Every lead gets an answer in under a minute.

New enquiries get a real reply in seconds rather than the next morning, then a follow-up that continues on its own until the lead books or tells you no.

Talk to us

In short

Answered in seconds at any hour, then chased for as long as it takes, and stopped the moment they say no.

Replies before the other quotes do
Follows up for weeks, not once
Cancels itself when they answer
Every source, one standard

Why it leaks

Whoever replies first usually wins the job

Leads decay quickly, and they decay in a specific way. Somebody who fills in three enquiry forms in ten minutes is talking to whichever business answers first. A reply that lands the following morning is not competing against the other two quotes. It is competing against a conversation that has already happened.

The second half of the problem costs more and is almost invisible, because it never appears as a lost deal. Most follow-up stops after one attempt. The lead who was not ready in week one, and who would have been ready in week five, simply never hears from the business again. That is not a lost lead. It is an abandoned one, and it is indistinguishable in the CRM from a lead that was never going to buy.

Both halves are solvable, and neither is solvable by trying harder. Answering within seconds at eleven at night is not a discipline problem, and remembering to send a fourth message on day fourteen to a lead from a month ago is not something any busy person reliably does. These are scheduling problems wearing the costume of effort problems.

Illustrative. The research behind it: a response-time study by MIT and InsideSales put the odds of qualifying a lead roughly twenty-one times higher inside five minutes than inside thirty, and a Harvard Business Review audit of 2,241 companies put the average first response at 42 hours.

The cadence

One lead, fourteen days, nobody chasing

A worked example of a single enquiry arriving late on a Tuesday and what happens to it afterwards. The messages are the ones that would actually go out.

An illustrative sequence, not a record of a real customer. The spacing, the channels and the wording are all set per business.

What runs

What happens without anybody remembering to

Most businesses start with the instant first reply on their highest-volume source, because it is the change with the shortest path to a booking, then add sequences and sources from there.

01
Instant first reply
A real response within seconds of the enquiry landing, at any hour, on the channel the lead used. Not an acknowledgement that a human will be in touch.
02
Every source, one queue
Website forms, listing sites, paid ads, phone, and social messages all feed the same process, so a lead is treated the same wherever it came from.
03
Qualification in conversation
Establishes scope, timing and fit while the person is still paying attention, rather than sending a form that asks them to do it later.
04
Routing with context
A lead that is ready reaches the right person with the whole conversation attached, so nobody opens with questions the lead has already answered.
05
Multi-step sequences
Leads that go quiet get a properly spaced sequence over days and weeks, written in your voice, with each message taking a different angle rather than repeating the last.
06
Quote and proposal chasing
The quote that went out and was never answered gets followed up on its own schedule. This is usually the single largest pool of recoverable work.
07
Speed-to-lead measurement
Time from arrival to first reply, recorded per source, so the number stops being a matter of impression.
08
Duplicate and identity handling
The same person enquiring twice from two sources is recognised as one lead, so nobody receives two opening messages from the same business.
09
Clean stop on a no
Someone who says no, or asks not to be contacted, is suppressed immediately and permanently, and the reason is recorded.
10
Reactivation of old leads
The enquiries already sitting in your CRM from six months ago are worked on a separate, slower cadence. Most businesses are sitting on more of these than they realise.
11
CRM write-back
Every message, reply, qualification answer and outcome is written back, so the record is complete without anybody typing it up.

Sequences

A new enquiry and a dead quote need different letters

A lead who has never spoken to you and a lead sitting on an unanswered quote need different messages at different intervals. Treating them the same is what makes follow-up feel automated.

New enquiry
Triggered the moment a lead arrives. The priority is speed and a real question, because the objective at this stage is a reply rather than a booking. It runs for a few days and hands over the moment the lead engages.
Quote not answered
Runs after a proposal or estimate has gone out and gone quiet. Paced more slowly and written to be useful rather than pushy, because the lead has already met you and the silence usually means comparison rather than disinterest.
Went quiet mid-conversation
For the lead who was engaged and then stopped replying. Picks up the specific thread it dropped rather than starting again, which is the difference between being followed up and being processed.
Reactivation
Worked across leads that are months old and long since written off. The slowest cadence of the four and the least commercial in tone, because the only reasonable objective is to find out whether the need has come back.

Instead of what

Why autoresponders and drip campaigns fall short

Every business already does something with a new enquiry. The gap is rarely intent, and almost always either speed or persistence.

How automated lead follow-up compares with replying manually, a templated autoresponder, a CRM drip campaign and chasing by hand
Approach	Replies in seconds	Holds a conversation	Follows up past once	Adapts to the reply	Stops cleanly on a no
Replying when you can	No	Yes	Rarely	Yes	Yes
Templated autoresponder	Yes	No	No	No	Sometimes
CRM drip campaign	Yes	No	Yes	No	Usually
Chasing manually	No	Yes	Depends on the week	Yes	Yes
Automated lead follow-up	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

Replying when you can
Replies in seconds
No
Holds a conversation
Yes
Follows up past once
Rarely
Adapts to the reply
Yes
Stops cleanly on a no
Yes
Templated autoresponder
Replies in seconds
Yes
Holds a conversation
No
Follows up past once
No
Adapts to the reply
No
Stops cleanly on a no
Sometimes
CRM drip campaign
Replies in seconds
Yes
Holds a conversation
No
Follows up past once
Yes
Adapts to the reply
No
Stops cleanly on a no
Usually
Chasing manually
Replies in seconds
No
Holds a conversation
Yes
Follows up past once
Depends on the week
Adapts to the reply
Yes
Stops cleanly on a no
Yes
Automated lead follow-up
Replies in seconds
Yes
Holds a conversation
Yes
Follows up past once
Yes
Adapts to the reply
Yes
Stops cleanly on a no
Yes

Replying when you can is the honest answer most businesses give, and it fails at eleven at night and during any week that gets busy. A templated autoresponder solves the speed and nothing else: it cannot answer the question the lead actually asked, and everybody recognises one.

