Audit Last Month's Leads in an Hour
A one-hour audit that shows where last month's leads went: booked, dropped, or never touched. The fastest way to find the revenue you already paid for.
Before changing anything about how your business handles leads, spend one hour finding out what it does now. Not what you think it does. What the records say. Most owners who run this audit find a leak they'd have argued didn't exist an hour earlier.
This is the short version of the conversation-count exercise, built to fit in sixty minutes. Set a timer.
Minutes 0 to 10: gather the sources
Open a blank spreadsheet with these columns: date, time, source, channel, name, outcome, notes.
Then pull last month's leads from each place they land. Don't work from memory; work from the logs.
- Phone system call log (inbound only, business hours and after)
- Web form submissions, from the form tool itself
- Business-line text messages
- Facebook, Instagram and Google Business Profile messages
- Any lead platform you pay for
- Chat widget transcripts, if you have one
Paste each into the sheet. Strip obvious spam and wrong numbers as you go.
Minutes 10 to 40: mark the outcomes
Go down the list and give every row one of five outcomes:
- Booked. A conversation happened and an appointment, estimate or sale was created.
- Conversation, not booked. Someone talked to them; they declined or went quiet.
- Attempted. Somebody tried once (a voicemail, a single text) and stopped.
- Never touched. No outreach at all.
- Junk. Spam, wrong number, vendor.
Be honest about the difference between "conversation" and "attempted." An auto-reply is not a conversation. A voicemail you left is not a conversation. If you can't tell from the records, mark it attempted; the ambiguity itself is a finding.
Thirty minutes is enough for most small businesses. If you have hundreds of leads, sample one week and multiply.
Minutes 40 to 50: find the pattern
Sort the sheet three ways and look at where the "attempted" and "never touched" rows cluster.
By time. If they cluster after 5 PM and on weekends, your leak is an hours problem. Nobody's there, and the leads that arrive then are the ones dying.
By channel. If forms and social messages are dropped while calls are answered, your leak is a channel problem. The business treats calls as real and everything else as optional.
By source. If one paid channel's leads are dropped disproportionately, you're paying for leads you don't reach. That channel's real cost is far higher than its reported cost per lead. See cost per conversation for the calculation.
Most businesses find two of the three. Write down which.
Minutes 50 to 60: put a number on it
Count the attempted and never-touched rows. Multiply by your normal booking rate (the rate from the booked and not-booked rows, not a hopeful one). Multiply by your show rate. Multiply by your average ticket.
That's last month's leak in dollars: revenue in leads you already paid for, at the close rate you already have. Multiply by twelve for the year. Then compare it with what you'd spend to fix the pattern you found. The recovery calculator runs the same math if you'd rather not do it by hand.
What to do with the result
The audit tells you which problem you have, and each has a different fix:
- An hours problem needs coverage that doesn't sleep: an AI front office that answers every channel in seconds at every hour, books, and confirms.
- A channel problem needs one place where every lead lands and is treated as a lead, whether it came by call, form, text or DM.
- A source problem needs the cost per conversation by channel visible every month, so budget follows what actually books.
What the audit never says is "buy more leads." More leads into the pattern you just found means a bigger pile of dropped leads at a higher cost each.
Run it again in ninety days
Whatever you change, repeat the hour in three months. The attempted and never-touched rows should be close to zero. If they aren't, the fix didn't take, and the sheet will tell you where. Owners who audit quarterly stop having the leak, because the number is visible before it grows.
Frequently asked questions
I don't have a call log for my cell phone. Your carrier's online account has inbound call history. It's enough for the audit. It's also a reason to move the business line onto something that logs, since a phone you can't audit is a leak you can't measure.
What if I can't remember outcomes for old leads? Mark them attempted, not booked. If the outcome isn't recorded anywhere, it's a fair bet nothing much happened, and the missing record is itself the finding.
Can I have someone else do this? Yes, but read the result yourself. Owners who see their own rows believe them.
How do I keep the sheet updated without doing this monthly? An AI front office that answers every lead also logs every lead with an outcome. The sheet becomes a line in the daily brief.
Bring the sheet. We'll walk through the pattern with you and size the fix. See if you qualify.