A price-list download is not a lead: how to measure a channel whose revenue arrives in two years

The quotation is for roughly 1,500 square metres of paving stone. The road it will surface is due to be laid in about two years. And the first traceable step in that chain was somebody filling in a price-list form on a website on a Tuesday afternoon in August, four weeks earlier.

That is the first fully documented download-to-quotation chain I have for a natural-stone supplier I look after, and I have been waiting months for one. Their commercial lead had written to me a fortnight before, after a monthly review: now all that's missing is the link to the quotations and the sales. Not entirely unimportant. He was right, and I had nothing to give him.

Now I do, and it says two things I did not expect to have to argue for.

Nobody called back. Somebody called out.

When the enquiry landed, the managing director forwarded it to a colleague in sales with a one-line instruction: follow up in a week. She rang the architect. He, in her words, appreciated it very much. The quotation followed.

Two sales people in that business had independently reported the same thing about this channel in the same week: nobody has contacted me directly. Both of them were describing it as a weakness of the channel. It is not. A price-list download is a set of contact details and a stated intention. It is not a person who intends to ring you. The confirmation email that goes out automatically is administration; the phone call a week later is the marketing working.

The Harvard Business Review study of 2,241 companies responding to web-generated leads found that 23% never responded at all, and that firms which made contact within an hour were far more likely to qualify the lead than those who waited a day. I am not going to pretend a paving project with a 2028 delivery date runs on a one-hour clock. But the structural finding holds regardless of speed: the channel produces contact details, and contact details rot untouched.

So the recommendation I made is embarrassingly unglamorous. A follow-up commitment of about a week on every single price-list request, with a named owner per region. That is it. That is the whole intervention, and it is worth more than any further optimisation of the form it came through.

Benjamin Graham's line, quoted by Jeff Bezos in Invent and Wander: "In the short term, the stock market is a voting machine; in the long term, it's a weighing machine." Lead channels are the same. In the short term you are counting votes. The weighing happens years later, and you will not be running the same report by then.

A channel whose results arrive in 2028 cannot be measured in 2026 revenue

This is the part that changes how I report. If the paving goes down in about two years, then realised revenue this year tells you nothing about whether the channel works. Attribution logic that keys on revenue booked in the same calendar year will read this channel as a failure for two consecutive annual reviews and then, if anyone is still keeping records, as a miracle in the third.

So the leading indicator is quotation volume and quotation value, and realised revenue is the lagging one. Say that out loud before the numbers arrive, not after, because afterwards it sounds like an excuse.

The ad platforms have this constraint baked in and it is worth knowing the exact number: Google Ads lets you set a conversion window of at most 90 days for a search click. Ninety days against a two-year build cycle. Whatever the platform eventually reports as this channel's contribution is, by construction, a report about the first quarter of a multi-year decision. That is not a bug to be fixed with better tagging. It is the tool telling you honestly that it cannot see that far, and the honest response is to keep the long record somewhere the platform doesn't own.

What I am actually changing

Three things, none of them technical.

The quotation goes into a running enquiry-and-quotation register as entry number one, with the date of the original download attached. Not because one row is a dataset, but because the register only becomes an argument if somebody starts it before it is convincing.

The follow-up commitment gets a named owner by region, so that "somebody should ring them" has a name on it. I have written before that someone has to own the learning; the same is true of a phone call, and for the same reason — a responsibility spread across three people is a responsibility held by none.

And the reporting frame changes. I have been building a performance dashboard for this business that reports enquiry value rather than revenue, precisely because they take no payment online. This case says the same thing one layer further down the funnel: what the dashboard should be weighing is quotations issued, and the number it will not be able to show for years is the one everybody wants.

The temptation in that gap is to quietly substitute a number you do have. That is how you end up counting three enquiry routes as one funnel, or comparing two windows measured with different rulers. Long lead times do not make measurement impossible. They make it slow, and slow measurement is where most people start making things up.

One architect, one phone call, one quotation, four weeks and a two-year horizon. The channel did its job in August. The business did its job in September. What I have to do now is build a record patient enough to still be around in 2028.

Sources & further reading

External
The Short Life of Online Sales Leads — Harvard Business Review
About conversion windows — Google Ads Help

Related posts
Nobody had paid them a franc — building a dashboard on enquiry value
Three ways in, none of them a funnel
I replaced a monthly report with a 90-day review
Someone has to own the learning