A CRM drip campaign is closer, and it is the option worth taking seriously. What it does not do is respond to what came back. It sends message three on day five whether the lead replied on day four or not, which is precisely the behaviour that makes people stop reading. Chasing by hand beats all of it on quality and loses on both consistency and reach, because it depends on somebody having a quiet afternoon.

How long does a form on your site currently wait?

Most businesses have never measured it. We will, across every source you use, and tell you where the time is actually going.

Talk to us

Wired into

Where your leads already live

Follow-up is only worth running if the record ends up where your business already keeps it. These indicate the class of system it works with.

CRM: HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Zoho
Field service: Jobber, Housecall Pro, ServiceTitan
Forms: Typeform, Gravity Forms, Formspree, native site forms
Ads and listings: Google Ads, Meta lead ads, and most marketplace lead feeds
Email: Google Workspace, Microsoft 365
Messaging: Twilio, and most SMS and business messaging providers

This indicates the class of system supported rather than an exhaustive list. Where a business runs on something less common, we confirm compatibility before anything is agreed. Messaging and email sending are also subject to the consent rules of the jurisdiction you operate in, and those are scoped as part of the build.

Rules of engagement

This writes to your customers in your name

This service writes to your customers in your name, repeatedly, without anyone reading each message first. The terms that govern it matter more here than anywhere else we work.

Your voice, not ours
Sequences are drafted from how you already write to customers, and you approve every message before it is capable of sending.
It stops when told
A no ends it immediately and across every channel. We would rather lose a marginal lead than earn a complaint.
One conversation at a time
Part of the build is making sure this and any existing CRM automation are not both messaging the same person on the same day.
The record is yours
Every message and outcome is written back to your CRM, so the value stays with the business rather than inside a tool we operate.

01
Map every source
We list every place a lead currently arrives: site forms, listing sites, ad platforms, the phone, social messages, and the ones that only turn up in somebody's inbox. Sources nobody remembers are the usual finding.
02
Define what ready means
Qualification is worthless in the abstract. We set the specific criteria that separate a lead worth interrupting somebody for from one that should be handled without you.
03
Write the sequences
Each of the four sequence types is drafted in your voice, with the spacing and the angles set deliberately. You approve the wording before anything is capable of sending.
04
Connect the CRM and the channels
Your own number and domain, your CRM, and whatever existing automation is already running, so the two do not collide.
05
Go live on one source
The highest-volume source first, where the feedback arrives quickest and a mistake is visible within a day rather than a quarter.
06
Read the replies and widen
We go through what leads actually wrote back, correct the messages that did not land, and add the remaining sources once the first is behaving.

Who benefits

When speed is worth engineering

A good fit

You buy leads, or generate enquiries you cannot answer instantly
The same person is enquiring with two or three firms at once
Quotes go out and then go quiet, and nobody chases them
Trades, real estate, dealerships and professional services

Not a fit

Volume is low enough that every enquiry already gets a considered reply within minutes
The first message is a negotiation rather than a qualification
Enquiries arrive through a channel we would have no way to read

Objections

The ones worth raising

Is this just an autoresponder?

No. An autoresponder sends one templated message and stops. This holds a conversation, asks questions, qualifies against your criteria, books where it can, and follows up over weeks with genuine variation between messages.

Will it annoy people?

Sequences are paced deliberately and stop the moment someone says no. Three messages over two weeks is not pestering. Never following up at all is the more common and more expensive mistake.

Can it work alongside our current CRM automation?

Yes, and making sure the two are not both messaging the same person is an explicit part of the build rather than something discovered afterwards.

What happens when a lead replies mid-sequence?

The rest of the sequence is cancelled immediately and the conversation takes over. A follow-up that arrives after somebody has already answered is the fastest way to look automated.

Do messages come from our number, or yours?

Yours. Your number and your domain, so replies come back to you and the record stays in your systems rather than in a platform we operate.

The nine seconds

Why a reply takes nine seconds and not nine hours

Speed is an architecture question rather than an effort question. These are the parts that decide whether a reply takes nine seconds or nine hours.

01
Intake
Every source is wired in directly rather than by forwarding email: form posts, lead notifications from listing and ad platforms, inbound calls and messages. A lead is in the system in under a second, because everything downstream is measured from that moment.
02
Identity resolution
Incoming leads are matched against what you already hold, by phone and email. This is what stops the same person being opened twice, and what lets a returning enquiry be recognised as one.
03
The language model
Writes the first reply and every message after it from your services, your terms and your voice, with the conversation so far in front of it. It is constrained to ask rather than assert, and to hand over rather than guess.
04
The sequencer
Holds the schedule: what goes out on day two, day five and day fourteen, and what happens when a reply arrives mid-sequence. Cancelling the rest of a sequence the instant somebody answers is the part that most implementations get wrong.
05
Delivery
Sends on the channel the lead actually used, through your own number and domain, so replies come back to you and the messages look like they came from your business rather than a platform.
06
Suppression and consent
A stop request, an unsubscribe or a plain no removes the lead from every sequence immediately, permanently, and across channels rather than just the one they replied on.

Also

The rest of the pipeline