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 7
The Weekly Lead Review Habit
Twenty minutes a week, the same day every week, to keep capture, replies, follow-ups, callbacks, routing and tracking honest. Without this habit the rest of the eBook quietly rots. With it, the system compounds.
Every system in this eBook is small enough to ignore for a week. The follow-up sequence, the same-day callback, the routing rules, the five-number sheet - any one of them can be skipped on a Wednesday, picked up on a Friday and survive. All of them being skipped for three weeks running is what kills the system entirely. The thing that protects against that, week after week, is a single twenty-minute review, on the same day, that touches every part of the eBook in turn.
This is the least exciting chapter and the most important one. The owners who keep this habit are the ones who, eight months from now, will tell us that conversion is up forty percent and they barely noticed it happen. The owners who skip the review will, on the same call, ask us why the system stopped working - and the answer will be that it never stopped, they just stopped looking at it.
By the end of the chapter you should have a twenty-minute checklist, a fixed weekly slot for it, a way of running it when you are too busy to think and a clear definition of what the review is for and what it is not.
The full chapter walks you through the twenty-minute checklist, the fixed slot in the week, the version of the review that survives a busy month and the once-a-quarter deeper look at what to keep, change or stop.
The twenty-minute checklist
Pick a slot - Friday afternoon works for most service businesses, Sunday evening for shop owners, Monday morning for builders - and protect twenty minutes for the review every week. The checklist is six items. One, count this week's enquiries and reply-rule hits. Two, look at the open follow-up sequences and check that day-five and day-twelve messages went out as planned. Three, scan the call log for missed calls that did not get returned. Four, scan the inbox for any bucket-one enquiries you forgot to reply to. Five, update the five-number sheet for the week. Six, write down one thing you will change next week.
Done in twenty minutes. The checklist is short on purpose. Owners who try to do a forty-five-minute weekly review skip it after a fortnight. Owners who do a twenty-minute one keep it for a year.
The weekly review checklist
Count this week's enquiries and reply-rule hits
Check open follow-up sequences are on track
Scan the call log for unreturned missed calls
Scan for bucket-one enquiries you forgot to reply to
Update the five-number sheet
Write down one change to try next week
Running the review when you are too busy
On weeks where you genuinely cannot find twenty minutes, run the five-minute version. Open the inbox, scan for unreplied bucket-one enquiries and reply to them. Open the call log, return any unreturned numbers. Skip the spreadsheet for one week. The five-minute version protects the customer-facing parts of the system; the spreadsheet can wait. What you must not do is skip both the full review and the five-minute version. Two weeks of total silence and the discipline starts to dissolve.
The quarterly deeper look
Once a quarter, take an hour instead of twenty minutes. Look at the last twelve weeks of the five-number sheet. Ask three questions: which channel produced the most paying customers; which kind of enquiry converted best; which part of the system slipped most often. Make one change in response - a different first-reply template, a tweaked follow-up sequence, a routing rule that was too generous. The weekly review keeps the system alive; the quarterly review improves it.
What this review is not
Two clarifications. The review is not a sales meeting; you are not strategising about which leads to chase, you are checking that the system handled them. The review is not optional once installed; the moment the slot moves around the calendar it stops happening. Treat the slot the way a kitchen treats prep time - non-negotiable, not glamorous, the reason everything else works.
What to do this week
Pick the day and time of your weekly review and put it in the calendar as a recurring twenty-minute slot. Run the first review at the end of this week using the six-item checklist. From then on, treat the slot as a customer appointment - you would not move it to make room for an admin task, so do not move this either.
We pointed earlier in the series, in Sales Basics and Lead Generation, to the idea that the conversation and the source matter. This chapter is the routine that keeps both alive. The next eBook in the series Simple Customer List Systems takes the people who survived this whole pipeline and gives you somewhere to keep them, follow them up over months and turn first-time customers into repeat ones. Recurring principle: review results and improve the system.
