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Join for freePosted: Fri 6th Nov 2026
Do you know where your last five enquiries came from?
Most small businesses don’t, so they can’t tell which marketing is paying off.
In this Lunch and Learn, Sharon Gwati-Mudzudzu shows how to send every enquiry from your website, social media and email into one sheet or CRM automatically, tagged by source.
See how simple tags and a free connector tool turn scattered messages into a clear picture of what’s working. It’s a practical, jargon-free session, with no coding or analytics skills needed.
See how to capture every enquiry from your website, social and email in one place, without manual copying
Learn how to tag each lead by source so you can see which marketing brings in business
Leave with a simple setup using free or low-cost tools (such as Google Sheets and a connector like Zapier or Make) and a first step you can take this week
Sharon has moved from over 20 years in digital marketing to marketing engineering, building the automated systems behind marketing rather than just running campaigns.
She is the founder of Marketing.27, which helps businesses and solo operators put AI-automated marketing in place.
With an MBA in big data analytics and deep experience in analytics and tracking, she specialises in making marketing data simple and useful. She is a regular BrightonSEO speaker and is based in Cumbria.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Amy: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today’s Lunch and Learn. My name is Amy, and I’ll be your host today. For those of you who are joining a Lunch and Learn for the first time, Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for startups and small businesses.
I’m pleased to introduce Sharon, who is a marketing strategy and AI automation consultant. In this session, Sharon is going to show you how to send every enquiry from your website, social media and email into one sheet or CRM, automatically tagged by source.
If you’ve got any questions throughout the webinar, please post them in the chat, and we’ll do our best to answer them in the Q&A at the end. Today’s webinar is also being recorded, so we’ll send you a follow-up email later today with the recording and further resources. Without further ado, I’ll hand over to you, Sharon.
Sharon Gwati-Mudzudzu: Thanks, Amy. Hi, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I’m going to be taking you through how to automate your lead tracking.
First, I’ll tell you a little bit about myself. I do quite a number of things, but I do two things very well. The first is digital marketing data – if you give me a dataset, no matter what it looks like, I can probably clean it up and tell you what’s going on with your business.
The second is building marketing systems. I’ve spent 23 years selling stuff online for other people, and I’ve sold everything – well, not cars, that’s the only thing I haven’t sold. I’ve sold paintball guns, I’ve sold software, and I’ve helped plumbers and tradespeople become visible online.
So I’ve worked across a huge range of industries. For some people, that’s experience – and it is experience – but for me, it really is an adventure, because it’s given me opportunities to learn. I’m now using those adventures to build marketing systems, one of which I’ll be sharing today.
When I work with different people, one of the main things that comes up is that they don’t know where their leads are coming from, or they can’t quantify things. You’ll get an enquiry, and then you’ll probably get a deal – someone comes to your website and buys something. But people are never able to trace it back: where did it come from, how much did I pay, what did I do to get that lead, and what can I do to get more leads?
I’m hoping I can take you through this so you can answer those questions for yourselves and for your businesses. Where did that enquiry actually come from? That’s one of the questions a lot of people have.
If you’re anything like me, you try to keep on top of it, and then you find yourself asking what happened after you got it. You question yourself: I think I replied, or the details are there somewhere, or I sent a quote. Or you don’t know which enquiries became a sale.
It’s hard when you run it manually, because so much relies on things that are done by hand. You might have the capture running automatically from your website or form, but the follow-up is what makes it hard, because that’s the manual part.
The manual part is the actions you take, and it’s slow. Enquiries sit in inboxes, and you have to remember to go back into the inbox and look at where they all are. It’s also blind, because sometimes you don’t have proper tracking, so you don’t know where an enquiry has come from.
And it’s fragile. If you’re anything like me, you do the school run in the morning, you come back, and you have three meetings. By lunchtime, you remember you volunteered for the bake sale at school, you have to do something else, and you forget.
You just don’t have the time to go back and look at it. So when everything is being done manually, it costs a lot more than just time.
So I developed this system, which is a five-step tracking system. It takes you through definition, tagging, capturing, automation and reporting. If you’ve ever dealt with me, you’ll know that reporting is very, very important – we like reporting.
I’m going to take you through these steps, looking at what each one is and how you can implement it. Before we get into the leads themselves – when people are filling in forms, or you’re getting business emails – and start looking at them as a process, I think the first thing you need to do is define what a lead is.
You need to sit down with yourself, your team, your business or your mentors, whoever it is, and write down what a lead is. The first thing is to decide what makes an enquiry qualified.
It might be that someone comes to your website, gives you their name and email address, and requests a quote or a service. Maybe that’s what qualifies them. If they’re qualified, they have a different journey, and you automate them completely differently.
