Cutting enquiries by half and doubling the buyers

The situation#

The manufacturer sold a premium range through a dealer network, competing against products at a third of the price. Marketing was measured on enquiry volume and delivered it — several hundred a month from portals, search and social.

Sales and the dealer network told a different story. Most enquirers had budgets nowhere near the range. Many were homeowners at the browsing stage, eighteen months from a decision, who had clicked an advert that did not mention price. Dealers had stopped following up promptly because experience told them the leads were mostly noise, which meant the occasional serious buyer also waited two days.

And nothing could be measured properly. A buyer enquiring in one financial year and completing in the next fell outside every advertising platform's attribution window, so the campaigns that produced real revenue looked ineffective and the brand-search touchpoint at the end looked brilliant.

What we did#

Weeks 1–2 — worked backwards from closed sales. Not from a persona document. We took two years of completed sales and looked at what those buyers had in common at the point of first enquiry — project stage, specification detail, geography, referral source. That produced a fit definition precise enough to score against, and it did not match the targeting in use.

Weeks 3–5 — built the attribution layer. Enquiry origin stamped at creation in the CRM and carried through to the closed sale, so attribution became a join in the client's own data rather than a platform's estimate. This is the piece that had to exist before any spend decision could be trusted.

Weeks 6–8 — qualification and routing. Enrichment and scoring at the point of enquiry, with the reasoning attached so a sales lead could inspect and argue with it. Qualified enquiries routed to the right dealer within hours, with acknowledgement and outcome tracked rather than emailed and forgotten.

Weeks 9–12 — changed the creative. Price band and specification stated plainly in the advertising. Enquiry volume fell immediately and the mix improved sharply, which is the trade the whole engagement rested on.

Ongoing — weekly cadence. Spend reallocated against qualified buyers rather than clicks, with a structured testing programme on creative, audience and offer.

The uncomfortable number#

Halving enquiry volume was the hardest part of this engagement, and none of the difficulty was technical.

Enquiry count had been the headline metric in a monthly report for years. Reducing it deliberately required agreement from the marketing head, the sales director and the managing director in advance, with the replacement metric — cost per qualified buyer and sales hours consumed per sale — agreed and baselined before anything changed.

Without that agreement up front, the first month's report would have looked like a catastrophe and the work would have been reversed before the sales figures caught up.

What we would do differently#

We fixed targeting and creative before fixing dealer response time.

The routing work was scoped, and we sequenced it after the acquisition changes because the acquisition problem looked larger. For the first two months, better-qualified enquiries were going into the same slow handoff, and a meaningful share of genuinely good buyers were still waiting two days for a dealer to call.

The qualification improvement was real and partly wasted. Response speed was the cheaper fix and should have gone first — it needed no change to spend and would have improved outcomes on the existing lead flow while the targeting work was still in progress.

The general rule we took from it: fix what happens to a lead after it arrives before improving the leads that arrive. It is almost always cheaper and it compounds with everything that follows.

Where it went next#

The manufacturer moved to an ongoing growth retainer. Dealer conversion rates are now visible per dealer, which was commercially useful in a way nobody anticipated — two dealers converting well below the network median turned out to have no follow-up process at all, and that became a channel management conversation rather than a marketing one.

Specification and quotation drafting from the enquiry and product data is in a pilot with the internal specification team.