The five numbers a small business funnel needs to be usable

4 days ago
3 min read

Introduction

Most funnel measurement fails by being too ambitious. Someone lists twenty metrics, three of them require software nobody has installed, and within a month nothing is being counted at all. The alternative is a very short list that can be maintained by one person with a spreadsheet.

Five numbers is enough to run a small business funnel. They can be counted manually, they do not depend on analytics being configured correctly, and between them they identify which part of the process is losing money. Anything beyond them is refinement, and refinement is worth having only once the basics are stable.

1. The five numbers a small business funnel needs begin with enquiries

The first count.

How many people contacted you this month, by any route — form, phone, email, in person, message. One number, counted the same way every month. Most businesses genuinely do not know this figure. Everything below it is a proportion of this one.

2. Quotes or proposals issued

The second count.

Of those enquiries, how many reached the point of a price being given. The gap between this and the first number is your qualification and responsiveness performance. It is frequently the largest single loss in the whole funnel. Enquiries that never received a price are the cheapest thing you will ever fix.

3. Jobs won

The third count.

How many of those quotes became work. This is the number everybody already tracks, and on its own it explains very little, because it says nothing about what happened before the quote. Read it as a ratio to the quote count rather than on its own.

4. Average value

The fourth number.

Total revenue divided by jobs won, over the same period. Without it, a rise in volume and a fall in value look identical. It also turns the other counts into money rather than activity. Track the median as well if a few large jobs distort it.

5. Elapsed time from enquiry to decision

The fifth and least common.

The median number of days between first contact and a yes or a no. This is the number that tells you whether the process is getting slower, and slowness is what most improvement work is actually fixing. It is also the easiest of the five to improve.

6. Count them the same way each time

The consistency requirement.

A definition that drifts makes the whole series worthless, and definitions drift whenever a new person starts counting. Write the definition down beside the number. It takes a sentence each.

7. Use a month or a quarter, not a week

The period.

Weekly numbers at small volumes are mostly noise, and reacting to them produces churn. Monthly is usually right; quarterly for long sales cycles. Pick one and hold it.

8. Put all five on one page

The presentation.

A single sheet with five rows and twelve columns is a complete funnel report for most small businesses. If it does not fit on a page, it will not be looked at. Add a column each month rather than rebuilding it.

9. Add a sixth only when the five are stable

The restraint.

Once you have twelve honest months of these, the next question will suggest its own metric. Adding metrics before that point is how measurement collapses. The order matters more than the ambition.

Be careful about replacing any of these with a website metric. Sessions and click-through rates describe traffic rather than the funnel, and a business can improve every one of them while the five numbers stay exactly where they were.

Conclusion

Count enquiries, quotes issued, jobs won, average value and the days from enquiry to decision.

Define each of them in a sentence so the definition survives a change of staff, use a monthly or quarterly period rather than a weekly one, keep all five on a single page you add a column to each month, and resist adding a sixth measure until you have a full year of the first five counted the same way.