Are leads coming in that nobody's calling back?
You are spending money to generate leads. Those leads are landing in your CRM. But is anyone actually picking up the phone? Here's how to find out.
The short answer
Check your CRM for contacts with zero logged activities. Filter to leads created in the last 30 days with no calls, emails, or meetings logged. If the list is not empty, you are paying to generate leads that nobody is working. Every uncontacted lead is ad spend with zero return.
Paying for leads nobody contacts is burning cash twice
You spend $3,200 on Google Ads this month. Those ads generate 45 leads. Your team contacts 30 of them. The other 15? They sit in the CRM untouched. Nobody calls. Nobody emails. The lead goes cold in 48 hours.
You just paid to acquire those 15 leads. At $71 per lead, that is $1,065 wasted on acquisition alone. But the real cost is the revenue those leads would have generated. If your average deal size is $4,000 and your close rate is 20%, those 15 uncontacted leads represent $12,000 in lost pipeline. Per month.
The worst part: your ad dashboard shows 45 leads generated. It looks like the campaign is working. Nobody realizes that a third of those leads are being wasted on the other side of the handoff.
What an untouched lead looks like in your CRM
An untouched lead is a contact record that exists in your CRM but has no associated sales activity. Specifically:
- Contact was created (from a form, import, or ad). The lead exists in the system.
- Zero logged activities: no calls, emails, or meetings. Nobody on your team has interacted with this person.
- No associated deal or opportunity. The lead was never moved into the sales pipeline at all.
How to find uncontacted leads in your CRM (step by step)
In HubSpot
- 1Go to CRM → Contacts
Click “Advanced filters.” Add filter: “Create date” is in the last 30 days. Add another filter: “Number of times contacted” equals 0.
- 2Review the filtered list
This shows every contact created in the last month that your team has never reached out to. Note the count. If you want lead source detail, add the “Original Source” column to see which channels these leads came from.
- 3Export for analysis
Click “Export” to download the list. Include properties: Contact Name, Email, Create Date, Original Source, and Lifecycle Stage.
In Salesforce
- 4Go to Reports and create a Leads report
Create a new report using the “Leads” report type. Add filters: Created Date equals “Last 30 Days” and Last Activity Date equals blank (no activity). Add Lead Source, Status, and Company fields.
- 5Export to CSV
Click “Export Details” and download as CSV. Count the records. Each one is a lead that was generated and never contacted.
Calculate the waste
- 6Multiply uncontacted leads by your cost per lead
Check your ad platform (Google Ads, Meta Ads) for your average cost per lead. Multiply that by the number of uncontacted leads. That is the acquisition cost you wasted. Then multiply the count by your average deal value and close rate to estimate lost pipeline.
Total time: 20 to 40 minutes. The CRM filtering is straightforward, but calculating the true cost requires pulling cost-per-lead data from your ad platforms, which means logging into another system.
New leads come in every day, and gaps reopen constantly
This is not a monthly check. Leads go stale in hours, not weeks. If you check once a month, the leads you find are already long dead. The real value is catching them within 24 to 48 hours of creation.
Some teams set up CRM workflow automations to assign leads immediately. That helps. But automations do not guarantee the rep actually followed up. They just guarantee the lead was assigned. The gap between “assigned” and “contacted” is where leads die.
Or let Bottomline track lead follow-through automatically
Bottomline connects to your CRM and ad platforms. It knows which leads came in, which ones were contacted, and which ones were ignored. Your monthly report includes a clear count of wasted leads and the estimated dollar cost.
No CRM filtering. No ad platform logins. No manual calculations. Bottomline shows you the gap between leads generated and leads contacted, with the dollar cost attached. You know exactly how much your lead response gaps are costing every month.