Customers · Sales
Where service-business customers come from
Measure honestly and you'll find your two channels. Guess and you'll pay for five that don't work.
Most service businesses can name where they hope customers come from. Very few can prove it. That gap is the whole problem — you can't double what's working if you can't tell what's working.
Start with the last twenty. Look at your last twenty customers. For each, write down where they came from: walk-in, referral from customer X, referral from someone in your industry, WhatsApp broadcast, a specific ad, a specific event. If you don't remember, ask them. Twenty is enough to see a pattern.
Group by channel. "Referral" is not one channel. A referral from an existing customer is very different from a referral from a supplier — they arrive with different expectations and different conversion rates. Split them.
Compute cost per customer per channel. Money is one input; time is another. An event you spent a Saturday at costs your Saturday. A broadcast costs the airtime. Don't let "free" hide time.
Pick two. Almost every stable service business ends up with two channels that produce most of its customers. Not five. Two. Pick the two with the best cost-per-customer and double down. Cut the rest for a quarter.
Measure the follow-up. First sales don't matter alone — repeat sales are where the margin lives. A channel that produces one-off customers is not the same as a channel that produces repeat customers. Track both, honestly.
Inside the Study Desk, Sales and Customer Acquisition takes this further — channel-by-channel measurement, scripted objection handling for your industry, and a follow-up system that survives you being on the road.
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