You finally got more leads, so where are the customers?

That’s a daft place to end up, because the sums were supposed to be simple. More leads should mean more customers. So either the sums are wrong, or something is happening between a person becoming a lead and a person paying you, and nobody is looking at it.

My starting opinion is the second one. I think a lot of us spend months getting leads without deciding what we want those leads to do next, and then we’re surprised when they do nothing. But sometimes more leads is the right answer, and I’d rather find out which this is than assume.

Here’s what I found. A lead count doesn’t tell you whether anyone wants to buy, and the quickest way to find out why sales haven’t moved is to look at what each lead did and whether anyone replied to them. The exception is small numbers. If you only get a handful of leads a month, you can’t tell what’s going wrong, and more leads is a fair answer. To see why, I started with the most basic question I could think of. What is a lead?

If you’re running Meta ads, the platform has a definition. In Meta’s pixel reference (opens in a new tab), the standard Lead event is described as “When a sign up is completed”. That’s the whole description.

Be careful with that, because “Meta says” covers a lot of different setups. This is the pixel’s standard Lead event, which tracks something happening on a website, and the business chooses what triggers it. One account’s Lead could be a newsletter sign-up and another’s could be a booking request. Lead ads that use instant forms, campaigns that send people to Messenger and campaigns that ask for a phone call are all set up differently, and I haven’t found one definition that covers them all. So I can’t tell you your leads are sign-ups. I can tell you that Meta’s own description of its standard website event is a sign-up, and that the first useful question is what the person in your spreadsheet did to get there.

Instant forms have a similar nudge in the setup. Jon Loomer’s guide (opens in a new tab) (published 2024, updated March 2025) lists the form types. “More volume” is selected by default and is designed to be quick to fill in. “Higher intent” adds a review step before someone submits, which is there to improve lead quality. Meta’s own lead generation guide (opens in a new tab) lists the same three form types.

So the fastest option comes pre-selected, and the person who used it spent a few seconds. I don’t think that’s sinister. A volume number going up on a dashboard is what most advertisers want to see. But it does mean “lead” can describe someone who tapped a button and someone who was seriously weighing up buying from you, and the count can’t tell you which.

I expected to find the platforms happily counting anything. Meta’s lead generation guide says otherwise. It separates maximising the number of leads, which it labels as being for volume, from maximising “conversion leads”, which it labels as being for quality. A quality lead, it says, is one where “a qualifying, lower-funnel action identified by the business” has happened.

That’s the question I was about to accuse business owners of skipping. What should a good lead go on to do? Meta asks, and then leaves the answer to you.

There’s a catch. The tool for this is called Conversion Leads, and Meta’s developer documentation (opens in a new tab) says that connecting your CRM and using it “may yield higher quality leads that are more likely to convert”. The requirements are specific. It currently works with instant forms only. You need at least 200 leads a month, you need to send data back at least once a day, and you need to pick a stage that happens within 28 days of the lead and converts at somewhere between 1% and 40%.

Now hold that up against a small service business, one with a client diary rather than a customer list in the thousands. If you’re getting 40 leads a month, that tool isn’t open to you. The ad system carries on finding more people like the ones who filled in the form, because nobody has told it who bought. Which is fair enough, because for most small businesses nobody has recorded who bought against which lead.

It also changes what I think about my own opinion. Say you get 40 leads a month and 2 of them buy. Is that bad luck, a weak offer, or replies that took too long? You can’t tell from numbers that small, and neither can anyone else. At that size, more leads can be the sensible next move, because you need more of them before any pattern shows up. I’d started out suspicious of that answer, and I’m less suspicious now.

Then there’s the stretch between someone signing up and you finding out whether they wanted to buy. The best-known piece of research on it is old and American, so I’d treat it with care. In 2011, Harvard Business Review published a study (record here (opens in a new tab)) in which researchers sent test enquiries to 2,241 US companies. According to one summary, 37% replied within an hour and 23% never replied at all. The firms that got in touch within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as those that waited an hour longer.

On whether speed matters, that study says yes, and the sooner the better. It doesn’t give a number your business should hit, so I wouldn’t treat an hour as a rule. What it also shows is how much room there is between a sign-up and the first human reply for things to go missing, and that in a study of companies who all wanted those enquiries, nearly a quarter said nothing.

So I’d want to know which people on your list got a reply from a person, how long it took, and what they said back. That answers “did anyone follow up”, and it also answers “did they get a chance to say they were interested”, which aren’t the same question. Someone who signs up for a free thing and receives the free thing has been served. Nobody asked whether they were thinking about buying anything. And a spreadsheet looks the same whether the person wasn’t interested or was never asked.

I came in thinking the problem was that owners hadn’t decided what a lead should do next. That still stands, but I’ve stopped blaming the owners for it. The default form is the quick one, the tool for finding buyers needs data that small businesses don’t have, and the dashboard looks healthy whether or not anyone buys, so nothing prompts you to build the step in the middle.

If you want to know which situation you’re in, take your last twenty leads and give each one a row. What did they sign up for? Did a person talk to them, not an automated email? How long did that take? What did they say? Who enquired and disappeared? If most rows show a conversation and a “not now”, the leads are probably fine, the offer or the timing is what to look at, and more leads won’t help. If the rows show people replying “how much is it?” and then hearing nothing for a week, that’s where the sales went, and it’s cheaper to fix than anything involving ads. And if you can’t fill twenty rows because you haven’t got twenty leads, you have your answer too. Get more leads.