We spend a lot of money trying to get people to contact us. We advertise on Meta and Google, invest in SEO, build websites, create landing pages, write content and run campaigns. Then we track impressions, clicks, conversions and cost per lead to work out whether all that money is doing its job.
But how many actual leads did your business get this week?
Do you know? And of those leads, how many have actually been spoken to? Not sent an automated email telling them that someone will be in touch shortly. Actually spoken to, or at least had a useful conversation with your business.
What happens after you get the lead?
For all the effort we put into generating leads, we can be surprisingly casual about what happens once we get one. A lead comes through a website form and lands in someone’s inbox. Another is sitting in Meta. Someone sends a message through Instagram. Someone else calls while everybody is busy and leaves a message.
Nobody is deliberately ignoring them. That’s usually not the problem. The problem is that following up relies on someone seeing the enquiry, having time to deal with it, remembering to come back to it and then actually doing it.
And while all that is happening, the clock is ticking. Because the person who contacted you hasn’t stopped. They contacted you because something was happening in their world. They had a problem to solve, something they wanted to buy, an appointment they needed to make or a question they wanted answered. They searched, found you and took the trouble to get in touch.
That is a pretty valuable moment. And it turns out it has a shelf life.
How quickly should you respond to a lead?
Ideally, an inbound lead should receive some form of useful response within the first few minutes. That doesn’t mean someone in your business needs to drop everything and make a phone call. It means acknowledging the enquiry and starting the conversation while that person is still interested and engaged.
There is some fairly compelling research behind this. InsideSales analysed 5.7 million inbound leads and more than 55 million sales activities and found conversion rates were eight times higher when the first contact attempt was made within five minutes.
More recently, RevenueHero tested what actually happens when someone puts their hand up. In 2024, it submitted demo requests to 1,000 B2B companies. Only 365 responded at all. Among those that did, the average response time was more than a day.
Different research, different businesses and different methodologies, so we wouldn’t pretend there is a magical five-minute line where a good lead suddenly turns into a pumpkin, but the broader point is hard to argue with.
“When someone is interested, time matters.”
But somebody has to do the actual work
This is where it gets tricky for small businesses. If you run a pest control business, you might be under someone’s house when the enquiry arrives. If you’re a vet, you could be halfway through a consultation. A physio could be with a patient. A consultant could be with another client.
In most small businesses, the people best equipped to talk to a potential customer are also the people doing the actual work. So the question isn’t really whether a human can answer every lead immediately. It’s whether the business can make sure every lead is picked up immediately. There’s a difference.
Someone can get a response straight away. You can find out what they need, ask a few sensible questions, answer the straightforward ones, capture the information your team will need and, where it makes sense, book an appointment or organise the next step.
The conversation can start even if the right human isn’t available yet.
Keep the conversation moving
Not another chatbot lurking in the bottom corner of a website asking, “How can I assist you today?” We have quite enough of those. AI and automation can help here by picking up the enquiry straight away, getting the conversation started and keeping it moving until someone from the business can step in.
That’s conversational lead management.
It isn’t about removing people from the sales process. Quite the opposite. It can make sure the routine stuff happens, the right information is captured and the conversation keeps moving so your people can step in where they’re actually useful.
It also means the lead doesn’t have to stay where it arrived. Website forms, Meta, social messages, email and other enquiries can become part of one lead management process rather than a collection of places somebody has to remember to check.
Before you spend more money generating leads
Maybe we’re concentrating too much on the wrong end of the problem. When a business wants to grow, the answer is often to generate more leads. Spend more on ads. Do more marketing. Drive more traffic.
Maybe. But before you spend another dollar doing that, have a look at the leads you already have.
How many did you get this week? Where did they come from? How quickly did someone respond? How many turned into a proper conversation? How many are still sitting somewhere waiting for someone to notice them?
And perhaps the most interesting question of all is this:
How many more leads do you really need if you get much better at looking after the ones you already have?
Do you know what happens to your leads?
We help businesses connect the dots between generating an enquiry and turning it into a conversation. If you’re not sure how many leads are being missed, how quickly they’re being answered or where they’re getting stuck, we can help you work it out.
