If we asked you to name your goals as a local business owner, one of them is almost certainly going to be “get more leads.” You’re not alone—74% of companies say converting leads into customers is their top priority.
Key Takeaways
- Respond to new leads quickly so potential customers know you’re available and ready to help.
- Prioritize your strongest leads based on urgency, service fit, location, and how ready they are to take action.
- Make every follow-up useful by addressing the customer’s needs, answering questions, and giving them a clear next step.
- Follow up more than once since a missed call or unanswered message doesn’t necessarily mean a lead has lost interest.
- Keep leads and conversations organized so you know who needs a response, what was discussed, and what needs to happen next.
- Keep nurturing leads who aren’t ready to buy with helpful emails, texts, reminders, promotions, and other ongoing communication.
And it makes perfect sense, because without leads, there are no new customers. And without new customers, your business doesn’t continue growing.
The thing is that leads aren’t guaranteed to turn into paying customers. In fact, about 79% of leads never convert into sales.
Leads require a little follow-up before an appointment or purchase. So if you’ve got the leads, but you’re not sure what your next step should be, you’re in the right place.
We’re covering the seven steps to following up with your leads that will help you turn them into customers.
[Related: More Leads Than Ever Before]
Seven steps to following up with your leads
Taking the time to nurture your leads is worth it. The businesses that do yield 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost. And nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads.
1. Respond as quickly as possible
When it comes to incoming leads, your response time matters. If a potential customer is in the “Decision” stage of the buyer’s journey, they’ve already done their research and now have a strong intent to make a purchase.
Since they’re ready now, they won’t wait around long for you to get back to them. Research done by MIT and InsideSales found that contacting a lead within 5 minutes makes them 21 times more likely to qualify.
Yeah, we’re really talking about responding that quickly.
Something as simple as “Thank you for reaching out. We’ve received your request and will be in touch shortly” keeps a potential customer from wondering if you even got their message in the first place.
However, you have a business to run. So it’s just not possible for you to watch your texts, your email inbox, your voicemail, and all the other ways customers can contact you all day every day.
That’s when automated responses come in handy. You can set up a message like the example above to send automatically across all your channels, so you can hit that 5-minute mark—even when you’re busy doing other things.
A unified Inbox complete with autoresponders is part of our all-in-one marketing solution—Hibu One. The Hibu One Inbox captures all your leads and automatically responds to them on your behalf. And all of those touchpoints are captured in one dashboard, making it easy to keep up with all your leads without spending extra time.
2. Figure out which leads to prioritize
While all leads are important, they’re not all created equal. Not everyone who calls, emails, or fills out a form will require the same amount of attention from your business.
For example, someone asking, “Can you replace my water heater tomorrow?” is a lot more urgent than a general inquiry on pricing for a future project. And if you wait to follow up with the water heater customer, chances are they’ve already moved on to a competitor.
Here are a few things to consider when you’re prioritizing leads:
- How soon does the customer need the service? The more urgent, the higher the prioritization. Someone with a broken a/c unit in the middle of summer won’t wait days for a response.
- Are they looking for a service you actually provide? Someone you can’t actually help shouldn’t take time away from a customer you can.
- Are they within your service area? Someone calling from a town 2 hours away that you don’t service is lower on the priority list.
- Have they specifically asked about availability, an estimate, or scheduling? Questions like this tell you that the customer is serious. They’re ready to book or buy right away.
- Have they already reached out to you multiple times? This also indicates a high-quality lead. They’re willing to try reaching out multiple times instead of moving on to someone else.
It’s important to note that you shouldn’t completely ignore lower-quality leads. You still have a reputation to protect, and you don’t want to be thought of as a business that doesn’t respond in a reasonable amount of time. It’s just knowing which leads need your attention first.
Hibu One can help you do this too. All of your leads are scored in your Hibu One Inbox to help you identify and prioritize the most-promising opportunities without spending time manually sorting through every lead.
3. Know what to say on the first follow-up
Now you’ve zeroed in on the leads you want to prioritize first, the next step is knowing what to say when you reach back out.
We’d suggest a simple formula:
Acknowledge their need -> Answer what you can -> Ask a useful question -> Give them a next step
You already covered the “Thanks for contacting” sentiment in your autoreply—this next reply needs to be concrete. For example, if you’re a roofer and someone called about fixing a leak, start your conversation by bringing up the leak... then ask when it started... and follow with an offer to schedule an inspection.
