Get more customers
How to get more customers: find the stage where you lose them
To get more customers, find the stage where you lose them and fix that first. More marketing only helps when the gap is in enquiries.
The maths
The four numbers that decide how many customers you get
Fill in these four columns for one recent month. The weakest column is the one worth funding, and it often isn’t the first.
| Dimension | Enquiries | Qualification rate | Close rate | Retention |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What it counts | People who got in touch this month, by any route | The share of those who could realistically have bought | The share of those good-fit people who paid | The share of last year’s customers who bought again |
| Who owns it | Marketing, fully | Marketing writes the invitation, sales does the filtering | Sales, or whoever answers the phone if there is no sales team | Usually nobody, which is why it’s so often the weak one |
| Sign this is your weak number | Small totals, with a normal conversion rate behind them | Sales rejects most of the list and can’t explain why | Quotes go out, nothing comes back, and nobody chases | Revenue stays flat while new customer numbers rise |
| What it costs to improve | The most money and time of the four | Mostly a decision about your message and a form change | A follow-up rule and someone responsible for it | Steady attention inside the business, more than budget |
| How fast it moves | Weeks with paid ads, many months with competitive organic search | One or two reporting cycles | Days, once someone owns the follow-up | A full buying cycle before you can even measure it |
How it fits together
Why the weakest number decides how many customers you win
One group of people, filtered four times. The tightest filter decides the result, however healthy the other three look.
- Enquiries
- Everyone who got in touch this month, by every route, including ones nobody logged.
- Qualification rate
- The share who could realistically have bought, judged by a written rule both teams accept.
- Close rate
- The share of the good-fit people who paid. Measure it on that group, not on every enquiry.
- Retention
- Whether last year’s customers bought again. It sets what you can afford to pay for a new one.
Common mistakes
Three ways businesses misread a customer shortage
Each of these sends money to the wrong place. Check them before you look at your own numbers.
- The marketing report looks healthy and the bank account does not.
- Impressions, visits and even enquiries can all rise while customer numbers stay flat. That doesn’t prove marketing works and something else is broken. It proves the reporting stops before money changes hands, so it can’t tell you whether the activity was worth anything.
- Sales and marketing are each sure the other is the problem.
- This is nearly always an argument about lead fit. Marketing counts enquiries, sales counts people worth calling, and neither has written down what separates the two. More data won’t settle it. Spend an hour agreeing what rules an enquiry out, then apply that rule to last month.
- All the growth budget goes on getting more enquiries.
- Enquiries are the only number you can buy from outside, so they soak up the budget by default. The other three need people inside the business to change how they work, which is harder to approve and impossible to invoice. So businesses keep buying enquiries to make up for a close rate nobody has checked.
Do this first
Twenty minutes, a whiteboard and one finished month
You need one recent month, someone from sales in the room, and a willingness to write down definitions you may not agree on at first.
Pick one month and stick with it
Choose a finished month that wasn’t unusual: not your busiest, not the one with a big campaign. Use it for every count, so all four numbers describe the same group of people.
You get: One agreed month, written on the board
Count every enquiry, from every route
Count forms, calls, walk-ins, emails to staff, social messages and referrals by text. What matters is what reached your team, not what a platform recorded. Expect to correct the first count twice.
You get: One agreed enquiry count
Split them into good fit and not
Ask sales to sort the list into people who could have bought and people who never could, then write down the rule they used. The rule is worth more than the number: it’s what marketing has been missing.
You get: A rule for a good-fit lead that both teams accept
Count who paid
From the good-fit pile only, count who became a customer. Dividing by that pile, not every enquiry, separates a selling problem from a targeting problem, which one blended figure hides.
You get: A close rate on good-fit enquiries
Look back a year for repeat customers
Take the customers you won in the same month last year and count how many bought again. Many businesses have never worked this out.
You get: A repeat-purchase rate you can stand behind
Fund the weakest number, not the loudest one
Compare each number with what you’d call normal for your type of business and pick the one furthest below. If two are weak, start with the one closer to the sale. It moves faster and changes the cost of fixing the other.
You get: One funding decision with the maths behind it
The four numbers multiply. That’s why the weakest one decides the result, and why buying more of the strongest one so rarely helps.
A business that wins one in twenty good-fit enquiries doesn’t have a demand problem. More demand makes its problem more expensive, because every extra enquiry hits the same ratio.
Sometimes the help you came looking for isn’t the help you need. Better to hear that before an invoice than after one.
The forgotten number
How to look after repeat customers in practice
Repeat business fails because nobody is responsible for whether a happy customer hears from you again. None of these steps needs new software.
- One person responsible for repeat purchases, written into how their work is reviewed
- A set moment after the sale when the customer hears from a member of your team, not a template
- A record of why customers left, gathered from the customers and not guessed internally
- A reason for a second purchase that fits what they bought the first time
- A review request built into how you deliver the job, not sent as a one-off campaign
- A list of past customers you can contact, with permissions that are current and lawful
- A repeat-purchase figure shown next to new customers, every month, in the same report
- A clear decision about which customers you’d prefer not to keep, so you don’t lose the others through neglect
Questions
Questions about getting more customers
How is this different from wanting more leads?
A lead is someone who got in touch. A customer is someone who paid. In between come qualifying, selling and follow-up. A business can double its leads and still win the same number of customers.
If the shortage is at the top (you don’t show up for your buyers’ searches, or your campaigns reach nobody), the lead page is more useful. This page is for when enquiries come in and customers don’t follow.
We do not have a CRM. Can we still do this?
Yes. A whiteboard is enough. You need four counts for one recent month: enquiries, how many were worth pursuing, how many paid, and how many customers from a year earlier bought again.
Counting by hand for one month beats a year of automated reports nobody trusts. You’ll argue about the definitions while you count, and that argument is most of the value.
Which of the four numbers is usually the weak one?
No benchmark answers this for every business. Repeat customers are often most at risk, because nobody is judged on them. Lead fit and closing are often weaker than enquiries, because they depend on habits inside the business, not budget. That’s a reason to check, not a verdict.
Enquiries are the only number an agency can sell you a fix for without seeing how your business runs. Be sceptical when that’s the one everyone tells you to fix.
Does improving retention help us win new customers?
Yes. It changes how much you can afford to spend winning each one. If a customer buys twice, not once, you can pay roughly twice as much to win them, and channels that looked too expensive become affordable.
Repeat customers also bring referrals and reviews, which make new customers cheaper again. Retention is the least visible of the four numbers and has the widest knock-on effect.
Can you work on more than one number at a time?
Yes, but it’s better not to start that way. Work on two at once and you can’t tell which change did what.
Fix follow-up and lead fit first. They sit closest to the sale, move in weeks and cost little. Then decide whether the top of the funnel still needs the budget you planned for it.
Where to get help
Services that solve this
SEO & Organic Growth
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Bring four numbers and we’ll show you which one holds you back
Bring one month of enquiries, good-fit enquiries, customers won and repeat customers to a strategy call, and we’ll work through the maths with you. If marketing isn’t your problem, we’ll say so.
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Related
More ways to fix this
- measurement that counts customers, not clicksYou can’t compare the four numbers until they’re all counted the same way.
- improving what the site does with the visits it hasFor when enquiries come in but they aren’t a good fit.
- tracking that follows an enquiry through to a sale
- when the shortage is at the top of the funnel
- visits that never turn into enquiries
Last updated · Published by Zubair Afzal, responsible editor