Systems NinjasSystems Ninjas
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The money is not in the market you have not reached. It is in the people who already found you.

Every month, people raise their hand at your business and walk away without buying. Most of them leave no trace, so nobody ever counts them. Put four numbers in and the arithmetic will count them for you, then show you what moving three ordinary levers would actually be worth.

You do not need to know your numbers precisely, and you do not need to know what is normal for your industry. Every box tells you how to work it out, and every slider shows you what the published research does and does not say. Where there is no trustworthy figure, it says that too.

1 · Your numbers
Never seen numbers like these before? Start here

There are only four, none of them need to be exact, and a rough number you estimated in ninety seconds is far more useful than an empty box. Here is the whole thing on a worked example — a small dental clinic:

  • RevenueAbout $30,000 in a normal month. Not the best month, not December.
  • Average saleA typical visit is billed at $60. Some are $20, a few are $400. Take the middle.
  • EnquiriesRoughly 800 people a month get in touch somehow — calls, WhatsApp, the form, walk-ins.
  • CurrencyPick yours. It only changes the symbol.

The tool works out the rest: $30,000 divided by $60 is 500 customers, so of 800 enquiries, 300 people did not buy. That is the number this whole page is about.

A normal month. Not your best one.
How do I work this out?
This is money in, before costs — not profit, not what you paid yourself. Open last month’s bank statement or your point-of-sale total and use that. If last month was unusual, use the month before.
What a typical customer spends in one go.
How do I work this out?
Take the monthly revenue you just typed and divide it by how many separate sales you made that month. Twelve thousand across 200 invoices is an average sale of 60.

If you sell one big thing rarely, use the price of that thing. If you sell a subscription, use what one customer pays you in a month, not their lifetime value — lifetime value inflates every figure below it and the point of this page is a number you can defend.
Everyone who raises a hand: messages, calls, forms, walk-ins, DMs. Estimate it. A rough number beats no number.
This is the hard one. How do I count it?
Nobody has this number written down, which is exactly why the leak stays invisible. Do not try to reconstruct a month. Count seven days and multiply by four.

Count anyone who made contact wanting something, whether or not they bought:
  • WhatsAppNew chats, plus old chats that went quiet
  • PhoneAnswered and missed — missed calls are the ones that matter most here
  • Forms & emailWebsite enquiries, quote requests, booking attempts
  • SocialInstagram and Facebook DMs, comments asking price or availability
  • In personWalk-ins who asked and left. Estimate honestly — nobody logs these

If you truly cannot face counting, guess. Then guess low. The number this page produces is large enough on a cautious guess that a precise one rarely changes the decision.

Customers a month
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Revenue divided by average sale
Who did not buy
—
Enquiries minus customers
Conversion rate
—
Share of enquiries that became a sale
Every year, people raise their hand and walk away worth
—
—
That is straight arithmetic on the four numbers you just typed. Nothing assumed, nothing added. Nobody converts all of it and you never will. The only question worth asking is how many of those people currently get a second message.
2 · The three levers—

Step 1 Capture

Of the people who did not buy, most left no trace. No name, no number, no way to ever speak to them again. Capture turns an anonymous walk-away into someone you can still reach.

Partial evidence What the research says, and what to put in the box
  • The Baymard Institute keeps a running average of documented online cart abandonment: 70.22%, calculated across 50 separate published studies and last updated in September 2025. Seven in ten people who get as far as a basket leave without buying. Baymard Institute, Cart Abandonment Rate ↗
  • That figure is online checkouts only, where at least the shop can see the person leaving. On a phone call, in a shop doorway or in a DM there is no basket and no record at all — which is the entire reason this lever exists and the reason no one can put a percentage on it.
So what do I put? Not an industry statistic — an inventory question. Of the people who contacted you last month and did not buy, how many could you send a message to right now? If the honest answer is “almost none”, then your capture slider genuinely starts near zero, and that finding is worth more than any benchmark. The slider asks where you could get to, not where you are.

The second slider — how many captured people eventually buy — has no trustworthy published figure. It depends completely on what you sell and how you follow up. 5% is deliberately pessimistic.
Of non-buyers, share you capture details for0%
Of those captured, share who eventually buy5%
Worth per year—

Step 2 Speed

An enquiry that waits goes cold, and the ones arriving at 9pm on a Saturday wait longest. This lever is not about getting more enquiries. It is about not losing the ones you already got.

