Northfield Supply

Northfield sells workwear and site safety equipment to trade customers. For eighteen months the company has bought search traffic through an outside agency and judged the result by the number of enquiries arriving. That number is healthy. Forty to forty five people fill in the form every month and roughly two of them become customers.

Nobody has looked at what happens between those two events. There is no routing, no qualification and no service level on the reply. Every enquiry lands in a shared inbox, and whoever opens it first sends the same thirty minute calendar link.

We just send them a calendar link and hope. Honestly nobody owns it after the form. J. Reyes, 06:40

M. Okafor described two enquiries that arrived in the same week. One was a reorder of about four hundred units for a site in Leeds. The other was a student asking whether the company sold single pairs of boots. Both received the same automated confirmation and the same calendar link. The student booked a slot. The reorder did not.

The Q3 commitment came up twice. It was made to the board on the strength of the enquiry volume, before anyone had looked at the conversion rate behind it. Neither person on the call knew whether there is a specific date inside the quarter or whether it means the quarter end.

Three things are happening, and only the third one is about tools.

1. Nobody owns the first day

   An enquiry that arrives at nine in the evening is answered the following afternoon at the earliest. Their own estimate for the median was around twenty six hours, and both of them volunteered that Friday evening enquiries often wait until Monday. For a trade customer with a site start date, a day is usually enough time to call somebody else.

2. Every enquiry is treated as the same enquiry

   There is no question anywhere in the flow that separates a four hundred unit reorder from a single pair of boots. The form asks for a name, an email address and a message. Because nothing distinguishes them, the only triage available is whoever opens the inbox first, and the fastest enquiry to deal with wins the attention rather than the largest.

3. The pipeline is not measured, so the loss is invisible

   Both people on the call reported the same two numbers, forty five in and two closed, but neither could say where the other forty three stop. HubSpot was mentioned once, with no detail about what is configured in it. Until we have seen it, anything we say about reporting is a guess.

This is why more traffic has not helped. The spend above the form has been doing its job for eighteen months. The constraint moved below the form some time ago and nothing in the current setup would have shown that.

The temptation here is to rebuild the funnel. We would not. The traffic is already arriving and already converting into enquiries at a rate the company is happy with, so touching the top of it risks the one part that currently works.

The work is to put a process around the enquiry after it arrives, in the order that the money sits. Qualification first, because until enquiries are separated, every other improvement is applied evenly to a student and to a four hundred unit reorder. Response time second, because it is the cheapest change available and the one trade customers notice. Reporting last, because it tells you whether the first two worked, and because it depends on seeing the CRM.

Nothing in this scope requires new software. Everything described below can be built in the tools Northfield already pays for, assuming the HubSpot instance is in a usable state.

This came up on the call and is worth answering directly, because the answer affects how the two pieces of work are judged.

Nothing here touches the campaigns, the keywords, the landing pages or the ad budget. That work stays where it is. What changes is what happens to the enquiries those campaigns produce, which means the agency's own numbers should improve without them changing anything.

One practical consequence. Once qualification is in place, the raw enquiry count may fall, because some of what is currently counted as an enquiry is a student asking about a single pair of boots. If the agency is measured on enquiry volume, that will read as a decline. Agreeing before we start that the measure is qualified enquiries rather than total form fills will save an awkward conversation in month two.

Four months, phased so that the cheapest and most visible change happens first. The windows below are relative, because no start date was agreed on the call.

• The paid search campaigns. They stay with the agency running them. Nothing here changes a keyword, a bid or a landing page.
• Website redesign. The two questions go on the existing form. If the form itself turns out to be unusable, that is a separate conversation and we will say so rather than quietly widening this.
• New software. Everything described above runs in tools Northfield already pays for.
• Outbound. No prospecting, no list building and no cold email. This is about the enquiries already arriving.
• Answering the enquiries. We build the rota and the templates. Your people reply, unless you decide otherwise, which is one of the two open questions on pricing.

None of these are difficult. All of them stop the work starting if they arrive late.

The quickest of these is the second one. Everything we have marked as a guess in this document closes with that one piece of access.