Say nothing, lose the job

Here is a test that costs you ten minutes. Take three of your competitors' websites, send each the same enquiry from any old email address, and note the time. Then wait. It nearly always goes like this: one answers the same day, one after three days, one never. Now guess who would have got the job, if you had been a real customer.

The winner is not the one who answers best. It is the one who answers first.

Why timing beats the answer itself

The person writing to you has a problem right now, and three tabs open. The moment you reply, you are the only one they have spoken to: you set the conversation, you ask the questions, and the comparison with the other two starts tilted your way. Two days later you are third in a queue, answering questions somebody else planted in their head.

Politeness has nothing to do with it: whoever gets there first sets the yardstick the client will measure everyone else by!

The real problem is not speed

Nobody is slow out of laziness. You are slow because the enquiry lands on a form that emails one address that one person checks, and that day they are out at a client's. Or because «I will reply when I have time to reply properly», and the time to reply properly never comes.

The cure is not running faster: remove those two causes and you will not need to rush at all.

Three rules and you are done

• A short reply now beats a long one tomorrow. Two lines — «got it, I will call you tomorrow at eleven» — close the door on the other two.
• Enquiries go to two people, not one. If the only person who reads them is on holiday, the company is shut and nobody knows it.
• Keep three replies ready. One for «we need a few details», one for «we do not do this, but here is who does», one for «you will have the quote by Friday». Writing them once saves you months.

And if you cannot answer within the hour?

Say so. One line on your contact page — «we reply within one working day» — is worth more than silence. Give people a firm commitment and they wait; give them nothing and after a few hours they write to somebody else.

It works the other way round too: promise an hour and you keep that hour, Friday afternoon included. A promise broken on first contact tells the client exactly how the rest will go.

The sum nobody does

Take last month's enquiries and count how many got an answer after more than twenty-four hours. Multiply that by what an average job is worth to you. That is the cost of silence, and it is almost always higher than the cost of paying somebody to answer the phone. Enquiries, on the other hand, can be made to arrive: lead generation. And if they are not arriving at all, the problem sits further upstream: in the contacts you are not generating.