I keep wondering how much business gets lost after somebody has already decided they want help.
We spend a considerable amount of time and money getting people interested in things. We build websites, write articles, run advertisements, worry about search rankings, and try to get our work in front of the right people. All perfectly reasonable activities. But I’m increasingly interested in what happens after they arrive, because we seem remarkably capable of losing people who were quite prepared to become customers.
Consider a restaurant. Somebody recommends it, you look it up, and you decide it sounds good. Now you want to see the menu and perhaps book a table. The menu is buried somewhere, the reservations link takes you to a general contact page, and Instagram offers a photograph of a steak from last February. A fine-looking steak, admittedly, but you were hoping to eat something this evening.
Then somebody calls, you put your phone down, and dinner happens somewhere else. Three weeks later, you drive past the restaurant and remember that you meant to try it.
You never really decided against going. The restaurant got your attention, had something you wanted, and still failed to get you through the door. Somewhere between being interested and making a reservation, the whole thing became slightly more trouble than you had attention available to give it.
I notice versions of this in software constantly. You want to do something, click what appears to be the correct button, and end up looking at three options whose differences are presumably obvious to whoever designed them. You open another tab to check the documentation. An email arrives. Eventually, you close the original tab because you can no longer remember why it was open.
Meanwhile, the software is running beautifully. No exceptions, no outages, nothing alarming in the logs. We could produce a very reassuring report about the health of a system that just prevented somebody from accomplishing the thing they came there to do.
That bothers me, partly because I work on these systems. It’s very easy to verify that a form submits successfully. It takes more effort to find out whether the person receiving it knows what to do next, whether anyone replies, and whether the person who asked for help ever gets any.
The same problem turns up well outside business. Imagine a Catholic family moving into an area and trying to find a parish. One page lists Mass at nine, another says nine-thirty, and the bulletin is a PDF from sometime before Easter. They decide to sort it out next weekend. Nothing about their beliefs has changed. Finding out when to turn up has simply become another unfinished job.
That seems like an awfully ordinary way for something important to fail.
I suspect we give intention more staying power than it deserves. “I should call them” feels like the beginning of an action, but it can sit in someone’s head for months without becoming one. People have jobs, children, interruptions, and several other things they were also supposed to call about. A process that depends on them remembering, investigating, and repeatedly trying again is asking quite a lot.
Yet when an organisation wants better results, the instinct is often to increase what goes into the process. More advertising, more visitors, more enquiries. Sometimes that is exactly what’s needed. But if enquiries are already sitting unanswered, buying more of them seems like an expensive way to discover that the inbox is still unattended.
This is where an idea I’ve been calling Revenue Capture starts to take shape. It’s a working name for looking at how much existing interest a business actually manages to turn into completed, paid work, and where it makes that unnecessarily difficult.
There are familiar pieces in there: answering enquiries, making websites usable, following up, scheduling properly, delivering the work, getting paid. I’m interested in what happens when we follow the whole sequence. A better contact form might help, but it won’t accomplish much if the enquiry goes to someone who left the company six months ago.
Imagine a business with a good advertising campaign, a decent website, capable salespeople, and a service people need. The marketing report shows enquiries coming in. The website report shows that everything works. Sales responds to the enquiries it receives. Everyone can point to evidence that their part is being handled.
But perhaps the website sends certain enquiries to a shared mailbox that everybody assumes somebody else checks. Perhaps sales promises a callback that never makes it into anyone’s calendar. Perhaps a customer accepts a quote and then waits a week to hear how the work will be scheduled.
Each problem looks small from inside the department responsible for it. To the customer, they all belong to the same company. They don’t particularly care which piece of software was supposed to tell which employee to call them. They would quite like the work done.
There is a bit of arithmetic here that I think deserves more attention. Suppose a process has ten steps, and at each step, ninety percent of the people who reach it continue. Start with a hundred people and only about thirty-five make it through all ten:
0.9¹⁰ ≈ 0.35.
That’s an illustrative example, obviously, rather than a measurement of any particular business. But it shows how losses accumulate. You can look at each step and think ninety percent seems fairly respectable, while the complete process loses nearly two-thirds of the people who started.
A few unnecessary form fields, an unclear next step, a delayed reply, another account to create, another round of suggesting meeting times. None needs to be disastrous on its own. Together, they give somebody plenty of opportunities to put the whole thing aside until later.
And “later” has an impressive capacity for becoming “never.” I have enough unfinished projects to offer some personal evidence there.
Of course, people also have perfectly good reasons to stop. They discover that the price is too high, the service doesn’t fit, or they don’t need it after all. An enquiry is an opportunity to find out whether you can help somebody. It isn’t money that already belongs to you.
That distinction matters if this idea is going to be useful. I’m interested in the people who wanted to continue and got stuck somewhere we could reasonably have helped them. Making the next step clear is useful. Pestering someone until they regret ever giving you their email address is a rather different achievement.
It also makes measurement more difficult than simply counting everyone who disappeared. A visitor leaving a page tells us very little about why they left. We can’t assume they were ready to buy, any more than we can assume every unanswered proposal was rejected on price.
Still, there are practical places to start. We can check how long enquiries wait for a response, whether promised callbacks happen, and how often an accepted quote stalls before work begins. We can try the process ourselves. We can ask customers what confused them and actually listen when the answer is something we thought was obvious.
Even following a handful of real enquiries from arrival through completion might reveal more than another month of admiring the traffic graph.
This is also where I become suspicious of adding dashboards. A report can tell you that enquiries went unanswered. Unless somebody has responsibility and time to respond, you have mostly improved your ability to watch the problem continue. Somewhere, a manager looks at a chart, says “interesting,” and goes back to the meeting. The enquiry remains unanswered, but at least it has been visualised.
Useful information needs to lead to a useful action. That might mean assigning responsibility, changing where a message goes, making booking simpler, or giving someone enough time to return calls. Sometimes the fix will involve software. Sometimes it will involve agreeing on who checks the bloody inbox on Fridays.
I think this helps explain why an ordinary business that reliably answers the phone can be such a formidable competitor. There’s considerable value in knowing that if you ask for something, someone will respond, explain what happens next, and then do what they said they would do. A more impressive website has quite a lot of work to do if the business behind it can’t manage that.
I don’t have a finished theory here. I’m still working out where Revenue Capture begins and ends, how to measure it sensibly, and whether grouping these problems together helps us see something we otherwise miss. The restaurant, the parish, and the software application have different purposes. Each still depends on someone being able to follow through on an intention before the rest of life intervenes.
For a business, though, I think the question is concrete enough to be useful now. Before spending more money getting people to contact us, we could take a closer look at what happened to the people who already did.
Did they decide we weren’t right for them? Fair enough. Or are some of them still waiting for us to tell them how to get started?