A rooftop solar installer in Nagpur gets about 120 enquiries a month, most from a ₹60,000 monthly ad budget and the rest from a form on its website. Four salespeople share them. Each one is good on the phone. Between them, they call almost every lead once, some twice, and very few three times.
Nobody decided that. It's what happens when the next call lives in a diary, and each new morning brings fresh enquiries that feel more urgent than yesterday's. This post puts rupees on the calls that don't happen, then sets out a follow-up routine a small team will keep.
What a lead follow up system needs
Strip it down and a working system is four rules, applied to every lead without exception:
- One owner per lead. Decided the moment it arrives, by a rule. Two salespeople calling the same customer is embarrassing; no salesperson calling is expensive.
- A dated next step, always. A lead with no next step is parked, and parked leads go cold in days.
- A fixed number of tries. Four, spread over two weeks, before a lead is closed as unreachable.
- A queue somebody reads. The leads with no next step, or with a missed one, listed together every morning.
The arithmetic of the third and fourth call
Here's how the installer's 120 leads get reached, attempt by attempt. The split is an assumption. Keep a month's record of which attempt reached each lead and put your own in.
| Attempt | Reached | Reached so far | Of all leads |
|---|
| First call | 46 | 46 | 38% |
|---|
| Second | 22 | 68 | 57% |
|---|
| Third | 13 | 81 | 68% |
|---|
| Fourth | 9 | 90 | 75% |
|---|
Stopping after two calls reaches 68. The third and fourth reach 22 more, people who were driving or in a meeting and meant to call back. Each of those leads cost ₹500 in ads, same as the rest.
₹11,000a month of ad spend on leads a two-call team never reaches
2.6orders a month at a 12% close rate
₹6,33,600of installations a month
The cheap fix: the third and fourth calls cost the team maybe fifteen minutes per lead. At a ₹2,40,000 average installation and a 12% close rate on leads you speak to, those 22 leads are worth about ₹6,33,600 of work a month. Most of the leads you lose, you lose by not calling.
Put your own numbers in: enquiries a month, what you spend to get them, how many you close once you're talking. The shape rarely changes. The late calls are the cheapest sales you'll make.
How to follow up with leads, one attempt at a time
- Same day, within the hour if you can. A website enquiry answered on Wednesday was often answered by a competitor on Monday.
- Fix the next date before you hang up. "I'll call Thursday at 11 with the site survey slot" beats "I'll get back to you". Write the date against the lead, not in a notebook.
- Four tries over two weeks. Day one, day two, day five and day twelve works for most businesses. Vary the time of day.
- Change the channel on the third. After two missed calls, send a short message saying who you are and what you'll call about. A message gets read in a gap between meetings.
- Close it properly. A lead that says no, or doesn't answer four tries, gets closed with a reason. A list of open leads nobody will ever call hides the ones somebody should.
Missed follow-ups: what to do the next morning
Every team misses some. What matters is whether a missed one is visible. In a diary, a missed call is a line nobody rereads. In Facto Lite, a follow-up that passes its due time is marked missed and stays marked, even after it's done. Moving an overdue follow-up to a new date asks for a reason, so "rescheduled" can't quietly stand in for "forgot".
The morning routine that goes with it takes ten minutes. Each salesperson opens the day's list, which shows what's due today and what's already late, clears the late ones first, and gives every lead they touch a new date before moving on.
A sales follow-up tracker a manager can read
A manager shouldn't have to read every lead to find the ones going cold. Facto Lite's Needs Attention queue lists the leads with no next step, no contact, or no movement past a limit you set for each stage. The owner is warned first. If nothing happens, the manager is told.
Managers also get a daily summary of their team's overdue follow-ups. One thing to know before you set it up: a manager doesn't automatically see their team's leads in Facto Lite. They see the follow-ups their team logs, and they see a lead once it's shared with them or they're given access to all leads.
A follow-up reminder app should come to you
If you have to remember to open the tracker, you'll forget on the busiest days, which is when leads pile up. Facto Lite can remind the salesperson a set time before each follow-up is due, on the phone and in the app, and send one morning summary of what's due that day. It won't dial the number or send the message for you; calls and messages are made from your own phone and logged against the lead.
Lead management for small businesses, kept small
The installer doesn't need forty fields. It needs a source (ad, website, referral, walk-in), five or six stages it can name, an owner, and the next date. Everything else can wait until somebody asks for a report on it.
Leads arrive in Facto Lite from a form on your website, a spreadsheet import, or by hand, and assignment rules give each one an owner as it comes in. Leads from the web form go to the form's owner, who is told when one arrives. Once a lead is interested, the next step is usually a quote, and the follow-up on a quote has its own timing. How to make a quotation customers say yes to covers it, and the free quotation generator makes one with the GST split worked out.
