquiries go quiet and nobody notices→The quote that was never chased has a name against it
- 4You find out a month was lost once the month is over→You find out on the day it starts happening
Get your blueprint today
Ready to see how your leads actually convert?
Tell us what happens once a lead reaches you. Who picks it up, how fast, and what gets written down.
We will show you where the revenue is leaking.
Leon du Preez
Role
Founder & Chief Executive Officer
- Revenue Engineer
What I do
I innovate and pioneer unique blueprints that changes and places companies in a position to reach beyond their limits.
Mission in Life
See businesses Grow, Expand, and Increase Revenue by spending strategically and making calculated moves that set their business on another level.
Experience
- 12 Years Helping Corporates Grow
See all Revenue Engineering posts →
Questions About Measuring to the Sale
It means measuring the whole path: the ad someone saw, the click, the form they filled in, and then everything after it. Who called them, when, how many times, what was quoted, and whether money ever changed hands. Most reporting stops at the form. This carries on to the receipt.
Working the leads is their job, and it should stay their job. Measuring whether the process around those leads is losing money is usually nobody’s job, and that is the gap this sits in. We measure it and put the same numbers in front of both teams, so the conversation stops being about opinion.
No. Speed is the most common leak and the easiest to prove, which is why it appears in the case study. The same measurement also surfaces leads nobody owns, follow-up that stops after one attempt, a message that changes between the ad and the sales call, and quotes that go out and are never chased.
Usually, or to whatever stands in for one. A spreadsheet, a booking system, a call log. The point is to connect a lead record to an outcome. If nothing is being recorded today, putting that recording in place is step one, and it tends to pay for itself before anything else does.
Then we start with what does exist. Plenty of businesses run on a shared inbox and a WhatsApp group. It is messier, but it is still measurable, and it often surfaces the biggest leak fastest, precisely because nobody has ever looked.
Yes, and it matters more. A long cycle gives a lead a dozen quiet places to be lost, and by the time the revenue is visibly missing, the cause is months in the past. Measuring the stages as they happen beats reconstructing them afterwards from memory.
Yes. Offline outcomes get connected back to the original campaign through call tracking and CRM records. It is often how a business discovers that the channel its report calls “expensive” is the one actually closing the deals.
The first read on where leads are being lost usually takes weeks rather than months, because the leaks are rarely subtle once someone is looking for them. How long the fix takes depends on what it is: routing and follow-up rules move quickly, a broken handover between two teams takes longer.
Then you know that with evidence instead of assumption, which is worth having on its own. Measuring to the sale is how you tell a lead-quality problem apart from a process problem — the two get confused constantly, and they need opposite fixes.
The seven gaps
YOU ARE READING 05 OF 07