Numbers
What an unanswered enquiry costs
An unanswered enquiry appears neither in the accounts nor in the reports. It simply happens and disappears. Which is why it is worth counting, at least once.
An unanswered enquiry shows up nowhere. Not in the accounts, not in the reports, not in conversations about how business is going. It simply happens and disappears, and a month later nobody remembers it existed at all.
Which is why it is worth counting, at least once.
Where enquiries disappear
In practice they are not lost to one big mistake. They are lost to four small ones.
- It arrived in the wrong channel. A Facebook message when everyone is watching the inbox. Or the other way round.
- It arrived at the wrong time. Eleven at night, on a Friday, during an event. By the time anyone sees it, fourteen hours have passed.
- It was read and put off. "I will reply later" is the most common cause of an unanswered enquiry.
- It was answered, but never followed up. The proposal went out, no reply came back, and nobody chased it.
How to work out your own number
You need three figures that you either know already or can estimate in five minutes.
| Figure | How to get it |
|---|---|
| Enquiries per month | Count one week and multiply by four |
| Average order value | Last month's revenue divided by the number of orders |
| Share of enquiries that become orders | If you do not know, use 20 %, which is common in service businesses |
The calculation is then simple. Say 60 enquiries arrive in a month, the average order is 400 €, and one in five becomes an order.
If five enquiries a month go unanswered, you lose one order, which is 400 € a month, or 4,800 € a year.
If ten go unanswered, you lose two orders, which is 9,600 € a year.
That number almost always comes as a surprise, because five unanswered enquiries a month cannot be felt. That is one a week.
Why speed matters more than it looks
A client looking for a service rarely writes to one company. They write to three or five and book with whoever answers first and most clearly. That means you are competing on hours first and on quality second.
It hurts most in a seasonal business. Venues, halls and event services get the most enquiries exactly when they have the least time to answer them.
What to do about it
Three things, cheapest first.
One list instead of five channels
While enquiries live in Facebook messages, Instagram, a form and an inbox, no single person can physically watch them all. The first step is not a faster reply, it is a place where all of them are visible.
A status on each one
New, answered, waiting, closed. Without a status it is impossible to notice that something has stalled, because a stalled enquiry looks exactly like a healthy one.
A reminder that does not depend on memory
After three days, and again after a week. It is the only action that needs neither new clients nor new copy, and it shows a result almost immediately.
An honest note
If you get a handful of enquiries a week and answer all of them the same day, the numbers here mean nothing to you. This problem starts when the flow grows larger than one person's attention, and it ends when someone exists whose only job is to watch it.
If you want to see this with your own numbers
Give it thirty minutes and we will walk through one real enquiry of yours from start to finish. After the call you get a map of where data is retyped by hand at your company. If there is nothing worth automating, I will say so.
Let us look at your workflow