Often forgotten lead sources

Block an hour this week. Open a blank sheet with four columns: source, how many enquiries came in last month, where they were recorded and who followed up. Go through the five sources in this chapter and fill in what you can.

The gaps are the point. A source with enquiries but no record is a leak. A source with a record but no follow-up is a bigger one.

Anyone who searches for your company name, or for what you do in your area, may find your Google Business Profile. It shows calls, messages and website clicks, and people can contact you straight from it.

Check three things. Is the phone number right? Does the website link point to a page with a clear next step? Does anybody read the messages and questions? If these arrive in a personal account, forward them to the shared inbox or the CRM.

Addresses such as info@ and support@ often hold buying questions: "Do you work with companies of our size?" "Can you send me a price?" These look like support, but they are leads.

Search the last 90 days of those inboxes for words like "quote", "pricing", "demo", "work with" and "available". Count how many were answered, how fast, and whether they were recorded as a lead. Then set a rule: any message that matches goes into your HubSpot or other CRM as a new contact with the source "inbox". A flow in Zapier can do this for you.

Phone calls are the easiest source to lose, because nobody writes them down. Pick one of two options. Either every call gets a one-line note in the CRM, or you use call tracking such as CallRail or a business phone system such as Aircall, which log calls and missed calls for you.

Also look at missed calls. A missed call from a new number during working hours is a lead you did not answer. Set a rule to call back the same day.

Open Google Analytics and list your ten most visited pages in the last 90 days. Many will be blog posts, help pages or old guides with no next step.

For each page, add one clear action that suits the reader: a short form, a booking link or a related guide. The page already has the attention, so you are only giving the visitor somewhere to go. How to place capture points where people already are is covered in Capture where attention already is, not only where you wish it was.

Your best leads may come from people who already know you. Make a list of five customers and five partners who have a good opinion of your work. Ask each one the same question: "Who do you know with the same problem we solved for you?"

Make the ask easy. Offer a two-line introduction text they can forward. Log every referral with the name of the person who made it, so you can thank them and see who sends you the best leads.

None of this helps if you cannot see which source performs. Add a required field called "source" to every contact, with fixed values: Google Business, inbox, phone, page CTA, referral, and so on. Without it, forgotten sources stay forgotten.

Once the tag exists, Track submission rate by source shows you which source deserves more attention. If your leads are spread across several channels, the same approach exposes the weakest link, as in Traffic is not the problem, the leak is.

• Treating an email to support as a ticket, never as a lead.
• Counting only form submissions, which hides phone calls and messages.
• Asking for referrals once and never again.
• Adding calls to action to pages nobody visits.
• Following up on forgotten sources more slowly than on forms.
• Leaving "source" as a free text field, which gives you forty spellings.

• All five sources show a monthly count in one sheet.
• A message in your inbox, a missed call and a Google Business message all create a lead record.
• Each lead has a source value.
• Your top ten pages each have one next step.
• At least one new lead a month comes from a source you ignored before.