Your sales process is held together with memory and a whiteboard

You have a good business. The work is good, the team is good, and customers who buy once are usually happy. What you don't have is a sales process that works when you're not the one doing it. Quotes go out when someone remembers. Follow-ups happen if the job is big enough to worry about. Nobody can tell you how many quotes are sitting unchased right now, because the answer lives in three different inboxes.

That is the most common starting point we walk into, and it is fixable in a fortnight. But you have to be honest about where the money is going before you go buying more leads.

Where the money goes

In almost every business we look at, revenue leaks out of four places. Not four clever places. Four dull ones.

• Quotes that never get sent. The enquiry came in at 4pm on a Friday, the site visit happened, and the quote is still in a draft.
• Quotes that get sent and never chased. One email, no follow-up, and silence interpreted as a lost job.
• Jobs lost without anyone asking why. Nobody recorded the price you lost at, or who you lost to, so the same thing happens next quarter.
• Work done and never sold twice. The customer is happy, the invoice is paid, and nobody has called them in two years.

None of these need new customers. They need a rule, a list, and someone whose name is against it.

How to find out which one is yours

Take the last ninety days. Pull every quote you sent and every enquiry you received, from wherever they live — the CRM, the diary, the email folder, the notebook in the ute. Then answer four questions in writing:

• How many quotes went out, and how many got a follow-up within seven days?
• Of the jobs you lost, how many do you know the reason for — with a number attached?
• How much time passed between the enquiry and the first reply, on average and at worst?
• Of the customers who bought from you last year, how many bought something this year?

Most owners can answer the first two within an hour and cannot answer the last two at all. That is the finding. You are not missing a strategy, you are missing a record.

You don't need more leads to find this. The evidence is already sitting in your own records, and it costs nothing to look.

What fixing it actually takes

Not a transformation programme, and usually not a new system either. Three things, in this order:

• One place every job lives, with stages named after your real jobs rather than somebody's template.
• One follow-up rule that nobody has to think about — for example every quote gets a call on day three and an email on day seven, no exceptions.
• One person who owns the list and gets asked about it every week, in ten minutes, at a meeting that already exists.

We write the scripts and the emails, then sit with your people while they use them, because a document nobody has watched being used is a document nobody uses. The point is not to install process for its own sake. The point is that a business with 80% of its revenue coming from repeat and referred work should never lose a job because nobody picked up the phone.

If you can answer those four questions for your own business this week, do it. If the idea of pulling the data makes you uneasy, that is your answer, and it is worth thirty minutes to find out what the numbers say.