Someone else might come in and give you the same thing – their name and email address – but then ask a question. You can convert customer A right there and then, because they asked for a quote or a proposal, but you can’t convert customer B. So their journey is different.
You need to understand what that means to you, because that makes automation and follow-up easier. Then, who owns each stage of that enquiry? If you’re a big business, it would probably be someone within your team, and you need to detail how fast they must respond.
If you’re an owner-led business, it’s just one person, or it might be a bot or an agent that you build with your AI programs. Then there’s the one I think a lot of people overlook: what do you call a lead that’s lost, and why?
This is quite important, because not every lead is going to give you a sale. Not everyone is going to come in, fill in a form and then become a customer. Maybe they’ll say, ‘You know what? We really want your service or your product, but this isn’t the right time for us.’
That’s where the why becomes important. You might have the conversation in November, and they say they don’t have a budget right now, but they will in the new financial year. That’s the point where you tell the automation to restart the conversation in April.
Having this definition helps you lay down your system and tell it what it’s supposed to do, and it helps you run it more efficiently. After that, it’s the tagging.
I know a lot of people look at this and think, ‘I really don’t like doing that,’ or ‘I don’t know how to do it.’ I promise you, it’s really easy, and if you know what it’s supposed to do, I think it becomes easier. If you really don’t want to do it, you can ask Claude, Copilot or ChatGPT to tag your links for you.
Tagging is important because it tells you not only where the lead is coming from, but also how effective your marketing is. I think a lot of people miss this information because they don’t capture it. If you understand what’s working, you’ll probably do more of it, which is why it’s important to have tagging in place.
Your web developers or web partners should be able to create these links for you – they’re called UTM parameters – so you can use them wherever you share your content. I’ll break down what they mean. The first part is yoursite.co.uk, forward slash the offer you have on your site, so this is the page that sits on your site.
Then, because you’re creating social media content – you’re putting things on LinkedIn or Meta, maybe you have a Substack newsletter, or even TikTok – wherever you’re putting your content becomes the source. It’s important that you have that as part of your URL.
Then there’s the medium, which is social media – you can put whatever you want, as long as it makes sense to you. Then we look at the campaign: which campaign is this link coming from?
You then use this link. Instead of posting something on social media with a normal link that just goes to your page, this URL comes loaded with all this information, and we’ll see how you use it in the next slides.
So we’ve defined what a lead is. You now know what a lead is, and you have a map of what to do with every lead. And you’ve tagged, so wherever your traffic is coming from, you now have a tag for every source.
Now this is the part where you give every enquiry a journey. The journey I’ve laid out in this slide is that you receive an enquiry, and you make sure someone contacts them. That someone can be a person, a bot or an agent – whatever it is, there’s a contact.
Then they get what they’ve asked you for, whether it’s a quote or a proposal. At the end of this journey, you record whether it’s won or lost. You always need to be able to see what’s happened.
So the next slide shows you the status. Every time you look at your contacts or your CRM, you’ll always know what has happened and what the next thing is that you need to do.
Now I’m going to take you through the implementation itself. Step three is capturing every enquiry in one place. Like I’ve said, enquiries come from a lot of places.
You’ve got your website forms, your landing page forms and social lead forms. It can even be social adverts, where a person clicks an advert through to your website. It doesn’t matter where the lead is coming from – the process captures that lead, and then it does the UTM capture.
It captures the source, the medium and the campaign that brought this person to your website or to fill in this form. Then there’s the consent check, which is very important. If you haven’t put consent on your forms, go back and have it added.
Then there’s deduplication. You need to know whether this is a customer who’s already in your system, and if they are, who is best placed to handle them. If someone already exists in your system, you don’t want them to be treated as a new customer when they already have a relationship with someone else.
It might be best for the person they’ve been dealing with to carry on that relationship. All of this is added into what’s called a customer relationship management system, or CRM. This is the one that will save your life and keep everything clean.
Everything, regardless of where it comes from, then sits in one location that you can work through. There are paid CRMs and free ones, and people choose depending on what they want or what they know.
There’s HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho – there are so many of them. I’d encourage you to choose the simplest tool that you’ll actually use, and in this case, even a Google Sheet will work. The example I’m going to give you in this presentation shows how to use a Google Sheet.
So it doesn’t have to be paid, and it doesn’t have to be complicated to set up. You can use a simple Google Sheet, and it will do all the automation for you with the steps we’re going to look at. But what’s important is that every record has a minimum of five fields.
