Stop counting enquiries. Start counting opportunities.

You had fifty enquiries last month. It's a nice number to report, and it tells you surprisingly little. Somewhere in those fifty are a buyer with a budget and a deadline, a student doing an assignment, a competitor checking your prices, someone in Perth you can't deliver to and a supplier who wants to sell you something. On the report, each one counts as one.

If it goes up to seventy next month, nobody can say whether that's good news. It might be ten more buyers. It might be twenty more students because an article started ranking.

What an opportunity is

An opportunity is an enquiry that someone in sales has looked at and agreed is real. They've got a need you can meet, they're somewhere you service, and there's a decent chance they'll buy within a time frame that matters to you. Each one also gets a rough value, meaning what it's likely to be worth if you win it.

Write the definition down and keep it short. Something like "a business in south-east Queensland that needs equipment we supply and expects to buy within twelve months" will sort most enquiries quickly. Yours will be different. What matters is that marketing and sales are working from the same one.

Why it changes behaviour

Counting enquiries rewards volume. Whoever's responsible for the number, an agency or someone in-house, has every reason to widen the net, because a broader campaign brings more enquiries even if fewer of them are buyers. The report gets better and the business doesn't.

Counting opportunities rewards quality. Now a campaign that brings thirty enquiries and two opportunities looks worse than one that brings ten enquiries and six, which is the truth. Whoever runs the marketing can see which campaigns, keywords and pages bring in real prospects, and move the money towards them.

Add a value and it gets sharper again. Six opportunities worth a few thousand dollars each and two worth a few hundred thousand are very different months, and a plain count can't tell them apart.

How to start

It takes one new habit. Within a day or two of an enquiry landing, someone marks it in the CRM as an opportunity with a rough value, or as not a fit with a short reason, like "out of area", "student", "too small" or "selling to us". That's it.

The "not a fit" reasons can be just as useful as the opportunities. If a third of last month's enquiries were out of area, that's a location setting in your ads. If a lot were students, an article or a keyword is pulling in the wrong readers. Without the reasons, those problems hide inside a healthy-looking enquiry count.

Then report opportunities and their total value by source each month, next to the enquiry count rather than instead of it. Over time you'll also see how many opportunities from each source become quotes and sales, which is the number that matters most in the end.

Things to watch

The values will be rough, and that's fine. What matters is being able to tell a small job from a big one. Don't pump them up to make a month look good, because the whole thing only works if people trust the numbers.

The definition will need tweaking. After a couple of months you'll hit edge cases, like an enquiry from an existing customer, or a big company asking for one small part. Decide how you'll treat them and add a line to the definition.

And someone has to own the marking. If it's everyone's job, enquiries sit there unmarked and the report drifts back to counting everything. One named person with a backup is plenty.

Fifty enquiries feels good. Eight opportunities with a value on each, most of them from two campaigns, is a number you can actually run a business on.