Two things leak sales without anyone logging them: enquiries that arrive when nobody is working, and enquiries that sit in a queue behind other enquiries at your busiest hour. Put your own figures in and see what they come to.
One lead is worth your close rate times your average order value. If you close 20 out of every 100 enquiries and a sale averages 50,000, a single enquiry is worth 10,000 before anybody has done anything with it.
The first leak applies only if you answered no to round-the-clock cover: 30% of a month’s enquiries are treated as arriving out of hours and going cold. The second applies at peak: 10% of enquiries if demand sometimes outruns the people free to answer, 20% if it often does, and nothing at all if it never does. Each leak is a count of leads, and each count is multiplied by what a lead is worth.
lead_value = (close_rate / 100) * average_order_value
off_hours_leads = monthly_leads * 0.3 # only when nobody covers the night
off_hours_revenue = off_hours_leads * lead_value
peak_leads = monthly_leads * 0.1 # 0.2 when demand often outruns the team
peak_revenue = peak_leads * lead_value
monthly_leak = off_hours_revenue + peak_revenueThe two leaks are added, not netted off. A lead that would have been lost both ways is counted twice, which makes the total the pessimistic reading of your own answers rather than the careful one. We would rather tell you that than quietly bury it.
Harvard Business Review published an audit of business lead response times in 2011 — The Short Life of Online Sales Leads — which found that firms attempting contact within an hour of an enquiry were far likelier to reach a decision-maker and qualify the lead than firms that waited longer. That study is why this page exists.
It is not in the arithmetic. Nothing above uses a figure from it, because a percentage borrowed from somebody else’s sample is not a fact about your business. Everything you see comes from what you typed and from the two assumptions printed beside the result.
It cannot tell you that Tephlo recovers this money. An assistant answers the routine part of an enquiry at hours and volumes you cannot staff, and keeps the conversation moving until it reaches something only a person should decide. How much of a leak that closes depends on your traffic, the content it can answer from, and which actions your workspace has enabled.
It also cannot tell you that every lost enquiry was winnable. Some of them were never going to buy, at any hour, from anyone. The figure is the size of the thing worth looking at, not a bill somebody owes you.
Compare the published conversation allowances against the volume you just entered.