You’re free to put in as many fields as you want, but I think for any business, it makes sense to know who’s been in touch with you, where they came from and what the campaign was. We cover all that in the UTM parameters. Next is the stage: has this enquiry just started, has someone contacted them, and what’s going on with it?
Then you need an owner. Again, I keep stressing this. It’s important that there’s ownership of the leads, because without ownership, they fall through and you lose the potential for new business.
Then there’s the next action and a date. I work very well with deadlines, and I think it’s very important that every lead has a date attached to it.
So what’s the automation process? It starts when a person fills in a form – that’s what triggers the whole automation we’re going to look at now. It doesn’t matter where the form sits, whether it’s on the website, a landing page or from your AdWords.
They fill in the form and click submit, enquire or whatever button you have on the form. When they’ve done that, the automation enters all the information they filled in into a CRM or the Google Sheet. It saves the source, the medium, the campaign and the other important information.
It then sends you, the owner of this flow, an alert, whether by email, Slack or WhatsApp. I use email, because my phone goes off enough as it is, so I’d rather not have Slack and WhatsApp connected to my business. So I always get an email notification when something new has come in.
At the same moment, the person gets a friendly auto-reply saying, ‘We have received your enquiry. I will get back to you within the next day,’ or ‘within the next two days’. Then a follow-up task is created.
There’s a one-day difference between what the auto reply says and my own internal deadlines. [Note: unclear in the recording which deadline is earlier.] All of these actions in the middle column happen within the space of one or two minutes, depending on what the system looks like, and you have to test, test, test everything.
I’m going to take you through a system I built, which anyone watching this can build. It uses a form – it doesn’t matter what your form is – and I use Make.com, which is quite affordable.
You can use Make.com, you can use Zapier, or you can use n8n – those are the three that I use. Or, if you actually have a CRM, you can use it to set up a process just like the one I’ve detailed here.
So I’m going to show you the system. I’m just trying to get my mouse here. This is going to be very fast, because I can’t pause it.
You can see the form on the left-hand side. Someone has filled it in, and within the same minute, the details go to Make.com and are saved into the sheet. As soon as they’re saved, the person gets an email, and I get a notification.
The alert says that Alex from LinkedIn, from this campaign, has sent me an enquiry for my services. It says we’ve saved all of this in the tracker and that I have to reply within two days.
So you set up the form, and whenever it’s submitted, everything goes into Make.com. Make.com then submits everything into the Google Sheet. At the same moment, Alex gets a reply saying, ‘We’ve received your email. I will be in touch personally.’
I also get an alert saying Alex has done this, and this is what we’ve told him. Then a task is set up for me, telling me to follow up by this date.
With the auto-replies, you can put in whatever you want. If you want people to book demo time with you or look at additional information, you can set that up in the automation within Make.com.
Make.com and Zapier are both no-code. n8n might be a bit more complicated, but if you spend time with it, it’s quite simple.
So where does this process go wrong? Everything I’ve shown you, you can set up and run, and every enquiry is processed within a minute or two. You’ve got everything working, and you can get on with your day.
Where it goes wrong is if you don’t have UTM parameters. If you don’t tag all the traffic coming into your form or your website, you won’t know where the leads have come from. They’ll always show up as direct, which isn’t correct, and you can’t go back and see what’s actually working.
Then there are duplicates. The good thing about working with systems like Make.com and Zapier is that you can set rules to say, if this is a duplicate, then do that. But it doesn't work when there's an enquiry because it will start questioning the logic of what’s happening, so it’s quite important to set up a rule for what to do when there’s a duplicate.
And then there’s no consent. Please get consent – it will save you a lot. You’re collecting people’s data and processing it through different systems, both your own and systems like Make.com or whoever else you choose to work with, so make sure you get consent for that.
The final step is reporting. Reporting is important because it shows you what works, and I urge people not to overcomplicate it. Check these things: enquiries by source, customers won by source and time to first reply.
When you look at time to first reply, you’re looking at two things. First, is your team actually getting back to people in the time you’re promising? Maybe you’re overpromising, and there isn’t the capacity for that timescale.
Second, is the system you’ve built on Make.com, or wherever, actually giving that response in the time you’ve allocated? You need to check that number, because it helps you become more efficient, and you’re not lying to people.
Then there are open enquiries with no actions. This is money you’re leaving in your CRM, so go through it and look at what’s there.
And then act on it. Do more of what gives you wins. When you know what gives you better wins, there are other automations you can use to get leads faster and respond to them before they even fill in a form.
You’ll see patterns from going through your data. Instead of getting people to come to your website, you can change how you’re getting leads within the systems that are giving you those leads. Then fix or drop what doesn’t work – if it’s not giving you leads, don’t spend time on it.
