What one forgotten customer costs you
A forgotten follow-up shows up in no report — which is exactly why it's so expensive. A formula and a worked example of how much the enquiries you forgot cost you each year.
A forgotten follow-up doesn't hurt. No invoice arrives, nobody complains, it shows up in no report. That's exactly why it's the most expensive line item most companies have never calculated. Let's calculate it.
The formula
Annual loss from forgotten follow-ups = enquiries per year × the share that end in "later" × the share that actually get forgotten × the conversion rate of a followed-up enquiry × the average deal value.
You know each of those numbers better than we do — plug in your own. Below is a model example, just to show the order of magnitude we're talking about.
A worked example
A small B2B company: 100 enquiries a year, average deal €2,400. Roughly a third of enquiries don't end in "no," but in "not now" — that's 33 live threads. Without a system, maybe half get followed up on; 16 get forgotten. If a followed-up enquiry closed just 15 percent of the time, that's 2–3 deals a year.
The result: €4,800 to €7,200 a year lying on the table with nobody bending down to pick it up. For companies with larger deals — machinery, technology, annual contracts — move the decimal one place to the right.
The second floor: the customer forgotten after signing
The calculation above counts only new enquiries. The second loss is often even more expensive: a customer who bought, got the invoice — and then never heard from you again. Their next purchase, service or renewal goes to whoever got in touch. Yet selling to an existing customer is several times cheaper than winning a new one — you don't need advertising, you just need to remember.
What to do about it
Three steps that cost nothing but discipline: 1) every enquiry ends with a date and a reason for the next step, 2) a system watches those dates, not a person, 3) after signing, the customer doesn't disappear from the system — they get a next date: a check-in call, an anniversary, a renewal.
You can run the formula without us. But if the number that came out is worth fixing, Lemnio is built precisely for the three steps above — try it free (100 companies and 200 contacts forever), or write to [email protected].