Lead Capture and Follow-Up for Small Businesses

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.

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.