Inbox zero, for leads
Every form submission should be looked at by a person before it becomes a lead. Here is why, and a ten-minute routine that makes it painless.
Why a human check beats automation
It is tempting to turn every form submission into a lead automatically. It feels efficient. In practice it fills the pipeline with three kinds of junk: spam that got past the filter, the same person enquiring twice under two spellings, and tyre-kickers who will never pick up the phone.
Each one costs more than the five seconds it takes to look at it. A spam "lead" gets a follow-up. A duplicate gets two reps calling the same person. And every one of them makes your conversion rate look worse than it is, so you make decisions on bad numbers.
A review step fixes all three. A person looks at each submission and does one of three things: accept it, merge it into an existing lead, or mark it as spam. Only accepted submissions become leads. Your board, and your reports, contain only real opportunities.
The ten-minute routine
The objection is always time. So make it a routine, and make the routine short.
- Same time every day. First thing, before email. Ten minutes on the calendar, one person on rota.
- Work top to bottom. Do not cherry-pick the interesting ones. Oldest first, so nothing waits two days.
- Decide, do not research. If it is obviously real, accept. If the tool shows a match, merge. If it is obviously junk, bin. If you are not sure after ten seconds, accept it and let the follow-up sort it out.
- Finish at zero. An inbox with three leftovers tomorrow is an inbox with thirty in a month. Zero is the only stable number.
Keyboard, not mouse
Ten minutes assumes the tool is quick. Arrow down, read, press a key to accept, next. If your tool makes you click into each submission and back out again, the routine becomes thirty minutes and dies.
What to do with the spam
Keep it, out of sight. Marking something as spam should remove it from the inbox without deleting it, so that when someone says "I filled in your form last week", you can find it. And look at the spam once a month: if it is growing, the form needs a better trap field or a tighter list of allowed websites.