Most hotel tech founders know something is leaking. Very few can rank the leaks by what each costs.

This is the audit I run at the start of an engagement, written so you can run it yourself. Pull real numbers before you start. Guessing defeats the point, and the guess is always generous.

Demand: points one to three

1. Do hoteliers find you, or only other vendors? Take your top twenty organic landing pages and tag each as hotelier-intent or vendor-intent. Under 30 percent hotelier-intent means you are visible to competitors and invisible to buyers.

2. Can a hotelier describe what you do in one sentence? Ask five customers to write it unprompted. Five different answers, or any answer naming a feature rather than an outcome, means your customers cannot refer you because they cannot explain you.

3. Is your founder voice a channel or a hobby? Sessions from social referrers as a share of total, last thirty days. Under 5 percent means you are posting into a channel that does not return traffic.

Conversion: points four to six

4. What share of demos reach a second conversation? Under 40 percent is my working threshold from engagements rather than a published benchmark. Set your own once you have three quarters of data.

5. How long from first call to signature? Median, not average, because one long enterprise deal hides everything. Over ninety days for sub-50-room properties suggests risk is not being handled early enough in the conversation.

6. Do you lose to competitors or to no decision? Tag every closed-lost for six months. If the majority is no decision, you are optimising against rivals while losing to inertia. The research behind The JOLT Effect found 40 to 60 percent of lost B2B deals end this way, and hospitality sits at the higher end because switching costs bookings rather than money.

Activation: points seven to nine

7. What is your first-value moment, precisely? Not completed onboarding but a specific observable action, such as first reservation synced to the channel manager. If two people on your team name different moments, you have found a problem before measuring anything.

8. What share of new accounts reach it within thirty days? Take last quarter as a cohort. Under 60 percent is where month-three churn is born.

9. When does churn actually happen? Plot churn by month since signup rather than as a monthly rate. A spike at month three is an activation failure surfacing late, not a product failure. A rate tells you how much; a cohort curve tells you when, and when tells you why.

Expansion: points ten to twelve

10. Do your best customers buy more over time? Net revenue retention, including upgrades, downgrades and churn. SaaS Capital's 2025 retention survey puts median NRR at 102 percent in the 25,000 to 50,000 dollar contract band, bottom quartile 97. Read the band nearest your pricing rather than the headline.

11. Does anyone refer you without being asked? Unprompted referrals as a share of pipeline over twelve months. Zero is a signal rather than bad luck, in an industry where general managers move properties constantly and talk more than most.

12. Which of the above is the expensive one? Rank everything you scored as leaking by revenue cost per quarter.

How to read your score

Zero to two leaking: the funnel is broadly working. Fix the specific point and move on.

Three to five: one stage is structurally broken. Almost always activation, almost always mistaken for a conversion problem.

Six or more: the leaks are connected. Fixing them individually will not work, because one root cause is producing several and you will be treating symptoms in sequence.

What to do with the ranking

Fix the most expensive leak first and leave the others alone until it closes.

This is counterintuitive when three things are visibly broken, but fixes interact. Improving conversion while activation is broken increases how many properties churn at month three, and the resulting dip convinces teams the work failed.

The point everyone gets wrong

Point twelve. Not through carelessness, but because you cannot see your own funnel from outside it, and the leak that feels most urgent is the one producing visible pain rather than the largest number.

If a metric takes more than five minutes to find, record that too. A number you cannot see is a number you cannot manage, and missing instrumentation is usually the first fix rather than the last.

The full version with the scoring sheet is here: 12-point leak audit.

How the ranking usually goes wrong

A founder runs this audit honestly and scores four points as leaking: demand, conversion, activation and referrals.

Asked to rank them by cost, they put conversion first. The reasoning is sound on its face. The sales team is missing target, deals are visibly stalling, and two reps have raised it in consecutive weeklies. It is the loudest thing in the business.

Working the numbers instead: conversion is costing roughly one deal a month, call it forty thousand a year in delayed revenue. Activation, at 48 percent reaching first value in thirty days, is producing a month-three churn rate that costs closer to three times that, compounding, because each lost property also removes its expansion and referral potential.

The activation number was never raised in a weekly, because nobody is in the room to raise it. The properties that fail to activate are not angry. They are quiet, and then they are gone.

Visible pain and expensive pain are different quantities, and businesses are organised to surface the first. That is the entire reason point twelve is hard, and why doing this exercise with someone outside the company usually changes the answer.

Related reading

• The Four Places Revenue Leaks in a Hotel Tech Company

• What a GTM Consultant Actually Does for Hotel Tech

• When to Bring in Outside GTM Help