Had a really interesting Discovery Call with a prospective client recently. Small team, plenty of pressure on them to keep bringing in new business and like a lot of the conversations I'm having at the moment, it came back round to leads.
They were convinced the answer to more revenue was better quality leads. So we went through our standard Discovery Call process: understanding their current sales process, finding out where it falls over and getting a read on the numbers underneath it.
They pushed back a little, said it still came down to the leads needing to be better.
Fair enough, I said. Let's just pause on that for a second. Out of everyone you quote, how many do you actually close?
Hard to say exactly, they said. It's relationship driven. If I get in front of someone and we click, I can usually close them. Probably around eighty percent.
Is that a number you've measured, I asked, or a feeling?
More of a feeling, if I'm being straight about it.
This is close to universal in my experience. Most people I talk to have a rough sense of their close rate and it is almost always higher than what the data shows once someone actually goes and counts. That gap, between the eighty percent someone believes and whatever the real number turns out to be, is usually the most useful thing we can find. It's revenue already sitting inside the business and it doesn't need another dollar spent on lead generation to get at it.
There's also the lead quality question, which is properly hard to answer for anyone up front. You don't really know if a lead is good until you're in the conversation with them, asking the right qualifying questions. That's most of the value in having a proper process. It tells you fast whether you're dealing with someone worth your time.
We landed on something simple. No CRM in place, which makes this harder to track for a lot of small teams. So the homework was: go and count. How many quotes went out, and how many actually closed, over the next few weeks.
Even that took a bit of convincing. Sometimes they seem keen and don't close, sometimes they don't seem it and do, was the response. True, and not really the point. The exercise isn't about predicting outcomes in advance, it's about knowing what actually happened once the dust settles.
We're meeting back up once the numbers are in. A few weeks probably isn't quite long enough to be fully reliable, and I'll say that plainly when we sit down with it, but it'll be enough for a first real look. If the number comes back close to eighty percent, that's a well run sales process and worth knowing. If it comes back lower, that's not a bad outcome either. That's just the opportunity, sitting there, waiting to be worked on before a single new lead gets added to the pile.