Every marketing report has a number at the top. Choosing which number goes there is the most consequential decision in the whole engagement, and it is usually made by accident.
We put qualified RFQ volume there. Here is the reasoning, including the parts that are inconvenient for us.
Traffic is easy to move and easy to misread
Sessions can be doubled without touching anything that produces revenue. Rank for a broad informational term, publish enough general articles, and the graph goes up and to the right.
None of it necessarily produces a single enquiry from somebody with a requirement. For an industrial manufacturer, the population of people who will ever buy is small and specific. A thousand extra visitors from outside it is not progress; it is noise that makes the report look better.
The failure mode is not that traffic is useless. It is that traffic is a proxy, and proxies drift from the thing they stand for exactly when somebody starts optimising them.
The enquiry is where the business actually starts
For a manufacturer, the process begins when somebody with a real requirement asks for a quotation. Everything before that — the page that ranked, the specification a machine could read, the case study forwarded internally — matters in proportion to how much it moved that event.
So we count those events, and we qualify them. An enquiry for work you cannot do is not a success. An enquiry from a student writing a dissertation is not a success. Counting them would make our reports look better and your business no different.
What this costs us
Three things, and they are worth stating plainly.
It moves slowly. Industrial sales cycles are long, and a month where the work was good can still show a flat number. That is an uncomfortable report to present and an easy one to lose a client over.
It is affected by things we do not control. If quote turnaround slips, or a salesperson is away, or the sector goes quiet, the number moves and none of it is marketing. We report it anyway, with the context.
It is harder to attribute. Buyers read for months, ask an assistant, click a paid ad, then phone. Honest attribution here means admitting uncertainty rather than assigning the whole enquiry to the last click because that is what the tool does automatically.
What we ask of a client in return
The number only works if enquiries are actually recorded. That usually means a small amount of discipline that did not exist before: logging enquiries that arrive by phone, noting which were a genuine fit, and telling us when one turned into an order.
It is not much work, and it is the difference between a report that describes your business and one that describes our activity.
The test to apply to any agency
Ask which number they lead with, and ask what would make it go down.
A metric that cannot go down is not a measurement. It is a presentation.