Lead generation in Newcastle, NSW: a steady flow of people asking for a quote.

Everything that turns somebody interested into somebody who has contacted you. It covers the channels that bring people, and the path between arriving and enquiring.

The phrase gets used as a synonym for advertising, and that is half of it. The other half is the path from somebody landing on your website to somebody actually getting in touch, which is usually where the losses are.

What it covers

• The channels. Search, advertising, social, referrals, your listing. Each has its own page and its own economics.
• The destination. What somebody lands on, and whether it asks for anything.
• The ask itself. The form, the number, and how much you demand before somebody can talk to you.
• What happens next. How fast you answer, and what happens to the ones who did not answer you back.

Businesses spend nearly all their attention on the first item and most of the money leaks out of the last two.

Somebody making an enquiry has usually contacted more than one business. What separates the one that gets the job is often nothing more than who came back first.

Watch how somebody actually hires a trade or a service. They open the map, they ring two or three, and they book with whoever answered or called back first while it was still on their mind.

That is not a criticism of anybody's effort. It is a description of a business with no free hands between eight and five, which describes most of the businesses we work with here.

It is also why an automatic reply to a missed call or a form is usually the cheapest improvement available. It does not have to answer the question, it has to hold the place until somebody can.

A form that goes nowhere, a number nobody answers, an ask that demands too much, and the enquiries nobody followed up. All four are free to fix and all four are common.

Before spending anything on more traffic, these are worth checking, because each one makes every channel look worse than it is.

Where it goes

• The form goes nowhere. Rebuilt at some point, never tested, silently failing. It is the single most common fault we find on a Newcastle website.
• Nobody answers the phone. And there is no text back, so the caller is gone without leaving a trace.
• The ask demands too much. Six fields and a preferred contact time, for somebody who wanted a price.
• Nothing follows up. A quote sent and never chased is pricing work already done and then abandoned.

Every one of these is an afternoon of work, and the whole list runs on time rather than a media budget. That is why they come before any spending.

Bought leads are usually sold to several businesses at once, so you are paying to be one of four people ringing the same person. Buying lists of strangers is a different thing again, and there are rules about it.

Lead sellers are a real part of some trades and it is worth being clear about what is being bought. In most cases the same enquiry is sold to several businesses, which makes speed the whole game and makes the price per job higher than the price per lead suggests.

That is not a reason nobody should use them. It is a reason to know which kind you are buying before comparing the price with anything else.

Buying a list of contacts and messaging them is a different thing and it is governed by law. The ACMA spam rules set out what consent means and what a message has to carry, and the penalties are real.

We do not buy or send to lists, which is worth saying plainly on a page with this title.

Test your own form, count what arrives and from where, shorten the ask, answer faster, and chase the quotes you already sent.

1. Send yourself an enquiry

Through your own form, from a phone, with a real address. Then ring your own number and see what happens when nobody picks up.

2. Count what arrives, and from where

A column on a spreadsheet is enough to start. Without it, no decision about channels can be made on anything but a feeling.

3. Shorten the ask

Name, number, and what the job is. Everything else can be asked when you ring back.

4. Answer faster, or hold the place

A text back within a minute on a missed call or a form. It does not have to answer the question.

5. Chase the quotes

Two polite follow ups on work you have already priced. This is the most commonly skipped job in a small business.

6. Then spend on traffic

Once the path works, every channel is worth more than it was, and you can tell which one is worth what.

The leaks are afternoon jobs. The counting takes a month before it says anything, and the channels themselves run on their own timelines.

The order it happens in

• The path gets tested and fixed. Form, phone, the length of the ask. Nothing here needs a budget and all of it makes the rest worth more.
• The counting starts. Where each enquiry came from. A month before it says anything, and it never stops being useful.
• The channels get chosen. With real numbers instead of an argument about which one works.

The order matters more than the speed. Spending on traffic before the path works is the most expensive sequence available, and it is the usual one.

Ask what they would fix before spending, who owns the enquiries and the accounts, what is being counted, and whether any leads are bought. The first answer tells you most of it.

We do this work in Newcastle, so we are not neutral. These are the questions we would want asked of us.

• What would you fix before spending anything? There is nearly always something. An answer that starts with a media budget has skipped the cheap half.
• Who owns the enquiries? The business, arriving in its own accounts. Leads held in an agency's system leave with the agency.
• What is being counted? Enquiries by source, and what happened to them. Clicks and impressions describe traffic.
• Are any of these leads bought? Ours are not. If any are, it is worth knowing how many businesses each one was sold to.
• Am I locked in? Ours runs month to month and always has. Any arrangement you cannot leave at the end of a month is worth a second look.

A business already getting more enquiries than it can answer does not have a lead generation problem, and it is worth saying so rather than selling into it.