Guide
What to do with an enquiry for seven days, written out day by day
Most businesses contact a new enquiry once. If that one attempt lands, they have a customer. If it does not, the enquiry sits in an inbox and quietly becomes nothing. Nobody decided to give up, there was just never a second step written down. This is the second step, and the five after it, laid out day by day so it can be run by a person or built to run itself.
Why one attempt is the default
Not laziness. The absence of a plan. Somebody replies to a new enquiry, does not hear back, and moves on to the work that is actually in front of them. There is no moment at which following up becomes anybody's job, so it does not happen.
Meanwhile the customer who did not reply was not saying no. They were driving, or at work, or waiting on two other quotes, or they read the message and meant to answer.
Before day one: speed
Everything in this plan is worth less than the first reply being fast. If your first response takes four hours, the sequence below is repairing damage that did not need to happen.
The published research on this is covered properly in the speed to lead guide, and the calculator sizes the gap with your own numbers. The short version: minutes matter, hours do not exist, and after a day you are working a much colder lead.
Day 1: answer, then ask one question
The first message does two jobs. It confirms a human has it, and it asks the one thing you need in order to move forward.
One question, not a form. A reply is the entire objective of this message, and every additional question reduces the chance of getting one.
- Within minutes: acknowledge, by whatever channel they used. If they texted, text back.
- Name the next step and roughly when it happens. "I can look at this today and come back with times."
- Ask one thing. The single fact that unblocks the next step: the address, the model, the date, the photo.
- Do not attach anything. No brochure, no price list, no lengthy explanation. Attachments turn a conversation into a document to review later.
Day 2: the useful nudge
Only if they did not reply. This is the message most businesses never send, and it is the highest-yield one in the sequence.
The mistake is sending "just checking in", which asks the customer to do the work of restarting the conversation. Give them something instead.
- Lead with something useful: the likely answer, the typical range of options, the thing that usually causes this.
- Repeat the one question. They may simply not have seen it.
- Keep it to three sentences. This is a text-length message even when it is an email.
- Never say "just following up". It signals that the message contains nothing.
Day 3: change the channel
If two messages in one channel produced nothing, the problem may be the channel. An email address given on a web form at 9pm is often a work address nobody checks.
- If you have a number and they came in by email, call once. Once, at a sensible hour.
- If they do not answer, text immediately afterwards saying who called and why. A missed call with no context is deleted; a missed call with a text is a callback.
- If you only have email, send at a different time of day than the first two.
Day 5: the decision message
By now they have either gone quiet because they are busy or gone quiet because they chose somebody else. This message finds out which, and it works because it is easy to answer.
Give them a way to say no. Counterintuitively this produces more yeses, because it removes the social cost of replying to a message they have been avoiding.
Day 7: close the loop, and set the long timer
Last message in the active sequence. Say plainly that you are stopping, leave the door open, and give them the one thing they would need if they come back in three months.
Then, and this is the part almost nobody does, set a reminder for a genuinely useful moment later: the season, the service interval, the renewal.
- Say you are stopping. "I will leave this here so I am not filling your inbox."
- Leave one route back. A direct number or a name, not a general enquiry form.
- Set the long timer. Three months, six months, or the point in the year when this becomes urgent again.
- Record why it ended if you know. Three words in the CRM is enough and it is how you find out whether you are losing on price, timing or speed.
The whole plan on one page
Stop the moment they reply. Every step below is conditional on silence, and continuing to send scheduled messages to somebody who has answered is the fastest way to look automated.
| When | Channel | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Within minutes | Whatever they used | Confirms a human has it, names the next step, asks one question |
| Day 2 | Same channel | Gives something useful, repeats the one question |
| Day 3 | Different channel | Call once, text straight after so the missed call has context |
| Day 5 | Same as day 3 | Makes it easy to say no, which is what gets a reply |
| Day 7 | Closes politely, leaves one route back, sets the long timer | |
| Month 3 to 6 | Email or text | Reopens at a moment that is useful to them rather than to you |
Running it without remembering it
The plan is not the hard part. Every business that reads this agrees with it and most will still not run it, because it depends on somebody tracking six timers per enquiry while doing their actual job.
That is precisely the shape of work worth handing to a system.
- The timers run themselves and cancel the instant a reply arrives, which is the part that stops it feeling automated.
- The messages are yours, written once in your words, with the specifics filled in per enquiry.
- A person takes over the moment there is a reply. The system handles silence, which is all it is good at.
- The record builds itself, so you find out where enquiries actually die instead of guessing.