Two weeks ago, we shared the results of a mystery shopping project across 50 Australian and New Zealand businesses, testing how quickly — and how personally — they followed up on a genuine customer enquiry. The standout number: 48% of the businesses we approached hadn’t followed up at all within one working day.
A missed follow-up doesn’t feel like much in the moment. It’s just one enquiry, one day, one missed call. But run that same gap every day, for a year, and the picture looks different. Here’s what 48% non-response could conservatively be costing a business — using only simple, deliberately cautious assumptions.
What’s the cost of not following-up?
The assumptions
To turn a percentage into a dollar figure, we’ve made a few conservative assumptions. These are starting points, not universal truths — every business’s numbers will differ, and I’m going to encourage you to swap in your own.
- 5–10 leads per day, Monday to Friday (1,300–2,600 leads a year)
- 20% lead-to-customer conversion rate for leads that are followed up properly
- 48% of leads receive no follow-up at all within 1 working day (our mystery shop finding)
- $1,000 average sale value
We’ve kept this to a $1,000 average sale. Businesses with a much lower average sale — say, $100 — also tend to receive a far higher volume of enquiries, which changes the shape of the model considerably. That’s a different sum for a different piece.
What that adds up to
Apply the 48% non-response rate to a year of leads, then apply a conservative 20% conversion rate to the leads that went cold, and the numbers look like this:
At the lower end — a business fielding 5 leads a day — that’s roughly $124,800 a year quietly disappearing. At the upper end, a business fielding 10 leads a day is looking at close to $250,000 a year. Most businesses will probably sit somewhere on this spectrum, and it’s worth doing the sum on your own numbers rather than someone else’s.
Why this is probably an underestimate
This model holds conversion rate steady at 20% — but that’s not really how it works. Harvard Business Review found businesses that attempt follow-up within an hour are seven times more likely to qualify a lead than those that don’t, and MIT found a 5-minute response makes a lead 21 times more likely to qualify than a 30-minute one. In other words: fix the follow-up, and the 20% conversion rate itself tends to move — which means the true cost of the 48% gap is very likely higher than the figures above.
Work out your own number
Every business’s leads, conversion rate and average sale are different, which is exactly why a single headline figure only tells part of the story. We’ve built a simple calculator so you can plug in your own numbers — leads per day, conversion rate and average sale — and see what your own 48% (or whatever your real number turns out to be) is costing you.
Try it here:
The takeawayNone of this is about guilt or blame — it’s simply what the numbers say when you follow them through. The opportunity sitting in a business’s follow-up gap is often larger than the time and cost it would take to close it. This is where the real lever sits: not a one-off audit, but ongoing feedback, coaching conversations and accountability. It’s hard to know what’s actually happening in those first minutes and hours of a customer enquiry unless you’re regularly looking at it through the customer’s eyes — you don’t know what you don’t know until you check, and checking once tells you very little. Mystery shopping, paired with genuine coaching and accountability, is what closes this gap on an ongoing basis, rather than letting revenue quietly leak away between periodic checks. |
