You sent customers to dealers last month. How many bought?

Count the customers you sent on to dealers last month. Now count how many of them bought.

If you cannot say, even for one dealer, even for last week, that is not carelessness. The customer is given a name and a number, walks out, and the story continues somewhere you cannot see.

Three things you cannot see

First, which dealers turn your enquiries into orders. You are sending customers you worked hard to attract. Some dealers will call the same day. Others are busy, and the slip stays in a pocket. Without the outcome, you send your best enquiries to both alike.

Second, which of your salesmen send ready buyers. One salesman may hand over customers who have chosen a product and want to buy. Another may hand over customers who are still only looking. Each counts as one referral, so on your figures they look the same. The difference is real, but nothing records it.

Third, what the showroom is worth. This is the one that eventually matters. The showroom costs rent, staff, stock, display material and electricity. It books very little revenue itself, because the invoice is raised elsewhere. So when someone looks at the numbers, the costs are visible and the contribution is not.

A showroom that inspires, hands over and never hears back is hard to defend in a slow quarter. Not because it is not working, but because nobody can show that it is. It is the same gap that makes secondary sales so difficult to track once goods leave your hands.

Where the trail goes cold

At the handover. It is a slip of paper, a phone number read out, or a message from one person to another. Nothing records that it happened, so there is nothing to follow up against.

Nobody is at fault. The dealer is busy with his own customers, and nobody has asked him to report back. The salesman has moved on to the next customer. The slip of paper is in a pocket.

What a handover needs

Two things, and neither is complicated.

A record on both sides. The dealer receives the customer’s requirement in writing: what he chose, the quantity, the quotation. Not a name and a number. The dealer starts the conversation knowing what the customer wants.

An outcome that gets recorded. Did they call, did the customer visit, did it close, at what value. Not every dealer will answer every time. Even “no, they went elsewhere” is worth having, because it tells you something about that dealer, or about the enquiry.

With those two, you can begin to say it as a sentence: these visits became these orders, through these dealers, worth this much. We have written separately about how to tell whether an experience centre is working, and this is the measure the whole argument rests on.

Start smaller than you think

You do not need this working across every dealer before it is useful. You do not need software to begin.

Take the next ten handovers. Send each dealer the requirement properly, in writing. Then ask, once, a few weeks later, what happened. Ten answers will show you something about your channel that you cannot see today.

Notice which dealers answer, and how quickly. That alone says something about each of them, and it is the start of an answer to the first question.

Sales360 sends the customer’s requirement to the dealer as a quotation rather than a phone number, and the outcome is recorded against that enquiry when the deal closes.