4 lessons · about 10 min · written by the PTS AI team from live deployments
Four exercises, one spreadsheet
You probably do not need more leads
2 min
Revenue is down, so the reflex is to buy more leads. It is the most expensive answer available and usually the wrong one, because the demand you already generated is sitting unworked in five places.
Calls nobody answered. Your phone system knows.
Leads that went cold because attempt two never happened.
Quotes that stalled and were never touched again.
No-shows, the cheapest opportunity in any business.
Past customers, who already trusted you once.
Every one of these is already paid for. New leads are the only item on that list where the money has not been spent yet.
The next three exercises need a CRM export and a spreadsheet. Nothing to install.
How much money is sitting in your database
3 min
Most owners can quote their cost per lead to the dollar and have no idea what their database is worth. That asymmetry is the opportunity.
Pull five counts, then price them
Past customers past your dormancy window, leads never contacted, records marked no decision, no-shows never rebooked, opportunities idle ninety days.
Multiply by a pessimistic reachable rate — a third of an old list is fair for phone.
Then by your real close rate on warm contacts, then by average ticket.
Write the number down and date it. If it is smaller than a month of ad spend, go buy leads. That is a legitimate answer.
In most multi-location businesses it is several times larger, and it has been sitting there through every budget meeting of the last two years.
What are your people doing by hand?
2 min
Nine in the morning, and a person you hired to close deals is copying a phone number from one screen to another.
One week, one tally sheet per role
Dialing, repeat follow-up, reminders, copying between systems, CRM updates, building reports, deciding who owns a record.
Marks, not minutes. Nobody fills in a timesheet honestly and everybody makes marks.
Then ask it out loud, once per line: does a human need to spend time on this, or does a human need to be free for the conversation at the end of it?
This is not about removing headcount. Usually it is discovering you already have the sales capacity you were about to hire, and it is doing data entry.
Find the stage where the money disappears
3 min
Draw your funnel on one line, put your own numbers under each step, and find the biggest percentage drop. Not the step that annoys you most — that is a different thing and almost always a smaller number.
Lead to contacted collapses: speed and attempts, not lead quality.
Conversation to qualified collapses: your bar is wrong, or nobody agreed what it is.
Booked to showed collapses: reminders, or you booked people who were being polite.
Do it again per location. A company-level number hides the two branches killing the average.
Automating the wrong stage is the most expensive mistake here, because it works perfectly and produces nothing. Whatever step lost the most is the one you take into the next section.
Rather not build it yourself?
We already run this across 28 finance branches.
Same system, installed and operated for you — calling, qualifying and handing leads to your team while you focus on closing.
