Get more leads
Work out which part of your lead problem is actually broken
"We need more leads" usually means one of four very different things: not enough people arrive, the ones who arrive do not enquire, the ones who enquire are wrong for you, or nobody follows them up. Each has a different fix, and choosing the wrong one costs a quarter.
Start here
"We need more leads" is four different problems
A lead shortage looks the same from the board seat no matter what is causing it: money out, not enough conversations in. Underneath, there are four distinct failures, and they need different budgets, different people and different amounts of patience.
Read the four below and note which one produces a flicker of recognition. That is usually the right one, and the rest of this page is about confirming it rather than guessing.
- Not enough people arrive in the first place.
- The pages that should attract buyers are not visible for the searches buyers make, or the campaigns are not reaching them. The tell is a low total with a perfectly respectable conversion rate: the people who do find you behave normally, there are just not many of them. This is the only one of the four that is genuinely a traffic problem, and it is the one most often assumed without checking.
- People arrive and do not enquire.
- Sessions look healthy and the enquiry count does not move with them. Something on the page is failing — the offer is unclear, the proof is missing, the price question goes unanswered, the form asks for too much, or the page is slow enough on a phone that people leave before it renders. Buying more traffic here multiplies the leak rather than the leads.
- The wrong people enquire.
- Volume is fine and sales are frustrated. The enquiries are out of area, out of budget, looking for a service you stopped offering, or students and job hunters. This is almost always an instruction problem rather than an audience problem: the campaign is optimising toward a conversion that is not a sale, or the messaging invites everyone in.
- Leads arrive and nothing happens to them.
- The enquiry lands in a shared inbox on Friday afternoon and is opened on Monday. Or it is routed to someone on leave. Or it is answered by email when the person asked to be called. This is the least glamorous cause and frequently the largest one, and no amount of marketing spend compensates for it.
Differential diagnosis
How to tell which one you have
Four causes, four different tells, four different fixes. The rows below are what we work through in the first hour of any engagement that starts with "we need more leads".
| Dimension | Not enough traffic | Traffic that will not convert | Wrong-fit enquiries | Leads not followed up |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The tell | Small totals, normal conversion rate on the pages that matter | Healthy sessions, enquiry count flat regardless of traffic | Enquiry count fine, sales team dismissive of the list | Marketing and sales report different lead numbers for the same month |
| Where to look | Search visibility for commercial queries, impression share, competitor coverage | Enquiries divided by sessions on service pages only, not the whole site | The disqualification reasons sales actually writes down | Time from form submission to first outbound contact |
| Most common cause | No page exists for the search, or three pages compete for it | Unclear offer, missing proof, long form, slow mobile page | Campaign optimising toward a conversion that is not a sale | No owner, no service-level expectation, no routing rule |
| The expensive wrong fix | Publishing more blog posts that no buyer searches for | Increasing ad budget on top of a page that already leaks | Loosening targeting to bring the lead count back up | Commissioning a website redesign |
| Realistic time to move | Weeks for paid, six to twelve months for competitive organic | Two to six weeks to test and ship the first changes | One to two reporting cycles once the signal is corrected | Days, and it usually costs nothing |
Do this first
The diagnosis you can run before you hire anyone
None of this needs an agency. It needs an afternoon, access to your analytics and someone from sales in the room.
Agree what counts as a lead
Marketing usually counts form submissions. Sales usually counts people worth calling. Until one definition exists that both accept, every other number in this exercise is disputed. Write it down, including what disqualifies an enquiry.
You get: One written definition both teams sign off
Count last month properly
Forms, calls, chat, email, whatever arrives. Reconcile the platform numbers against what actually reached a human. The gap between those two figures is often the whole story, and it is the step people skip.
You get: A single reconciled lead count
Segment the conversion rate
Calculate enquiries divided by sessions for your service and location pages alone. Excluding the blog changes this number dramatically and is the difference between a real conversion problem and a page-mix artefact.
You get: Conversion rate for commercial pages only
Ask sales why they rejected people
Pull the last fifty enquiries and get the disqualification reason for each. Out of area, no budget, wrong service, not decision maker, never answered. The distribution tells you immediately whether you have a quality problem or a follow-up problem.
You get: A tally of rejection reasons
Time your own follow-up
Submit an enquiry through your own website, from a phone, on mobile data, using an address nobody recognises. Record how long it takes to be contacted and by which channel. Do this on a Friday afternoon, not a Tuesday morning.
You get: A measured response time you can defend
Only then decide where the money goes
With those five outputs, the cause is usually obvious and the argument about budget stops being an argument about opinions. If two causes are live at once, fix the cheaper one first — it is almost always the follow-up.
You get: A budget decision with evidence behind it
The cheapest lead you will ever get is the one you already had and did not call back.
We have opened engagements meant to be about search visibility and spent the first fortnight on a routing rule in a shared inbox, because that was where the money was going.
It is an unsatisfying finding to pay an agency for. It is also the one that pays back fastest, and we would rather say it than sell you six months of content while enquiries go cold.
Where to go next
The fix, by diagnosis
If not enough people arrive
If people arrive and leave
Questions
What people ask when the pipeline is thin
How do I tell whether I have a traffic problem or a conversion problem?
Divide your enquiries by your sessions for the pages that are meant to produce enquiries. If that rate is reasonable for your category and the total is still small, you have a traffic problem. If the rate is very low, you have a conversion problem and buying more traffic will make it worse in absolute cost.
The trap is measuring the rate across the whole site. Blog traffic drags the number down and hides the fact that your service pages may be converting perfectly well. Segment before you conclude anything.
We get plenty of leads but sales says they are junk. Is that a marketing problem?
Usually yes, and it is fixable. Most wrong-fit lead flow traces to one of three things: campaigns optimising toward a conversion event that does not represent a sale, messaging that describes what you do too broadly, or a form that asks nothing that would let anyone disqualify a bad fit.
The uncomfortable part is that fixing it reduces the lead count on the report. If the business is measured on lead volume rather than qualified pipeline, the incentive works against the fix, and that conversation has to happen before the work does.
How long before a lead problem starts to improve?
It depends entirely on which cause you have. A broken form or a follow-up gap can be fixed in days. Conversion work on existing pages usually shows something within a few weeks. Paid search can produce enquiries almost immediately if the demand is there.
Organic search is the slow one. Meaningful movement on competitive commercial searches typically sits somewhere between six and twelve months, and any firmer number than that is a guess dressed up as a forecast.
Can you tell me which cause applies without access to our data?
Not reliably. We can usually narrow it to two possibilities from the outside by looking at your visibility, your competitors and the pages people would land on, but separating a conversion problem from a follow-up problem needs your enquiry data.
What we can do on a call is tell you exactly which four numbers to pull and what each combination of them means, so the diagnosis is yours regardless of whether you work with us.
Is it possible that the answer is that there is no demand?
Yes, and it is more common than agencies like to admit. Search demand for a specific service in a specific area is finite and roughly knowable, and some businesses have already captured most of what exists.
When that is the case, more search spend is the wrong answer. The growth usually has to come from a wider service area, a broader offer, a different channel, or from converting and retaining more of the demand you already reach.
Find out which of the four is costing you
Bring your enquiry numbers and your last fifty leads to a strategy call. We will work through the same five checks with you and tell you which cause is live — including when the honest answer is that the fix is not something we sell.
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Last updated · Reviewed by Zubair Afzal