C.E.A SmithMarketing

Leads

The expensive part is not getting the enquiry.

You can buy attention. What you cannot buy is somebody answering at nine on a Sunday night, and that is where most of a budget quietly goes. Four stages, every one of them a place people fall out.

  1. 01
    Within a minute

    Something answers

    Not a clever chatbot pretending to be you. An acknowledgement that a person has been heard, with the one question that moves it forward. The gap between an enquiry and any reply is the single biggest predictor of whether it turns into anything.

  2. 02
    Same evening

    The real answer

    Price, availability, whether it suits what they described. Most enquiries die here because the answer requires someone to walk out to the yard and look, and that does not happen at 9pm.

  3. 03
    Before it goes cold

    A next step with a time on it

    Not "let us know". A specific thing: come Saturday, I will send the walkaround tonight, I will hold it until Friday. An enquiry without a next step is a name in a folder.

  4. 04
    Two days later

    The follow-up nobody does

    The one message after the first silence. It is the cheapest lead source any business has, and almost nobody sends it, because at the moment it is due everybody is busy doing the actual job.

Why this belongs with the advertising, not beside it

The usual arrangement is that an agency runs the ads and the business handles the enquiries. It sounds reasonable and it is the reason so many campaigns get judged as failures. The ads did their job. The chain broke two steps later, and nobody owned the step where it broke.

So the enquiry flow is part of the same job here: where enquiries land, what answers first, who gets told, and what happens when nobody replies. Not because it is glamorous, but because a lead that nobody answers cost exactly as much as one that turned into a sale.

Scale of it: 3,886 conversations in six months for one dealer. At even a day’s delay each, that is a queue nobody could have worked through by hand.

Where this stops

Getting an enquiry answered fast is a marketing problem. Building the system that answers it, books the visit, chases the quote and updates the record is a different discipline, and it has its own home.

Leads arriving faster than you can answer them?

That is the automations side of the business. Missed calls, follow-up, booking and the admin behind it, built so it runs without you.

Automations with C.E.A Smith

Find out where yours are going.

The Acquisition Review follows a real enquiry through your business and tells you where it stops.

Get the free Acquisition Review

Part of C.E.A Smith

One company. A specialist for each problem.

C.E.A Smith is Richard Smith, working from Blenheim, Marlborough, New Zealand. Each part of the business has its own home so you get the specialist, not a menu.

Built by C.E.A Smith