Published evidence What the research says, and what to put in the box
  • Harvard Business Review audited 2,241 US companies by sending each one a real enquiry. 23% never replied at all. A further 24% took more than a day. Among those that did answer within 30 days, the average reply took 42 hours. Oldroyd, McElheran & Elkington, HBR, March 2011 ↗
  • In the same study, firms that made contact within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to have a real conversation with a decision maker as those that tried an hour later — and more than sixty times as likely as those who waited a day or more. Same study ↗
  • A separate study of 15,000+ leads and 100,000+ call attempts across six companies over three years found the odds of qualifying a lead fell fourfold between 5 and 10 minutes, and twenty-one fold between 5 and 30 minutes. Oldroyd (MIT Sloan) with InsideSales.com, Lead Response Management Study ↗
Read the 23% carefully. That is the share of companies that never replied, not the share of your enquiries that go unanswered. It tells you that being slow is completely normal. It does not tell you your own number.

To get yours, look: open last week’s inbox, WhatsApp and missed calls and count how many got no reply, or a reply the next day. If you genuinely cannot check, 25% is a cautious starting point, given that in that audit nearly half of all companies were either slow or silent.

The second slider is the honest weak spot. No study converts “reply faster” into “win this many more”. Those multiples are odds of a conversation, not of a sale, and anyone who hands you a straight conversion percentage for this has invented it. 10% is a placeholder, not a finding.
Share of enquiries not answered quickly today0%
Of those, share you would win by replying instantly10%
Worth per year—

Step 3 Return

The cheapest customer you will ever get is one you already have. This lever asks a smaller question than any loyalty scheme does: how many would come back just one more time in a year, if you actually asked them.

No benchmark worth quoting Why we are not giving you a number here
  • Published “average repeat purchase rate” figures are among the least trustworthy numbers in marketing. Searching for one returns 18.8%, 27%, 28.2% and “between 25 and 30%”, each presented as the average, nearly all published by companies selling retention software, mostly with no stated method. We are not going to repeat any of them at you.
  • The one genuinely durable finding is about profit, not revenue, and even it is quoted inconsistently. The original Harvard Business Review paper reports that cutting customer defections by 5% raised profits by 25% to 85% depending on the industry. Bain, the firm of one of its own authors, today words the same finding as “almost 100%”. Treat it as a direction, never as a multiplier for the box below. Reichheld & Sasser, “Zero Defections”, HBR, September 1990 ↗
So what do I put? You do not need a benchmark here, you need one afternoon with your own records. Of the customers who bought from you last month, how many had bought from you before? That is your real return rate and no published average can tell you it.

Then note what this slider actually asks, because it is smaller than it looks: not how many become loyal, just how many would come back one extra time in a year if somebody actually asked them to. 10% is a modest place to start.
Share of customers who return once more a year0%
Worth per year—
On your numbers and your assumptions
—
a year, from people you have already paid to reach
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Read this before you quote the number to anybody Every figure above is arithmetic on what you typed. The sliders are your estimates. The research blocks tell you what has actually been measured and what has not, but not one of those studies was run on your business, and none of them is a forecast. Nobody can promise you will recover any of it, and anyone who does is selling you something. What this tool is for is simpler than that: it shows you the size of the pool you are already sitting on, so you stop assuming the answer is more traffic. Set the sliders to whatever you genuinely believe. Even on conservative settings the number is usually bigger than people expect, and that is the whole point.

Where these numbers come from

Every study cited on this page is listed here in full, with a link to the primary source rather than to somebody’s summary of it. Two of the most repeated statistics in this field — “78% buy from whoever replies first” and “35 to 50% of sales go to the first vendor” — are deliberately absent, because we could not trace either one back to a published study with a stated method.

  1. Oldroyd, J. B., McElheran, K., & Elkington, D. The Short Life of Online Sales Leads. Harvard Business Review, March 2011. Audit of 2,241 US companies. hbr.org ↗
  2. Oldroyd, J. B. (MIT Sloan) with InsideSales.com. Lead Response Management Study. Three years of data, six companies, 15,000+ leads, 100,000+ call attempts. leadresponsemanagement.org ↗
  3. Baymard Institute. Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics. A running average across 50 published studies, last updated 22 September 2025. baymard.com ↗
  4. Reichheld, F. F., & Sasser, W. E. Zero Defections: Quality Comes to Services. Harvard Business Review, September 1990. hbr.org ↗
What now

A number on a screen has never recovered a single customer.

The three levers are not clever. They are capture, speed and return. Almost every business we meet is running all three on memory and good intentions. Installing them is the whole of what we do, and what it costs is on the pricing page in actual numbers, before you speak to anybody.

Rather talk it through? Book a call.

Bring your numbers from this page to the call. It makes the first ten minutes considerably less boring for both of us.

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