Lead intake & routing
Nothing slips through the net.
Most small businesses lose more revenue to disorganised enquiries than to competition. A lead that sits unanswered for three days is usually a lead that has gone elsewhere. This service gives you a single inbox for every enquiry, regardless of which door it came through, and places each one in the right pair of hands before the end of the working day.
How it shows up
Signs the work is needed.
- 01 Enquiries arriving across four or five channels — email, website form, Instagram DMs, WhatsApp, a phone voicemail that someone listens to when they remember.
- 02 First response times stretched into days because a human has to notice, triage, reply, and follow up.
- 03 Nobody can tell you, without opening six tabs, what happened to the lead you spoke to last Tuesday.
- 04 A rough sense that good enquiries are being lost — but no evidence of which, when, or why.
- 05 An out-of-hours enquiry that sat untouched until Monday morning because there was no system to catch it.
How we design it
The shape of the setup.
-
a.
We consolidate the channels.
Every channel — website, email, social DMs, WhatsApp, voicemail — pipes into a single structured inbox. Not a shared email account; a structured pipeline where each enquiry has a status, an owner, and a timestamp. Usually built on n8n with direct integrations into your existing tools (no new login for your team).
-
b.
We qualify on arrival.
A lightweight language model pass extracts the facts that matter to you — company size, service asked for, timeline, budget hints — and flags anything urgent. This is not "AI doing sales". It is pattern-matching against a short, specific rubric that you define, so your team arrives at each enquiry already knowing what they are reading.
-
c.
We route without drama.
Enquiries go to the right person automatically — by service line, by size, by geography, whatever matters in your business. If the right person is on holiday, it goes to their backup. If nobody picks it up within an agreed window, it escalates. No lead sits waiting for someone to "notice" it.
-
d.
We give you a response path.
Templated first replies for common enquiry shapes — acknowledging the enquiry, setting expectations, often booking a call — that feel personal rather than canned because they are written in your voice by you, once, and then re-used. The replies go out from a real person’s inbox, not from noreply@.
What “done” looks like
Outcomes we hold ourselves to.
These are the benchmarks we aim for on a typical engagement. Your specifics will vary — the diagnosis document names the ones that apply to your business, in writing, before work starts.
- Acknowledgement in under an hour
- Every enquiry gets a human-sounding reply within an hour of arrival, in business hours and out. For out-of-hours, a quiet holding message that doesn’t feel like an auto-reply.
- Qualified response within the working day
- Within 24 hours — usually much sooner — the enquiry has been read, qualified, and assigned. The next human touch is specific, not generic.
- Zero leads older than 72 hours without a next step
- A dashboard shows you, in one glance, any enquiry that has been sitting too long. In practice this becomes a near-empty screen within two weeks.
- A weekly enquiry audit
- Every Monday, a short summary arrives in the owner’s inbox: how many enquiries, where from, which converted, which went cold, and why. Two minutes of reading. No dashboard to log into.
A representative engagement
What an average client looks like.
The context
A ten-person UK creative agency with three regular sources of new business — their website, two directory listings, and referrals via LinkedIn DMs to the founders. Enquiries were being caught eventually, but the team admitted that "probably one in five" was falling through. The founders were triaging on evenings and weekends.
What we built
- A single enquiry pipeline in Airtable, fed by n8n from their website form, an IMAP listener on the shared inbox, a LinkedIn inbox poll, and a Typeform-based phone-callback request on the contact page.
- A GPT-4o-mini classifier that tags each enquiry with service-line, project size band, and urgency, and drafts a first-reply for the account director to review in two clicks.
- A Slack channel receiving a single daily digest — new enquiries since yesterday, anything stuck for more than two working days — instead of an alert-per-enquiry.
- A weekly email on Monday morning summarising the prior week — volume, source, conversion — sent to the two founders only.
Six months on
No enquiries lost. Average first-response time down from 28 hours to under 45 minutes. Founders stopped triaging in the evenings; their own Monday emails got shorter because the system was already doing the triage they used to do mentally on the train.
This is a composite drawn from the pattern we see most commonly in this area of work. The shape holds; the specifics change.
When this isn’t the right fit
Times we say no.
- You get one or two enquiries a week and you know every one of them already. You do not need this; you need to spend money on getting more enquiries, not on processing the ones you have.
- Your business runs on a very small number of very large relationships. Enterprise-scale RFPs do not come in through a web form; they come through relationships. The work we would do is in onboarding them once they sign, not catching them.
- Your primary bottleneck is not response time — it is what happens after the call. Building a better net does not help if the net already empties into a hole.
- You are pre-product-market-fit. If the message you would send in reply is still being worked out, stabilise the message first; automate after.
If this describes the shape of your week, write to us.
Book a discovery call