Measure the steps between first contact and sale, not only the sale. Record where every enquiry came from, follow it through clear stages in a shared sheet or CRM, and review it with your sales team every month. After a few months you’ll start to see which channels bring enquiries that actually close, even if no single month tells the full story.
Why the usual numbers don’t work
If a customer first sees your ad in March, visits your website in April, meets your sales team in June and signs in September, a monthly marketing report will never connect those dots. March’s report shows clicks with no sales. September’s report shows a sale with no obvious cause.
This is common in B2B, property, education, industrial equipment and other high-consideration purchases. The fix is to follow each enquiry from start to finish, instead of counting activity month by month.
A practical enquiry-to-sale method
1. Agree your stages
Keep it simple. For example: enquiry, qualified, meeting or site visit, quotation sent, won, lost. Write down what each stage means so everyone uses them the same way.
2. Capture the source at first contact
This is where most tracking falls apart. Use more than one method:
- Ask “How did you hear about us?” on your form and when someone calls or messages.
- Add UTM tags to links in ads, social posts and emails, and set up your form to record them if your form tool supports it.
- Use a separate WhatsApp click-to-chat link or prefilled message for each main channel, so you can tell where chats started.
- Note referrals and word of mouth too. They often matter most and never show up in a dashboard.
3. Keep one shared record
A spreadsheet is fine to start. Each enquiry gets a row with: date, name or company, source, product or service of interest, current stage, date of last update, estimated deal size if known, and outcome. If you already use a CRM, use the same fields there.
4. Review monthly with sales
Sit down with whoever handles enquiries once a month. Update stages, mark lost deals and note the reason. Ask which leads felt promising and which wasted time. Their view on lead quality is often more useful than any platform number.
5. Watch leading signals
While you wait for deals to close, track the earlier stages by source: how many enquiries became qualified, how many reached a meeting, how many got a quotation. These tell you which channels are likely to pay off before the sales arrive.
6. Look back at closed deals
Every quarter, take the deals you won and trace each one back to its first source and the touchpoints along the way. Over time you’ll learn your typical sales cycle and which channels start the best conversations.
Things to watch out for
Last-click credit. Website analytics often credit the final click before an enquiry. The channel that first introduced the customer may get no credit at all.
Small numbers. If you only close a handful of deals a quarter, one big deal can distort everything. Look at patterns over longer periods.
Missing data. If the source field is left blank, the record is much less useful. Make it a required step when an enquiry is logged.
Offline influence. Trade shows, referrals and a good conversation with your sales team all play a part. Record them honestly instead of pretending everything is digital.
A checklist to start this month
- Define five or six sales stages and what each one means.
- Add a source question to every form and enquiry script.
- Create UTM-tagged links for your main channels.
- Set up separate WhatsApp links or messages per channel.
- Build the shared enquiry sheet with the fields above.
- Book a monthly review with your sales team.
- Do your first look-back on won deals in three months.
FAQ
Do we need an expensive CRM?
Not to start. A well-kept spreadsheet with consistent fields will teach you a lot. Move to a CRM when the number of enquiries or the size of the team makes the sheet hard to manage.
What if the sales team doesn’t update the sheet?
Keep it short, make it part of the weekly routine, and show them how the information helps them, for example by bringing in more of the leads they prefer. If updates still lag, the monthly review is the moment to fill gaps together.
How long before we can draw conclusions?
At least one full sales cycle, and longer if you close few deals. Until then, use the earlier stages as your guide and avoid cutting a channel just because it hasn’t produced a sale yet.
If you’d like to set up tracking that fits your sales cycle, talk to Adxus. Here’s how we approach Creative Strategy & Advertising.
