Where a found lead goes missing
An automation that watches public forums, community groups and public records does one part of the job well. It reads more than a person could, checks each post or record against criteria agreed with the client and sends the ones that fit to the team. When it works, the team receives a steady supply of people who have said in public that they need what the company sells, along with businesses whose new permit, licence or registration points to the same need.
The alert is where the trouble starts, because an alert is a message and a message is read once. It lands in an inbox or a chat channel, somebody means to deal with it after the call they are on, and by the next morning it has scrolled out of sight under newer messages. Nothing records that the lead existed, so nothing records that it was lost, and the person who asked for help in public takes the first answer they get from somebody else.
A lead found this way is also more fragile than an enquiry through the company's own form. The person asking did not contact the company and has no reason to expect to hear from it, and the post or record that showed the need can be edited, buried under newer posts or taken down. If the lead is not written down with its source at the moment it is found, the reason it was worth finding goes with it.
The record comes before the alert
So the first thing the automation does with a qualified lead is create a record in the client's CRM, and only then does it send the alert. The alert points at the record rather than standing in for it, and a lead that nobody gets to on the day is still there the following week, sitting at a stage that shows nobody has acted on it yet.
The record carries the source. For a public request that means a link to the post, the words the person used to describe what they need and the date they posted it, and for a public record it means the record itself, its reference and the detail that made it match. A salesperson who opens the record can see why it was sent to them without opening anything else, and the first message they write can refer to the thing the person actually asked for.
The name of the source is held in a field rather than in a note, because a field can be counted and a note cannot. At the end of the month the team can see how many qualified leads each forum, group or register produced and how many of those turned into a conversation, which is the figure that decides which sources are worth watching and which should be dropped.
Before the record is created, the automation checks whether the person or business is already in the CRM. Someone who asks in a public group may already be a customer, or may have filled in the company's form the week before, and a second record for them splits the history and can put them into two sequences at once. A clear match updates the existing record and adds the new source to it, and anything uncertain goes to a named person on the client's team to decide.
A first email from a named person
Where the lead has an email address, because they have also sent an enquiry through the company's form or because the public record lists one, the automation can send a first email. It goes out from a named person on the client's team, under their name and from their address, and it reads as a short message that person could have typed themselves. A message from a general sales address to someone who never contacted the company looks like a mailing, and it gets treated like one.
The person whose name is on the email writes it, or at least approves every word of it, because they are the one who will receive the reply and carry the conversation on. The message refers to what the lead asked for or to the record that showed the need, says plainly who is writing and why, and makes one request, which is usually whether a short conversation would be useful. It carries no attachments, images or tracking, so that it reads as a personal message.
Where the lead came from a public post and there is no address, the automation does not go looking for another way in. The record and the alert go to the team, and a person on the client's team decides whether and how to respond on the platform where the request was made. That part stays with the client, because a reply in a public thread is the company speaking in public and it has to come from somebody who works there.
Rules on contacting people who have not asked to hear from a company differ from one place and one channel to another, and the client should check which rules apply to them before the first email is switched on. The sequence is built so that whatever the client decides can be set in it, including who may be emailed and what each message has to include.
Follow-up that stops on a reply
A single email that gets no answer tends to be read as a lead that was not interested, when it may just as easily have arrived on a busy day and been left for later. So the first email is followed by a short sequence of follow-ups, each shorter than the one before it, spaced at intervals the client's team sets and capped at a number they agree in advance.
The sequence stops as soon as the lead replies, whatever the reply says. A reply that asks a question, one that books a call and one that asks to be left alone all end the sequence in the same way, and the reply goes straight to the named person, with the record moved to a stage that shows a conversation has started. A lead who answers and then receives a scheduled follow-up asking whether they saw the first message concludes that nobody read their answer, and that impression is hard to undo.
Other events stop it too. A bounce ends it, a request to unsubscribe ends it and marks the record so that no later sequence reaches the person, and a meeting booked by any route ends it. If the record shows that the person is already talking to someone on the team, the sequence does not start at all.
The last message in the sequence says that it is the last one, and once it has gone the record moves to a stage that shows the sequence ended without a reply. The lead stays in the CRM with its source and its history, so that if the same person or business turns up in a later post or record, the team can see that they were contacted before and what was said to them.
