Enquiries go cold because nobody follows up in time

How quickly should you reply to an enquiry?

Within the hour, if you can. The best-known evidence is a 2011 Harvard Business Review article by James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington. They looked at 1.25 million sales leads received by 42 US companies. Firms that tried to reach a customer within an hour of the enquiry were “nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead” as firms that tried even an hour later (Harvard Business Review, The Short Life of Online Sales Leads, March 2011). Qualifying, in their study, meant having a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker. Compared with firms that waited 24 hours or longer, they were more than 60 times as likely.

The same authors sent a test enquiry online to 2,241 US companies and timed the replies. 37% answered within an hour and 16% within one to 24 hours. 24% took longer than a day, and 23% never answered at all. Among the companies that replied within 30 days, the average wait was 42 hours.

These were US firms handling web leads in 2011, and one author, David Elkington, was chairman and chief executive of InsideSales.com at the time. We’d expect the window to be shorter today, because buyers now message several businesses at once from their phones and go with whoever answers first. That last part is our reading, from our own work.

Where do enquiries fall through in a small business?

In the gaps between channels and between people. These are the ones we see most often:

• WhatsApp on a personal phone. The enquiry sits among family groups and supplier chats, and by evening it has scrolled out of sight.
• Missed calls. A call comes in during a meeting or after hours, and nobody calls back because nobody is sure whose job it is.
• Website forms. The form sends its emails to an address set up when the site was built, sometimes one nobody reads any more.
• The shared inbox. An email to info@ waits for whoever checks it, and each person assumes someone else already has.
• Different staff. Each salesperson keeps their own leads in their own phone. When they go on leave, or leave the company, the leads go with them.

The HBR authors saw the same gaps in the US companies they studied: leads pulled from the system once a day instead of as they arrived, sales teams busy chasing their own prospects, and rules that shared leads out by territory. A small business has the same gaps, with fewer people to catch what falls through them.

How do you stop enquiries going cold?

Four steps, in this order. In our experience the first two take an afternoon to set up.

1. Give every enquiry one place to land

   Pick one list where every enquiry gets written down, whatever channel it came from. A shared Google Sheet is enough to start. Give each enquiry a row: name, how it came in, when, who owns it, the next step and the date of that step.

   If your website form is a Google Form, it can write each response into a sheet for you and email you when a new one arrives. Both settings sit under Responses (Google Docs Editors Help, View and manage form responses). Calls and WhatsApp chats get typed in by whoever took them, the same day.

2. Send an acknowledgement straight away

   An instant reply tells customers their message arrived and when a person will answer. The WhatsApp Business app, WhatsApp’s free app for businesses, has automated greeting and away messages for this, plus saved quick replies for common questions (WhatsApp Business, Why small businesses should use WhatsApp Business app). Set the away message to say when you’re back.

   Make the promise specific and keep it. “We’ll reply by 6pm today” tells the customer whether to wait or call someone else.

3. Set a reminder rule

   Write one rule and tell everyone who handles enquiries. Ours would read: every enquiry gets a reply from a person within an hour during working hours, and anything still open at the end of the day goes to the owner of the business.

   Then give the rule a nudge in each tool. WhatsApp Business has labels to sort chats, so open enquiries are easy to find and follow up (WhatsApp Business). In Gmail, snooze takes an email out of your inbox and brings it back to the top at the time you pick (Gmail Help, Snooze emails until later). In the sheet, the next-step date tells you what’s due today.

4. Check the list once a week

   Fifteen minutes, the same day each week. Go through every open row. Did each enquiry get a reply from a person? Does each one have a next step with a date? Close the rows that are won or lost, and write a few words on why the lost ones were lost.

   After a month you’ll know which channel brings the most enquiries and where they stall.

What can you automate, and what should stay human?

Automate the parts that are the same every time: the acknowledgement, writing the enquiry into the list, the alert that a new one has arrived, and the reminder when a date comes due. People forget those steps on busy days. Software keeps doing them.

Keep the answer itself human. The first real reply, the price, the judgment about what this customer needs, and the call that turns an enquiry into a booking all need someone who knows the business. In our view, an auto-reply that pretends to be a person, or a bot that guesses at prices, loses more trust than a short honest wait.

One rule matters if you run WhatsApp through software, on the WhatsApp Business Platform (often called the API). When a customer messages you, a 24-hour customer service window opens. Once it closes, you can send only templates that Meta has approved in advance (Meta for Developers, Service messages).