How to Respond to Leads in 60 Seconds
How to Respond to Leads in 60 Seconds
Find the last automated reply your business sent to a new enquiry. Read it as though you were the person who received it.
Now answer one question: after reading that, does the sender know anything they did not know before pressing submit?
For most businesses the honest answer is no. The message confirms receipt, thanks them for their interest, and promises somebody will be in touch shortly. It arrives in four seconds and it contains nothing.
That is the part of speed nobody talks about. Getting a reply out in sixty seconds is the easy half. Getting a reply out in sixty seconds that is worth receiving is the half that wins the job.
What the fast reply is actually for
It helps to be clear about the job this message is doing, because it is not the job most people assume.
It is not selling. Nobody buys off an automatic acknowledgement. It is not qualifying, not properly -- that needs a person.
Its job is to stop the search. Someone who enquires with you has almost always enquired with others, or is about to. They are in an open loop, and the loop stays open until something closes it. A reply that says we will be in touch does not close it, because it gives no reason to stop looking.
A reply that tells them what happens, when, and who from -- that closes it. Not permanently. Long enough for you to be first.
The four things it has to contain
Strip away the pleasantries and a first reply that works has four parts.
It confirms the specific thing they asked about, not that a form was submitted. We have your enquiry about the flat roof at Hill Street proves a human system received a human problem. Thanks for contacting us proves nothing.
It commits to a time. Not "shortly", not "as soon as possible" -- a real one. Someone will call you before five today. A named window converts an open wait into a closed one, and the person stops refreshing other tabs.
It names who. Sam will call you is a different message from we will call you. One has a person attached to it. The other is a company making a vague noise.
It asks the one question you always need next. Every business has it -- the address, the date of the incident, the make and model, the size of the room. Asking it immediately does two things: it moves the job forward before anyone picks up the phone, and it shows the sender they are dealing with something that understands their situation.
Four lines. That is the whole message.
What to leave out
Most first replies fail by addition rather than omission.
Leave out your history. Leave out the paragraph about your values. Leave out the list of six services they did not ask about, the accreditations, and the invitation to follow you on social media.
None of it answers the question the sender is holding, which is simply: has this landed with someone who is going to help me, and when?
Also leave out anything you cannot keep. A promise of a reply within the hour that routinely takes four is worse than promising the same day and delivering it. The point of naming a time is that the person stops worrying. Miss it and you have taught them to worry about everything else.
Sixty seconds is a channel problem, not a typing problem
If replying that fast sounds unrealistic, it is usually because the enquiry has to reach a human first, and humans are with clients.
That is the wrong sequence. The immediate reply should not depend on anyone being free -- it should fire from whatever received the enquiry, on every channel you publish. Web form, phone, email, the message someone sends through a social profile at nine at night.
The awkward one is the phone. A missed call has no form to trigger anything, which is exactly why it goes unanswered for hours. It needs its own path -- an immediate text back that does the same four jobs the email does. The missed call was never the expensive part; the silence afterwards was.
And then the sixty seconds has to be honoured
This article is about one message, so it is worth being honest about its limits.
A perfect first reply followed by nothing is a more elaborate way to lose the job. You have now made a specific promise, with a name and a time attached, and breaking it is worse than never having sent it.
The commitment in that message has to land in a real system where someone owns the callback, with a due time against it. That is the whole path from first reply to an owned next step, and it is the part that decides whether the speed was worth anything.
Running that reliably, on a busy week, for every channel, is the work Bizi takes on for owners.
Rewrite yours this afternoon
Pull up the automatic reply your business currently sends. Score it against the four:
- Does it reference what they actually asked about?
- Does it commit to a specific time?
- Does it name a person?
- Does it ask the one question you always need?
Most existing replies score one. Getting to four is twenty minutes of writing and it changes what happens in the hour after somebody finds you.
Then check the harder thing: does the same message go out when the enquiry arrives by phone, and at eleven at night?
Stop missing out on leads.
Let Bizi handle your follow-ups, missed calls, and appointment booking automatically.
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