How Do You Follow Up With Sales Leads?

How Soon Should You Follow Up With a Lead?

Follow up the same business day, and within the hour when the lead arrives during working hours, because a buyer who has asked for something is paying attention now and is often talking to your competitors by tomorrow. Leads that arrive at night or over the weekend should hear from you first thing the next business day.

The research most often quoted on this is a Harvard Business Review article from 2011, which found that most companies were not responding to online inquiries nearly fast enough.¹ It’s more than a decade old, so we treat it as a direction rather than a benchmark, and we’d be wary of the precise multipliers for responding within minutes that circulate second-hand on sales blogs. What we see in client accounts points the same way, because leads that haven’t responded in the first day or two rarely respond later.

What Does a Good Lead Follow-Up Process Look Like?

A good follow-up process decides in advance who responds, how fast, through which channel, how many times, with what message and when to stop, so every lead gets the same treatment whoever is in the office that day. Writing it down takes an afternoon:

1. Name an owner for every lead, ideally someone who can answer the buyer’s questions as well as book a meeting, with cover for evenings, Fridays and holidays.
2. Set the response window, the same business day during working hours and first thing the next morning for the rest.
3. Reply in the channel the buyer used, and add a second channel, such as a text or email after a missed call, only when the first goes unanswered, though leads from Facebook’s instant forms need a faster call and text, as how to follow up on Facebook leads explains.
4. Make the first contact about their request, with the one or two questions you need to qualify them and a specific next step.
5. Plan the follow-up attempts in advance, with the timing and channel of each.
6. Decide when to stop and where the lead goes next, so quiet leads move to a nurture list instead of sitting in a rep’s queue.
7. Log every attempt in the CRM, including the time of the first real conversation, so you can measure the process.

Agree with sales on what a qualified lead is before you start, so the person following up knows which leads deserve the fastest call, which the Prospect-to-Lead Conversion step covers alongside the landing page the leads arrive from.

How Many Times Should You Follow Up With a Lead?

Follow up enough times to be confident the buyer has seen you, usually several attempts across two channels over about two weeks with most of them in the first two days, then move the lead to nurture. No single number fits every business, because it depends on what the buyer asked for and how long your sales cycle is.

As a starting cadence for a buyer who asked for a conversation, we suggest:

Front-load the attempts because replies fall off quickly after the first day or two, and space the later ones out so they read as persistence rather than pressure. The answer changes in a few situations:

• When the lead asked for something to read, such as a guide, a same-day call can feel intrusive, so a useful email and a lighter cadence work better until they show they want to talk.
• When the sale is large and slow, with several people deciding, the first two weeks open a longer conversation, so the cadence hands over to planned meetings and then to following up on the quote rather than stopping.
• When the lead is a clear poor fit, one polite reply that points them somewhere useful is enough.

Stop when the buyer says no, turns out to be a poor fit, or doesn’t answer the last planned attempt, then move them to a nurture list that sends something useful every month or so and alerts the owner when they reply, which how to nurture leads covers.

What Should You Say When You Follow Up With a Lead?

Say something that shows you read their request and moves them toward a decision: what they asked for, the one or two questions you need answered to help them, and a specific next step with a time attached. A message that only asks whether they’re still interested gives a busy buyer no reason to reply.

Each attempt should add something the last one didn’t:

• The first contact confirms what they asked for and asks about their situation. The contractor’s service manager asks about the building, the age of its equipment and when the budget is set, then books the site visit for the forecast.
• The useful follow-up sends something specific to them, such as an answer to a question they raised or an example from a similar customer.
• The last message is short and says plainly that you’ll stop reaching out and how to get back in touch, which removes the pressure and, in our experience, sometimes draws the reply the earlier attempts didn’t.

Leads that went cold months ago are the exception, because a short, no-agenda text asking whether they’re still interested is cheap enough to try, and in accounts we work with it has drawn replies the original sequence didn’t.

How Do You Know Your Follow-Up Is Working?

Judge follow-up on what it produces, which is meetings booked and customers won from the leads you received, rather than on calls made or emails sent, because a team can hit every activity target and still lose most of its leads. Track four numbers for each lead source and each person following up:

• Time to first real conversation, from the form fill to the first time a person talks with the buyer, ignoring automated replies and voicemails.
• The share of leads you reached, meaning a real conversation by any channel.
• The share that booked a meeting or a site visit.
• The share that became customers, over a period at least as long as your sales cycle.

If leads are reached quickly and still don’t book, the problem is usually the leads rather than the follow-up, and how to generate high-quality leads covers that side. To judge whether your own rates are healthy, see what is a good lead conversion rate.

In a smaller business, the biggest gain usually comes from one rule, that every lead hears from a person the same day, even if that person is you. In a larger company, check the handoff between marketing automation and the CRM first, where in our experience nobody owns the response time, so give one person that number and review it weekly, and do you need marketing automation covers what the software should and shouldn’t do in that handoff.