The medium in which you respond will change depending on how the lead came in too. If someone took the time to pick up the phone, they’d probably appreciate a call back, while someone who only filled out a contact form might be more comfortable with a short email or text reply first.
4. Don't give up after one attempt
You’ve formally followed up with a lead addressing their concerns, and now you haven’t heard back. Don’t panic. No response doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve lost them for good.
Think about how busy you are. Your customers are too! Maybe they submitted the form on their lunch break and then got stuck in meetings all day.
Build trust and credibility with a simple follow-up process:
- First contact: You’ve responded as soon as possible.
- Second contact: Follow up again in a day or two if you haven’t heard back.
- Third contact: Send one final, low-pressure reminder that you can still help them and give them your contact information to reconnect.
And you can divide these by channels as you feel necessary. Maybe that first contact is a voicemail and your final two are sent via text.
You want to remind them that you’re there to help and didn’t forget about them, but you don’t want to be a bother.
5. Keep the conversation organized
Having enough leads coming in that you have to prioritize who gets your attention is great… but not if some of those are falling through the cracks.
Your leads may come in as phone calls, website forms, texts, emails, or messages on social media. This can all become overwhelming fast.
You need a system for tracking:
- Who the lead is
- What they’re reaching out about
- When they last made contact
- What was discussed
- Whether you (or another employee) followed up
- What needs to happen next
You can do this with some simple statuses like:
- New
- Contacted
- Follow-up needed
- Appointment/estimate scheduled
- Won/lost
The Hibu One Inbox can help you out with that too. It brings all your customer conversations together so you don’t have to jump between multiple platforms to piece everything together.
You can also filter and flag conversations using the premade labels or create a system that works better for you.
6. Move the lead toward one clear next step
Your goal as a business isn’t to just follow up with a lead—it’s to turn them into a paying customer.
The best way to do that is to end each interaction you have with a potential customer with a clear call to action (CTA). Exactly what that CTA is depends on where that lead is in their decision-making process and what type of business you run.
Examples include:
- Schedule an appointment
- Book an estimate
- Choose a service date
- Send photos or project details
- Confirm their address
- Visit your business
- Approve a quote
Remember, it’s important to tailor this to each situation. Someone with a burst pipe needs to move directly to scheduling an appointment, but someone who’s only researching a kitchen remodel will need an estimate and some photos of your previous work first.
To put it simply, every interaction should always answer the question “What happens next?”
7. Keep nurturing leads who aren't ready yet
Say you’ve followed up, gotten in touch with your potential customer, sent over a quote, and they said, “Actually, we’ve changed our minds. We’re not ready yet.”
This isn’t uncommon. Research tells us 96% of visitors who come to your website aren’t ready to buy (yet). And this is especially true for higher-dollar services like roofing or remodeling.
That doesn’t mean they’ll never be ready, so it’s important to keep nurturing these leads. This keeps your business top of mind when they are ready.
There are many ways you might choose to nurture a lead:
- Helpful follow-up emails
- Appointment or estimate reminders
- Seasonal service reminders
- Relevant promotions
- Educational content
- Email and SMS marketing
- Periodic check-ins
Nurturing isn’t the same thing as those direct follow-up attempts we talked about in step four. This is a softer, more long-term strategy that gives a prospect a gentle reminder that you’re there for them on their timeline.
With Hibu, lead generation and follow-up can work together as part of one connected strategy. Email and SMS marketing are also included with the Hibu One platform and help you keep in touch with prospects that aren’t ready to buy quite yet. We help you stay top of mind and give potential customers more opportunities to take the next step.
[Related: Why Local Businesses Need an All-in-One Marketing Platform]
Make the most of every lead with Hibu One
We’ve been in the marketing game for over 40 years, and we’ve worked with thousands of local businesses, so we know a thing or two about lead generation and lead management.
Which is why we designed Hibu One as a full-service marketing platform that helps you get found, reach more customers, and build trust. Plus, with 24/7 access to your Hibu One Dashboard, you’ll be able to see what’s working with your marketing in one place.
Ready to learn more about what Hibu One can do for your local business? Take a self-guided tour of the platform right now or fill out the Get Started form for a free, no-obligation consultation from a marketing expert.
