The First Fifteen Minutes

Everything in this guide up to now has been about getting somebody to raise their hand. This chapter is about the fifteen minutes after they do, which is where more revenue is lost than anywhere else on this list.

We've seen businesses invest in a website, invest in traffic, invest in improving the enquiry path, and then route every resulting enquiry to an inbox that gets checked at the end of the day, or the next morning, or on Monday.

Meanwhile the person who enquired with you also enquired with two or three businesses around the same time, because that is what people do now, and they are talking to whoever came back first.

Speed of response in a competitive market is one of the largest levers on your conversion rate we see, and it is almost entirely a systems problem rather than an effort problem. Businesses are slow because responding requires a person, and that person has other work, so the enquiry sits in a queue.

Three ways to fix, in increasing order of effort and value.

Acknowledge instantly and truthfully. An automatic reply that says something specific about their enquiry, tells them exactly when a human will respond, and gives them something useful to read in the meantime. Manage their expectations.

Answer the easy ones immediately. Enquiries can often have questions that have fixed answers. Do you service my area? Do you work with businesses my size? How much does something like this cost, roughly. What is your turnaround? If those answers are consistent, a person does not need to type them at nine at night. Have publicly available FAQs, or have templated responses that you can quickly reply with.

Route by urgency, not by arrival. Most businesses process enquiries in the order received. While this may sound fair, we think it is wrong. A ready-to-buy enquiry from an ideal client and another submission asking for information about your refund policy should not sit in the same queue. Sorting them requires knowing something about each enquiry at the moment it arrives, which we will cover more in Part Five.

For your next twenty enquiries, record the time received, the time a human responded, rate each enquiry's likelihood to buy, and if they became a client or not, and why. Now look at the distribution of those time gaps, particularly look at the ones that took the longest. Most owners discover that the ones who were most likely to buy had longer than ideal gaps from when the enquiry landed to when the person was first contacted.

If you fix one thing in this entire guide, and you have competitors coming at you fast, fix this first!