Lead Leakage Guide

A lead leakage program should begin with evidence, move through repair, and end with ongoing control.

Phase 1: define leakage — Agree on events such as no response, slow response, incomplete cadence, missed customer reply, bad handoff, unscheduled qualified lead, and unrecovered cancellation.

Phase 2: build the baseline — Audit thirty to ninety days of legitimate inquiries. Calculate leak rate by stage, source, channel, and time.

Phase 3: rank the leaks — Use frequency and expected value. A rare inconvenience should not outrank a daily missed-sales-call pattern.

Phase 4: repair ownership — Every stage needs a current owner, backup, next action, and due time.

Phase 5: repair response — Improve alerts, overflow, after-hours coverage, and channel visibility where the timing data shows delay.

Phase 6: repair persistence — Create outcome-specific follow up rather than one generic callback reminder.

Phase 7: repair handoffs — Make sure context, commitments, and qualification travel with the lead.

Phase 8: monitor exceptions — Wrong numbers, cancellations, transfer failures, and customer replies often reveal whether the process is truly mature.

Phase 9: review monthly — Measure whether each targeted leak actually shrank. If not, change the intervention.

(New closer) Nine phases for one problem sounds like overkill until you notice most businesses have only ever looked hard at one or two of them — usually response speed — and assumed the rest were fine by default.