The sales solicitation problem, and why the excluded count belongs on the page

If you have a public phone number and a contact form, some proportion of your inbound is people trying to sell you something.

SEO agencies. Staffing firms. Software vendors. Merchant services. Business listing services. They arrive through exactly the same channels as your real enquiries, they trigger exactly the same conversion events, and in most reporting they are counted as leads.

Filtering them out is uncontroversial. What happens next is where it gets interesting.

The obvious part

Sales solicitations are not leads. They should not appear in a lead count, they should not inflate a conversion rate, and they absolutely should not sit in the denominator when somebody calculates cost per lead.

The scale varies by how visible your contact details are and how attractive a target your category is. In some businesses it is a rounding error. In others it is a meaningful fraction of total inbound, large enough that including it changes what a month looks like.

Nobody argues with this in principle. In practice it gets skipped, because identifying them requires actually reading the records rather than counting them, and that is work.

The part almost nobody does

Once you have a filter, you have created something that needs to be trusted.

A number that has had things removed from it is a number somebody made a judgement about. If the report shows 93 leads and does not mention that 41 records were excluded, then the reader is being asked to accept both the count and the invisible decisions behind it.

That is a bad position to put a reader in, and it gets worse the more consequential the number is.

Show the excluded count.

93 new leads. 41 records excluded as sales solicitations.

One line. It converts an unauditable filter into an auditable one.

Why this matters more than it sounds

Three reasons, in increasing order of importance.

It makes the filter checkable. If the excluded count jumps from 12 to 60 in a month, somebody will notice and ask. Either something changed in your inbound, which is worth knowing, or the filter changed, which is worth knowing more.

Without the number displayed, a filter can drift for a year and nobody finds out. Filters do drift, because the rules get tuned and nobody re-tests them against old data.

It removes an obvious way to cheat. A filter you cannot see is a filter that can be adjusted. If lead volume is soft this month, a slightly more permissive definition of what counts as a real enquiry solves it, and nobody can tell.

I am not suggesting anybody does this deliberately. The point is that a system where it is possible and undetectable is a system that will drift in the flattering direction over time, because every individual judgement call gets made under mild pressure in the same direction.

Displaying the count removes the option, which removes the pressure, which is a kindness to whoever is making the calls.

It is a signal in its own right. Solicitation volume tells you something. A sharp rise usually means you have appeared in a list somebody is selling. It can also mean your contact details have become more visible, which is worth knowing if you did not intend it.

More usefully: if solicitation volume is high and rising, your team is spending real time on it. That is an operational cost that never appears anywhere, and quantifying it occasionally changes how people think about their contact form design.

The general principle

This is a specific instance of a rule worth applying to every filter, exclusion, deduplication and adjustment in a reporting system:

If you removed something, say how much.

Deduplication removes roughly 30% of raw contacts. Say so, and show the number.

Sales solicitations get excluded. Say so, and show the number.

A source failed to collect and a day is missing. Say so, and say which day.

The alternative is a clean-looking number with invisible surgery behind it. Clean-looking numbers are exactly the ones that get quoted in board packs and defended in meetings by people who do not know what was removed to produce them.

What this looks like in practice

In the lead record, excluded rows are still visible. They are marked as excluded and greyed rather than deleted. Same for deduplicated rows: the second contact from the same person appears, marked as a duplicate of the earlier record, with the date it duplicates.

That is more visually cluttered than a clean table of qualified leads. It is also the version somebody can audit, and the clutter is the audit trail.

If somebody asks “are you sure that is 93,” the answer is not “yes, trust the pipeline.” The answer is to open the table and show them the 41 excluded rows and the reason attached to each.

The connection to everything else

This is the same commitment that runs through the whole method, applied to a small operational detail rather than to a headline claim.

A gap is a finding, never a hole to fill. If a data source fails, the report says the source failed rather than estimating around it.

Absence of evidence is reported as absence of evidence. Not converted into a confident negative.

Every number traceable to a dated, named source. Including the ones that were removed.

Marketing reporting has a strong pull toward tidiness, because tidy numbers are easier to present and easier to defend in a meeting. The pull is worth resisting, because tidiness is achieved by hiding the judgement calls, and the judgement calls are where the errors live.

A slightly messier report that shows its own workings is worth considerably more than a clean one that asks to be trusted.

Every definition, including exclusions and deduplication, is published here.