Before you buy another lead

A partner at a personal-injury firm called me because things felt quiet. I had been running the firm’s SEO for two years. The rankings looked good. People searching for a lawyer were finding the website. Alongside that work, the firm was spending about $50,000 a month on Google Ads.

I could have taken the request at face value. The partner wanted more traffic and I sold a service that could help her get it. But I wanted to see which enquiries had become clients. I asked for the CRM report.

“What’s a CRM?”

That was the moment I realised how little either of us could say about where the next marketing dollar should go. I could tell her how people found the firm. She knew how busy the practice felt. Between those two accounts were phone calls, consultations and people still deciding what to do about an injury.

Two years is a long time to call a lead lost

The partner resisted introducing a CRM for a few months. The firm eventually put one in and began recording enquiries and the conversations that followed. By the time we looked back, it had roughly two years of history.

Some people could take about that long to sign. Someone might ring after an injury, go away for a while and come back when they were ready. A report for the month of that first phone call could tell you what the click cost. It could tell you very little about what that enquiry was ultimately worth.

My recollection is that the firm made better spending decisions once it could follow those conversations. I don’t have a figure for the improvement. What changed was the question we could answer together when the phone next went quiet.

Follow the last twenty

Before your next budget meeting, pick one service and take twenty consecutive genuine enquiries. Choose a period old enough for a normal buying decision to have played out. For each person, ask three questions.

1. Did anyone have a conversation with them?
2. Who owned the next step, and when was it due?
3. What do we know about the outcome?

Give “still deciding” and “we don’t know” their own space. A buyer who picked another provider is telling you something different from a record nobody followed up. Those distinctions change what I would ask a business to spend next.

If an owner brought me that page of twenty enquiries and asked me about buying more traffic, we could have a much better conversation.