Response time
Qualifying inbound enquiries
Enquiries arrive through the website, by email, by phone and by referral. They are not all worth the same: some do not match what you do, others are out of budget, a few are exactly your core target. Sorting them means reading, looking up who is on the other side, then routing. For lack of time, the order of handling is the order of arrival.
An illustrative example, not client work
Who it is for
Brokers, agencies, recruitment firms, consultancies
What the problem costs
A qualified inbound enquiry is won more often the faster you answer. The cost of leaving it as it is runs both ways: the serious enquiries go cold while you deal with the others, and the time spent qualifying comes out of billable time.
The process today
- Reading each enquiry in the order it arrived
- Looking up the company and the contact, by hand
- Judging relevance and budget by feel
- Forwarding to the partner or consultant concerned, by email
- Losing track of the enquiries not handled within the week
The approach we take
An assistant reads the enquiry, gathers what is public about the company, compares it with your written target-client criteria, proposes a ranking and a routing, then shows the reason for its ranking. The commercial lead keeps the decision and corrects it when it is wrong. The reason shown is what lets you correct the criteria over the following weeks.
How it works
4 steps, and a human who decides at the end.
Collection
Enquiries land in one place, whatever channel they came by.
Enrichment
What is public about the company is gathered: size, activity, recent news.
Ranking
The enquiry is set against your written criteria, with the reason shown.
Routing
It goes to the right person, who can re-rank it in one move.
Before, after
What changes in your teams' day.
Today
The order of handling is the order of arrival. A high-stakes enquiry can wait a week behind five off-target ones.
With the solution
Enquiries that match your target clients rise to the top, with the reason. The time spent qualifying comes out of billable time.
Expected benefits
- First response time stops depending on the order of arrival
- The reason for every ranking is shown, so it can be challenged and corrected
- Your target-client criteria get written down, which is useful well beyond the tool
- Volumes per channel become visible, so commercial spend is decided on figures
No figure is shown: a gain is not promised before it has been measured at your company.
Prerequisites and limits
- A firm that has not written down its target-client criteria has nothing to compare against: that exercise is the real prerequisite, and it happens during the diagnostic
- The ranking gets it wrong at first. Without regular correction over the first weeks, it does not improve
- The decision to pursue or not stays human: no enquiry is dropped automatically
Contact
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