# Where do your leads leak?

> Twelve yes or no checks across the four places a lead dies: never recorded, answered, followed up or closed out. See your worst leak and what closes it.

Leads leak in four places: never recorded, never answered, never followed up and never closed out. Answer three yes or no checks for each place and the tool counts the gaps. The place with the most gaps is where I'd start, and a tie goes to the earlier place, because a leak upstream shrinks everything after it.

## The four places a lead dies

1. **Never recorded** The lead never lands in one place someone checks, so a form fill, a message or a missed call goes unanswered. The fix is one intake list that every channel feeds, with duplicates caught on the way in.
2. **Never answered** The lead lands, then waits too long for a personal answer to what they asked. The fix is a first reply drafted within minutes and approved by a person before it sends.
3. **Never followed up** The first reply goes out, and nobody follows up when the lead goes quiet. The fix is a follow-up schedule that stops itself when the lead answers.
4. **Never closed out** An interested lead never gets a booked call, a proposal or a reason to come back. The fix is a booked call or proposal date on every interested lead, plus a regular pass over leads that went quiet.

## How this is calculated

Each place has three yes or no checks, and a yes means the practice is in place. Every no counts as one gap, so each place scores from zero to three.

The place with the most gaps is your worst leak, as long as it has at least one. When two places tie, the earlier one wins, because a leak upstream starves everything after it. A lead that was never recorded can't get a slow reply.

### Assumptions and limits

- The answers are yours, and the starting answers are an example.
- There is no benchmark. The tool compares your four places with each other and with nothing else.
- It counts missing practices. How many leads each gap costs depends on your volume, and the response-time tool puts a figure on the first-reply leak.

## Questions

**What do I fix first?**

Start with the worst place the tool names, and inside it, the check you answered no to that is quickest to put in place. If leads go unrecorded, fix that before anything else, because every later fix depends on the lead landing somewhere someone checks.

**What counts as a first reply?**

A personal answer to what the lead asked. A message that only says you got their note doesn't count, because it answers nothing they asked.

**Why does follow-up leak?**

Because nobody owns it. The first reply has an obvious trigger in the lead's message. A follow-up needs someone to notice that a lead went quiet, and in a busy week nobody does.

**Do I need a new CRM to fix this?**

Often not. These gaps can close inside the tools you already use, once each step has an owner or runs on its own. I'd change the CRM only if it can't hold every lead in one place.

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## Related

- [The four places a lead dies](https://signalnine.io/bottlenecks/four-places-a-lead-dies): Leads drain out of a pipeline in four places: never recorded, never answered, never followed up and never closed out. How to count each one this week.
- [The lead-response bottleneck: how fast to answer a new lead](https://signalnine.io/bottlenecks/lead-response): How fast to answer a new lead, why a slow reply hands the decision to someone else, and a system that drafts from your rules for a person to approve.
- [The follow-up bottleneck: why follow-ups fall through the cracks](https://signalnine.io/bottlenecks/follow-up): Follow-ups slip when the next step lives in someone's head. They hold when every open lead carries a next step, a date and a drafted nudge a person approves.
- [What do slow replies to leads cost you?](https://signalnine.io/tools/response-time-cost): Multiply your leads, the value of a won client, your close rate and your own estimate of leads lost to slow replies to see the revenue at risk.

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Mashrur Rahman, Founder, SignalNine. Published 2026-10-04, updated 2026-10-05.
Canonical: https://signalnine.io/tools/lead-leak-finder