A new enquiry arrives. The marketing campaign has been successful, but the sale is still a long way off.
That person has probably also contacted a couple of other businesses as well. Whoever is quick to engage and strike up a conversation has a better chance of continuing it.
What happens after the enquiry, whether its a phone call, WhatsApp message, email etc, is just as important as the marketing campaign that brought it in.
The Problem Often Starts After the Lead Is Generated
Getting enquiries costs money. Losing track of them afterwards is an avoidable waste.
Enquiries can come from ads, website forms, social messages and phone calls. They rarely arrive in one tidy queue.
Who sees the enquiry first, and who is responsible for replying?
Let’s say a customer fills out a contact form at 10:30 am. An employee sees the form at 11:15 am and emails it to the sales team. One of the sales persons makes a call to the customer at 1:00 pm.
Each person followed the process. Yet the customer heard nothing while the message moved from one inbox to another.
The customer had to wait two and a half hours to hear from the company.
While waiting, the customer may have contacted other companies.
A better handoff would be to connect the lead capture to assignment and follow-up and remove the need for employees to forward messages manually.
The Real Problem Is What Happens After the Lead Is Captured
More enquiries will not help much if nobody can say which ones have been answered.
Think about where leads are captured in your organisation. Email enquiries may remain in an inbox. WhatsApp leads may be handled through employees’ phones. Advertising leads may sit in another system, while sales employees maintain their own Excel sheets.
Now there is no single place to see what was promised, who replied or whether the enquiry went cold.
A more connected process could look like this:
Website/Advertising Enquiry → CRM → Sales Assignment → WhatsApp Follow-Up
Automation does not need to write every reply. Its first job can simply be getting the enquiry to the right person, with the context intact.
If your team is manually moving leads between systems, Decimal Technologies can help find ways to integrate and automate this process.
Related service: WhatsApp Business Solution for communication and routing with customers and follow-up workflows.
The Importance of Following Up
A salesperson may call a customer once, but what happens if the customer doesn’t respond?
A second call should not depend on whether someone remembers to make it.
Customers might not reply because they are in a meeting and will address it later. The customer may need more information before they are able to make a purchase decision.
The organized nature of our CRM with a clear follow-up process makes it easy for the sales team to address customer needs more consistently.
For example, a missed call could create a follow-up task for a salesperson. A customer enquiry could trigger a WhatsApp follow-up, while leads that haven’t received a response can be identified for further action.
Automation doesn’t need to replace the salesperson. It can help make sure important follow-ups aren’t missed.
Customers Don’t See Your Internal Process
Customers don’t see your internal processes or inefficiencies.
Customers don’t know if your sales manager is busy and an enquiry is routed to the wrong employee or if someone forgot to update the CRM. However, customers do notice if your business is effective and timely in its response.
Consider two companies receiving the same type of enquiry. The lead is routed to a shared email account in Company A. The lead is automatically created in Company B’s CRM and assigned to a salesperson. A response to the lead is automatically generated by the CRM.
Company A is entirely dependent on its staff to respond to the lead and ensure the lead is routed to the correct employee.
Company B has simply removed some of the manual steps before the sales conversation begins.
Increasing ad spend while enquiries sit unanswered is like filling a bucket with a leak. Fix the handoff before asking marketing for more volume.
If the issue starts before the enquiry reaches sales, Decimal’s digital marketing services can also be reviewed alongside the follow-up journey.
Improving these processes can have a positive impact on your company’s bottom line.
When you are attempting to increase lead generation, it is important to consider the following:
- How long does it take for a new lead to reach the sales team?
- Are all leads being captured?
- Who owns each lead?
- What happens if the customer doesn’t answer the first call?
- Can management see which leads haven’t been contacted?
- Are the website, CRM and WhatsApp systems connected?
- How many leads eventually become qualified opportunities or customers?
These questions can help identify whether the problem is lead generation or what happens after the lead is generated.
Where AI Can Help
Not every follow up process requires AI. Traditional automation processes may be able to capture leads and assign them to salespeople. AI is more effective when the system is able to recognize the nature of an enquiry, understand it, and make a decision on how to proceed next.
An example of an AI workflow is recognizing whether a lead is a pricing lead, a service or support lead, or a lead for setting an appointment, and then direct the lead accordingly.
How Decimal Technologies Approaches the Enquiry Journey
Decimal Technologies looks at the full path from enquiry to first meaningful sales conversation, including the points where information gets delayed or lost.
A business may already have several systems in place, such as a website, paid advertising, CRM and WhatsApp Business solution.
Where gaps exist, we look at whether integration, automation, AI or a custom application can improve the next step in the customer journey.
Our goal is to reduce the gaps between lead generation, follow-up and the actual sales conversation.
If your business generates leads but too many fail to become customers, talk to Decimal Technologies about reviewing what happens after the first enquiry.