What happens after someone enquires on your website?

Picture the person on the other side of your enquiry form. Say she's the operations manager at a food manufacturer and needs two conveyor lines replaced before a shutdown in March. She found you, read a couple of pages, decided you looked credible and filled in the form. She's also filled in the forms of two of your competitors, because that's what a sensible buyer does.

From here, all three of you are being compared on something none of you has thought much about: what happens next.

The page after the button

She hits submit. On plenty of websites the page reloads with a line of green text, "Thank you, your message has been sent", and that's it.

That page is wasted. She's at her most interested right now, and it could tell her exactly what happens next: "Thanks. Someone from our engineering team will call you by 10am tomorrow. If it's urgent, ring us on this number." It could also tell her what to have ready for the call, or hand her the spec sheet for what she asked about. Either way she's still thinking about you while she waits.

The automatic email

Many forms send an automatic reply, and it tends to say something like "We have received your enquiry and will respond as soon as possible". It comes from a no-reply address, nobody signs it, and it promises nothing in particular.

It doesn't take much to beat. A reply from a real person's name that repeats what she asked for, so she knows someone read it, says when she'll hear back and gives a direct number does far more for the same effort. You write it once, so there's no excuse for getting it wrong.

The wait

Now she waits, and so do her enquiries with the other two suppliers. Whoever gets back to her first with something useful gets a real advantage. They frame the conversation and ask the questions that shape how she thinks about the job. When the other two quotes turn up, she reads them against the first one.

How long she waits depends on things she can't see: whether the enquiry went to a shared inbox or one person, whether that person's on site today, whether anyone else is watching. If you don't know how long your business takes to reply, find out. Pick ten recent enquiries and check the gap between arriving and the first reply from a person.

The first call

When someone does ring, that call decides a lot. The weak version is a salesperson reading the enquiry for the first time while the phone rings and asking her to explain it all again. The strong version is someone who's read what she wrote, had a look at her company's website, and opens with a question about the shutdown date.

The point of the call is to understand the job well enough to quote it properly and to agree what happens next. "I'll get a price to you by Friday, and I'd like ten minutes with whoever signs off on capital spend before then" is a good outcome. "I'll send something through" isn't.

The quote, and after

Then the quote goes out, and it's easy for the attention to stop there. From her side, she's only halfway. She's got three quotes, a manager to convince and a shutdown to plan. The supplier who checks in at the right time, answers the manager's questions and makes the decision easy is in the best spot, even against a cheaper price.

Walk it yourself

The easiest way to see what your buyers go through is to be one. Fill in your own form from your phone at 4.50pm on a Friday, like a busy buyer would. Note what the page says, what the email says, how long a person takes to reply and what they say when they do. Then get a mate to do the same to your two biggest competitors. For where the enquiry goes once it lands inside your business, follow it from the other side.

Much of what you find will cost very little to fix. It's mainly a matter of deciding what should happen and making sure somebody owns it.

How we help with this: CRM and follow-up →