As I was getting ready for work the other morning, I was watching Sky News as they were reporting from a small factory down south somewhere. The reporter was commenting that despite a more positive outlook, many businesses remain negative. She also then pointed out that this factory where she was reporting from have seen an increase in leads and enquiries, but that many of those have failed to turn into actual business.

This got my brain going. Leads doesn’t always guarantee business. Yes, laws of numbers suggest that if you have a ton of leads, you are bound to get at least a few of those turning into actual work. But lots of leads doesn’t mean lots of business.

I do often see many tweets from companies saying they have lots of leads coming in, which is great, but lots of business isn’t guaranteed. I think that is the way business is for everyone at the moment. Lets face it, people will always be interested in buying new things. That is curiosity and we all have it. But, a lot of the time, people cannot afford what they wish to buy, hence a lot of leads go cold and never get anywhere.

This is something which I find often goes unreported. Much pomp is made of increasing lead levels, and I have been guilty of such “fluffing” in the past. Yet if you have 100 leads in a month and sell just 10% of them, you’re still going to have a poor month for conversion rates.

It’s not all bad though. The second quarter of this year has shown 0.6% growth, which has followed a 0.3% rise in the quarter before. So, there clearly is money starting to flow again and people are starting to loosen those wallets a little.

It is now more important than ever to capture people’s interest while they are showing it, and give them enough reasons to follow that interest up with a purchase. This is something that double glazing companies tend to do very well or very badly. There are some absolutely brilliant companies out there that know exactly what their USP’s are and know how to market them to customer’s interests. On the other hand there are some terrible companies out there which continue to make a very half arsed attempt at selling and probably ruin 9 out of every 10 leads they get!