The follow-up that wins the lead
Most leads are not lost to a competitor's better offer. They are lost to silence. Here is a cadence that fixes that without turning your team into a nuisance.
The first hour
When someone fills in a form, they are thinking about the problem right now. An hour later they are in a meeting, and by tomorrow they have asked two other companies. The single biggest improvement most teams can make is replying within the hour, during working hours, every time.
That is not a script problem; it is a visibility problem. Nobody replies within the hour to an enquiry they have not seen. So the first job is to make sure every form, every channel, lands in one place that somebody is watching. Then the first hour takes care of itself.
A cadence that respects people
After the first reply, most leads need several touches before they decide. The mistake is to make every touch the same: "just checking in". Each contact should give the person a reason to be glad you got in touch.
- Day 0, within the hour. Reply, answer the question they asked, and propose a time to talk.
- Day 1. If no answer, a short note with one useful thing: a price range, a relevant example, a yes-or-no answer to their likely next question.
- Day 3. A phone call. Leave a message that says what you will do next.
- Day 7. Something they can use whether or not they buy: a checklist, a comparison, a mistake to avoid.
- Day 14. A plain question: is this still something you want to solve this quarter?
- Day 21. Close the file, politely, and say the door is open. People reply to this one more often than you would expect.
Six touches over three weeks. Then stop. A lead that has not answered six reasonable messages is telling you something, and your time is better spent on the next one.
Make "gone quiet" visible
The cadence only works if someone notices when a step is due. Writing dates in a notes column does not count. Each lead needs a next step with a date on it, and the team needs one list, every morning, of the steps that are overdue and the leads nobody has contacted at all.
That list is the whole point of a pipeline tool. If yours does not show it without building a filter, that is worth fixing before anything else.
What to measure
Two numbers tell you if this is working. Time to first reply: aim for a median under an hour. And the share of leads with a follow-up due in the future: if it is below ninety percent, leads are falling through. Both are easy to see on a board where every card carries a next step.