The Enquiries You Turned Down

An unread record

Over a year a small business turns down a meaningful number of enquiries: too small, too far, not what we do, not now, not at that price.

Each is dealt with in a minute and forgotten.

Collectively they are a description of how the market understands your business, produced by people with no reason to be polite about it.

That is genuinely useful information, and it costs an hour to read once a year.

Group by reason, not by count

The method, and it is straightforward.

Pull the declined enquiries from twelve months and put each into a category: outside our area, too small, too large, not a service we offer, could not do it in time, price, or not a customer we wanted.

The total number matters less than the distribution.

A category holding a third of the declines is telling you something specific, and it is usually something you can act on without changing what you sell.

What each pattern usually means

• Outside our area: your coverage is not clear enough.
• Too small: no minimum is stated anywhere.
• Not what we do: your description is being misread.
• Price: nothing on the site indicates the level.
• Timing: your lead time is not published.
• Wrong customer type: you are describing yourself broadly.

Every one of those is fixed by saying something on the site rather than by changing the business, which is why this review is unusually cheap.

The wrong enquiries are your fault

An uncomfortable framing and a productive one.

Somebody who enquires about work you do not do has not made a mistake, they have read something and drawn a reasonable conclusion.

The same applies to somebody outside your area, or with a budget far below your usual level. They found no signal telling them otherwise.

Which means each declined enquiry is a small piece of feedback about your own description, and a pattern of them is a clear instruction.

Fixing it saves your time and theirs, and improves the enquiries that remain because the filtering happens before they contact you rather than after.

A worked example

A firm reviewed a year of declines and found forty-one.

Fourteen were outside their working area, which was stated only on the contact page in a sentence.

Eleven were jobs well below the size they took, and they had never published a minimum.

Six were for a service they had stopped offering two years earlier and still had a page about.

They added their coverage to the header, put a from figure on every service page, and removed the old service page.

The following year declines fell to about a dozen, and total enquiries fell slightly while quoted work rose.

The owner's remark was that they had spent a year politely explaining the same three things to strangers.

Some declines are demand

The finding worth looking for specifically, because it is easy to miss.

Where the same request arrives repeatedly and is refused every time, that is a market telling you something.

It may be a service adjacent to what you do, a smaller version of your work that could be productised, or a customer type you have never targeted.

Refusing it forty times without ever asking whether it should be an offer is the expensive version of this.

The question is not whether to say yes, it is whether the repetition was noticed, and reviewing the year is how it gets noticed.

Where the enquiries came from

A second dimension worth adding if you have the data.

If most of the wrong enquiries arrive from one channel, that channel is describing you inaccurately.

A directory listing with an outdated category, an advert targeting too broadly, or a page ranking for something you do not want are all common causes.

That is a more precise fix than adjusting your general messaging, since it addresses the specific source rather than everything at once.

It also occasionally shows that a channel producing a lot of enquiries is producing mostly ones you decline, which changes what it is worth.

Say no better

A smaller point with a long tail.

The people you decline talk to other people, and a good decline is remembered.

Name somebody who can help, give a rough idea of what they should expect to pay, and be clear rather than vague about why you cannot.

That takes two minutes and produces referrals from people who never became customers, which is a source most businesses ignore entirely.

A vague brush-off produces nothing and occasionally produces a poor review from somebody who never bought anything.

Start recording them properly

The reason most businesses cannot do this review is that the declines were never written down.

They happened on the phone, or in a two-line reply, and left no trace beyond a sent message somebody would have to search for.

Fixing that costs almost nothing: a column in whatever you already use, or a shared note, recording the date, roughly what was asked for, and one word for why you said no.

One word is enough. Area, size, timing, price, scope.

Do that for a year and next December's review takes ten minutes instead of an afternoon of reconstruction, and the pattern is visible rather than remembered.

The counter-case

Not every pattern of declines is a problem to solve.

A business that is deliberately specialised will decline a lot, and that is the positioning working rather than failing.

Some filtering also has to happen in conversation, because no amount of website copy prevents somebody with an unusual situation from enquiring, and you would not want it to.

There is also a risk in over-qualifying: publishing minimums, areas, and exclusions so prominently that people who would have been good customers exclude themselves incorrectly.

Fix the patterns that repeat, keep the qualifying signals brief and factual, and accept a residue of declines as the cost of being findable.

The hour

1. Pull twelve months of declined enquiries.
2. Group them by reason.
3. Find any category holding a third or more.
4. Fix it by saying something on the site.
5. Look for repeated requests you always refuse.
6. Check which channel the wrong ones arrive from.
7. Write a decline that refers people on.

Step five is the one that occasionally finds a service worth adding, and it is invisible without the annual look.

Briefs that cannot be priced are covered in the quote request that cannot be quoted.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.