The third eBook in the Sales and Leads category. It picks up where Lead Generation stops: a person has just shown interest, the clock has started and most small businesses lose half of those people in the next forty-eight hours through avoidable mistakes. This eBook fixes that.
Members ebook·7 chapters· 40 minute read
Chapter 1
Capturing Enquiries Properly
How to set up the forms, inboxes, phone numbers and chat threads so the right enquiries land in the right place with the right information, instead of scattered across six channels you only check on Sundays.
Most small businesses lose leads before anyone has a chance to reply to them, because the enquiry never quite landed in a place a human being was going to look at within a useful amount of time. A contact form points at an inbox no one opens. A direct message on social sits unread because notifications are off. A call to the mobile rings out because the owner was on a job. A booking form asks twelve questions, so the customer abandons it at question five. Each of these is a quiet leak, and together they drain more pipeline than most price objections ever will.
This chapter is about plugging those leaks. We will look at the four or five places enquiries actually arrive in a typical small business, what each one needs to do, the right number of questions to ask on a form, and how to make sure that whatever channel a person chooses, the enquiry ends up in one place where you and any colleagues can see it the same hour it lands.
By the end of the chapter you should have a single mental map of how an enquiry travels from the moment a stranger decides to contact you to the moment a real person reads it, and a short list of fixes you can apply this week to stop the most common leaks.
The full chapter covers the four to six questions every form should ask, why most contact forms are too long, how to consolidate enquiries from five channels into one inbox and a checklist for testing your own capture from a customer's point of view.
The five places enquiries actually arrive
In a typical small business with a website, a phone and a presence on one or two social platforms, enquiries arrive in five places: the contact form on the website, the email address printed on the website and invoices, the phone (calls and voicemails), direct messages on social, and chat or messaging tools like a WhatsApp Business number. Some businesses also collect enquiries from a Google Business Profile, an online booking page or a marketplace listing. The exact mix varies; what matters is that you can list them all on the back of a napkin.
Once you have listed them, write next to each one who reads it, how often, on which device and what happens next. Most owners discover within ten minutes that two of the five channels are quietly broken: the contact form goes to an inbox no one checks daily, the social direct messages do not generate notifications on the owner's phone, the WhatsApp number is logged into a tablet that lives behind the till. Fixing any one of these recovers more leads than a week of marketing.
What a good contact form actually asks
The single most common mistake on a small business contact form is asking too much. Twelve fields, three radio buttons, a captcha, a date picker. The customer abandons before sending, and you lose a lead you would happily have spent thirty pounds on a paid ad to get. A good contact form asks four to six things, no more: name, the best way to reach them, what they need help with (a single open box, not a dropdown), when they need it by, and an optional line for budget or scope if it actually matters in your business. That is enough to reply intelligently and to qualify on the first call.
Two extra notes. First, never ask for a phone number as a required field unless you are going to call. The customer can tell whether you are about to phone them and resents being forced to give a number they do not want you to use. Second, the open box is more useful than three dropdowns, because the words a customer chooses to describe their problem are the words you should be using on your website and in your follow-up messages. You are gathering market research at the same time as you are gathering enquiries.
Six-piece test for any capture point
A real human reads it within one working hour, not at the end of the week
It collects name, contact, what they need and when - nothing else required
It works on a phone (most enquiries arrive on one)
It generates a notification on a device the right person actually carries
It produces a record you can find again in three months
It lands in the same place as enquiries from every other channel
One inbox, not five
Whatever channels you accept enquiries through, the rule is that they all funnel into one place a human checks. For most small businesses that place is a single shared email inbox - one address that the contact form posts to, that voicemails get transcribed into, that social direct messages get forwarded into and that WhatsApp messages get copied into. Some businesses use a small shared inbox tool to do this; many do it with email forwarding rules and a thirty-minute setup. Either is fine. What matters is that there is one screen you and any colleague open in the morning and you can see every new enquiry in the order they arrived.
If you are running a business by yourself, this rule still applies. The single inbox is what makes it possible to glance at your phone between jobs and know whether anything new has come in, instead of opening five apps in turn and missing the one that matters. The discipline of one inbox is what unlocks the first-reply rule in the next chapter; without it that rule is impossible to keep.
Test it from a customer's seat
Once a quarter, behave like a customer. Open an incognito browser window, find your own website the way a stranger would, fill in the contact form with a realistic enquiry, send a direct message from a personal social account, leave a voicemail on the business number from a phone that is not yours and time how long it takes for each one to land in front of a real human. You will be surprised. We have done this with businesses that swore their capture was fine and discovered that the form had not delivered an email in eleven months because of a domain change no one connected to the contact form.
What to do this week
Spend ninety minutes mapping every channel an enquiry can arrive on. Test each one from outside the business. Reduce the contact form to six fields or fewer. Set up forwarding so every enquiry lands in one inbox. Print the inbox address on a sticky note and put it where you will see it tomorrow morning.
We talked in the previous eBook Lead Generation about the eight sources interested strangers come from. This chapter is what makes sure those sources do not turn into a graveyard. The next eBook chapter covers the rule that decides what happens in the first hour after capture - and that hour is, unfairly, where most of the result lives. Recurring principle: follow up quickly and consistently.
The rest of this chapter walks through the practical steps, the templates and the checklists you need to put it into action. It includes worked examples, copy frameworks and the small decisions that make the difference between a plan that sits in a drive and one that gets used.
Inside you'll find a step-by-step playbook, a downloadable template, a checklist you can run this week and a short list of common mistakes to avoid before you start.
The full action plan, broken into weekly steps.
Ready-to-use scripts, templates and checklists.
Worked examples for different sized businesses.
Common mistakes and how to avoid them.
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