We need higher conversion rates. Imagine this: at the weekly review, the head of sales divides the number of payments by the number of new enquiries for the same week. There are more enquiries, but the same number of payments. The percentage has fallen. The owner is about to stop using the source that brought extra work instead of money.
I would first ask them to open any payment from that calculation. When did the buyer first enquire? If it was before the start of the week, they were included in the number of sales but not in the number of enquiries those sales were compared with. Meanwhile, yesterday’s enquiry has already made the figure worse, although the customer is still agreeing what the order will include.
This report brings together different buyers. They are already about to use it to make a single decision.
The customer who paid arrived before those being assessed now
The customer who paid today started the conversation earlier: sent requirements, received a quote, agreed terms. The new customer has only just provided the details needed for a quote. The sales team has to take them through the remaining steps. It is impossible to do this retrospectively so that they fit into the reporting week.
A report covering a calendar period is needed in its own right. The owner needs to see how many enquiries came in, how many orders were paid for and whether there will be enough money to cover expenses. The mistake happens when the ratio of these two numbers is called the proportion of enquiries that led to payment. To reach that conclusion, you need to trace the path of the same enquiries.
There is an unpleasant flip side to this mistake. If new enquiries decrease while older deals continue to be paid for, the same percentage will rise. The report will show an improvement at exactly the moment when the sales team starts losing future work.
So first, it is worth restoring the connection: which enquiry led to each payment. If this cannot be shown, a new conversion chart will not fix anything yet. The order needs to be linked to the original enquiry, keeping the date of first contact. The question of the source’s quality remains open.
Give different enquiries the same amount of time
To check a source, the head of sales chooses comparable enquiries: one product, one type of buyer, a first purchase. A repeat order from a regular customer is better reviewed separately: it may follow a path that a new buyer still has ahead of them.
Next, they take enquiries that came in during one period and look at what happened to those specific enquiries. The whole original list stays in the calculation: those who paid, those who declined, those who were not contacted and those who are still choosing. An enquiry closed because the customer declined cannot be removed from the list just because the salesperson is no longer working on it.
But even this is not enough. The older group has had more time. If you compare its results today with yesterday’s enquiries, the mistake remains, just in a different form.
Comparisons must be made after the same amount of time has passed since the first enquiry. If we look at the new group a week after each enquiry arrived, we reconstruct the state of the previous group at the same point. Not where the old deals stand today, but what had happened to them by then.
Dates of events are needed for this. The current status of a record will not show when the customer provided their requirements, received a proposal or paid. The head of sales checks the record’s history, correspondence and linked payments. If the earlier state cannot be reconstructed, they state the gap plainly and start recording events for new enquiries. A confident comparison based on incomplete data here would be fiction.
Such a check may lead to different conclusions. New enquiries may be moving at the same pace as the earlier ones: the early overall percentage did not show this. Or they may stop more often before a quote or after a proposal. Then there is a specific point to examine, rather than a reason to declare the whole source bad.
A long deal does not excuse missing a promised deadline
At this point, the head of sales may object: since the customer takes a long time to buy, there is nothing to assess yet. I suggest we wait.
Sometimes you really do have to wait for the final proportion of payments. There is no reason to wait for a promised quote that the salesperson has already failed to deliver on time.
In the same hypothetical group, one buyer has agreed a date to discuss the terms, and that date has not arrived yet. A salesperson was supposed to send another buyer a quote but did not. A third has explicitly declined because the company cannot meet a required condition. None has paid. The head of sales has different work to do in each case.
- The agreed date is still ahead — record the reason for waiting and return on the appointed day. Tomorrow’s sales meeting report does not make the customer overdue.
- The sales team has already broken a promise — get the promise fulfilled now, find out the cause of the delay and check the next quote of this kind. Referring to a long sales cycle does not answer the question here.
- There is a confirmed refusal — record the specific condition that stopped progress and check whether it recurs in similar enquiries. Another month of waiting will not change this refusal.
This is how the head of sales separates the buyer’s decision time from delays caused by their own team. There is no need to wait for the final conversion rate to do this. What is needed is an agreement, its date and a record of the completed action.
Cutting enquiries is a quick way to improve an incorrect figure
Let us return to the decision to stop using the source. If the flow of incoming enquiries is reduced while payments for old orders continue for now, the ratio of payments to new enquiries will rise. The owner will get confirmation that they were right from the same calculation that pushed them into the mistake.
But the salespeople have already lost their new work. Once the old deals run out, this will show up in payments too.
This does not mean that every source should continue to be funded. The enquiries may really be unsuitable, the sales team may be unable to handle them, and the business may not have the money to keep testing. But the decision in each case rests on a fact specific to that case.
If a confirmed reason for refusal recurs in comparable enquiries, the head of sales brings specific requests and constraints to marketing. If the new workload has caused promised deadlines to be missed, they first identify what work the team can complete in time and where help is needed. If the budget allowed for the test is running out, the owner may stop the test even without a full answer about the quality of the source.
That last decision is normal. The company does not have to buy complete certainty at any cost. But the record of the result must state: the test was stopped for financial reasons, and future outcomes are still unknown. Otherwise, the next head of sales will be handed an unconfirmed conclusion that this source does not work.
Bring the same list to the next review
The first step can be taken at the next review with the head of sales: take a source they want to cut back because of its conversion rate and ask them to show exactly which enquiries are behind the number of payments. If the arrival periods differ, a decision based on a single percentage is postponed until they have checked what is included in the calculation.
Before the next weekly review, the head of sales collects the enquiry date, customer actions, promised steps from the sales team, payments and refusals for the chosen group. They state in advance what they intend to find out during this time. For example, whether the salesperson finds out what the customer needs and sends the quote by the promised date. A purchase may take more time; whether the sales team has kept its promise is already visible.
The same list is brought to the next meeting with new events added. Enquiries that arrived later are kept separate. For each earlier enquiry, it is clear what has changed over the week, and for any delay found, what action the head of sales assigned and whether it was carried out. This makes it harder to quietly replace an inconvenient group with a more successful one and call the replacement an improvement.
To compare with the past, the head of sales reconstructs the same events at the same point in the life of the earlier enquiries. If there is no history or there are too few enquiries, they do not declare the source better or worse. They show individual observations and say which fact is still missing.
The date for the next decision on the source is set with the actual path to purchase and the available money in mind. It is based on the history of similar enquiries, including refusals and unfinished deals, rather than only quick, successful sales. On the set date, the whole original list is reviewed: how many led to payment, how many declined, what remains open and on what confirmed grounds. This date can be changed with an explanation of which event they are still waiting for and how much it costs to wait longer.
The owner remains responsible for deciding the budget and the acceptable length of the test. The head of sales remains responsible for work on the deals within that period. A request for patience must be accompanied by events in those same enquiries, rather than a fresh date in a presentation.
At RENTROP, “turnkey sales management” includes exactly this kind of daily work: the head of sales checks the path of enquiries, brings salespeople back to the actions they promised and passes confirmed reasons for losses to marketing. The business development director checks the head of sales’ own decisions: which deals they are based on and what changed after their intervention. When the head of sales changes, the original list, events and reasons for decisions stay with the company — there is no need to repeat the test blindly. We do not choose the advertising budget for the owner.
A new enquiry may not have led to a payment yet. A decision to stop using the source must already have a basis.