To be honest, all of this just takes 10 minutes. So take 10 minutes out of your week to analyse what’s happening.
To start this week, you can scan this QR code, and there’s a page that will give you step-by-step guidance to do everything I’ve talked about. First, define your lead – write down what a lead is.
Once you know that, tag your next three links. Whether you’re writing social media posts or writing for someone else’s blog, tag those links and see what you find.
Then pick a home for your leads. If you don’t have budget for it now, use a Google Sheet. Then build your one form-to-CRM automation.
Make.com has a free package up to a certain number of credits, which is quite helpful, so try it. I promise they didn’t pay me, but it works.
Then diarise a 10-minute monthly review to go through everything I’ve talked about. When you start, test it as much as you can – it might be 10 minutes every week or every two weeks.
Once you gain confidence and it’s working, you can do your reviews every other month. So that’s it. Thank you very much for taking part, and I’ll hand back over to Amy so we can look at some questions.
Amy: Thanks so much, Sharon, that was really helpful. If anyone has any questions, please drop them into the chat now. I can see one question about when the recording will be available – it should be available this afternoon, so you’ll receive a follow-up email with the recording in it.
I’ll get started on some questions. What are the most common mistakes you see small businesses make when tracking enquiries?
Sharon: Not tracking – that’s the first.
Amy: Oh, really? Okay.
Sharon: The first one is not tracking, and I get it. You’re busy, you’re trying to run a business, and you’ve probably got family and all of that. But it’s the not tracking.
Then, when they do start tracking, there’s no system to it. As I said, it might be emails coming through, but you do nothing about them. When you decide that you want to track, have a system.
Maybe check your email every 10 minutes and get the information out of the email and into an Excel sheet or an Airtable database. Get the enquiries somewhere, not just lost in your email, and have a system so you can see everything more easily.
Amy: What free or low-cost tools would you recommend for a small business just getting started?
Sharon: Make.com and Google Sheets. Make gives you free credits – I haven’t maxed out mine, if that helps, and I’ve used it a lot to test this. There’s also Zapier, which is a bit more expensive depending on what you want to use it for, but Make really does the job, and it’s affordable.
Amy: Lovely. How long should you track your enquiries to make sure you have the correct data?
Sharon: You should keep tracking them for as long as you’re doing marketing, because this is linked to your marketing activities. If you’re going to have any marketing activity – any posts, blogs or emails going out – tracking what you get from it helps you see what’s actually working. So if you launch anything or do any marketing, track everything you can.
Amy: Perfect. Another question is, what’s the first practical step a business owner can take this week to start tracking their enquiries?
Sharon: I think it’s to sit down and start thinking about what a lead is, and then look at your capacity and what you can actually implement. The guide I shared will take you through it: what is a lead, how are my forms set up, have I set them up properly, and where are they going?
Understanding that, I think, is the first thing. Understand how it works right now, then clean it up and find ways to make it better.
Amy: Lovely. And what would you recommend to someone who’s been running their business for years but has never tracked where their customers come from?
Sharon: If you have a form on your website, go back to your website company or whoever built your website and ask where those enquiries are going. They will know, because that’s the only way people have been getting in touch with you.
If you’ve got social media pages, go into the inboxes. Wherever you’ve given people a way to contact you, try to find out where those leads were going, and that’s where you start from.
Amy: Lovely. Someone just wrote in the chat saying that sometimes they just ask when they get on a call how the person found them.
Sharon: I used to do that too, and I got embarrassed.
Amy: Lovely. I think we’re done with questions now, so just one final question before we close. If the businesses watching this could take just one piece of advice, what would you say it should be?
Sharon: I’d say it’s important that you understand the traffic you’re getting to your site. Tracking enquiries and building systems like this helps you understand what’s working with your marketing. If you’re like me, a small business owner, you don’t have a big budget for marketing, so I think it’s easier to lean into what’s working.
Being able to track things like this means having systems that say: this is where this person began, they went through that, and they gave me £200 for six months. I’ll go back and do whatever I did to get that person, so I can get others to do the same.
So find a system that works. It’s quite important that you know your numbers and can get back to the granular things that actually work for you.
Amy: Amazing. Well, thank you so much, Sharon; that was super helpful, and thank you to everyone who’s joined us on today’s webinar. As I said, we’ll be sharing the recording and further resources in a follow-up email this afternoon.
Thanks again, Sharon, for sharing all your insights. It was super clear and concise, and I’m hoping everyone’s clear on their next steps as well.
Sharon: Brilliant. Thank you for having me.
Amy: Thanks, everyone. I hope you all have a lovely rest of your day.
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