Experiencing workflow bottlenecks and lead pile-up in your ongoing service operation?  Learn a simple small business workflow system that scales for lead follow-ups.  We share techniques for reducing admin time for your team while optimizing productivity.

In any job, position, or business that involves sales, the concept of ‘following up on leads’ is an essential system shared by all industries.  When you have a possibility of a sale, you work that connection until a set point within your system, and it either closes, or expires.  Should be simple, right?  The answer is a little more complex…

The level to which an operation should follow up on leads to maintain maximum efficiency is a more variable parameter based on many factors.  In all sales roles – whether you are an owner, or sales pro working for commission – we know we should follow up, but is this a set number of times that works best?  Or is there a rule to follow?

The answer is “no”, but there are ways you can find the best lead follow up workflow that is best for your particular business and needs.  For single-item sales, the lead follow-up process is more aggressive, because you only have 1 primary action to move the customer towards.  You should give it everything you’ve got to get that 1 sale of a car, boat, pool, etc.

For recurring services and subscription business models, though, this becomes more complex due to the amount of administrative time needed to foster current business, generate new leads, and manage operations.

How do recurring revenue models create a follow-up workflow that scales?

In my experience starting an ongoing service business (weekly music lessons), the way lead follow ups worked over time – from initial launch through the heights of what our infrastructure could carry with student numbers – evolved dramatically.  At the start, working a lead too much is an easy faux pas to commit, so the most energized owners must first learn to let go gracefully when someone isn’t interested. 

The issue that occurs for subscription services is when the operation starts growing, the work starts increasing, and the administrative team (often you, the owner) is now bogged down.  Keeping up with the same pace of lead follow ups becomes difficult, but you know it is a priority.  Lead follow ups WORK when you have a good source driving quality contacts.   Acquiring more recurring clients will lead to growth, but the practical challenge is how to fit this valuable work in for the future when immediate issues keep pulling you away.

What is the small business solution for managing leads effectively? Dynamic lead follow-up workflow

The issue with lead follow ups in a subscription services business, or ongoing service is the level of day to day care needed for the enrolled clientele.  Customer service is important in this business model, as maintaining your existing enrollment base is as growth-defining as gaining new sign ups.

And yet, sign ups need consistent work too, and many sales organizations and service businesses alike have engineered follow up processes and systems for working leads that are fixed into a set routine. By ‘fixed’, I mean a set number of follow ups for every lead, no matter how strong it is.  If it is in the queue, you have a set process, so the lead system for your workflow is “fixed”.

This uniform approach sounds very logical and a way to make sure every lead is universally served with the same opportunity to engage.  In fact, if you automated this process, this fixed approach is likely what would be applied – or some algorithmic variation.  So why is this system not the best way for ongoing service business models to manage lead follow ups?

A fixed lead-follow-up workflow system will break down and create bottlenecks if your day to day work load fluctuates – that’s the greatest danger of this approach for your admins and operational workflow.

The issue is not in the lead system itself, it’s in the variability of a subscription service business’s internal environment through the year.   The seasons and spikes are not uniform and can be affected dramatically by event timing, sales and lead trends, and any other seasonal factors.  If you are up and running, it takes just one busy-season to for your service business to become overwhelmed with lead follow ups, because you are consumed with day-to-day operations.

Or the opposite could occur – you could have times of year where routine lead work fills up your admin hours well, but others when you could really use some extra lead follow ups to fill the time, because routine tasks are slow.

By contrast to our fixed follow up system, a “dynamic lead follow-up workflow” system is the answer for your, or your admin team’s, process.  Dynamic means that the follow-up system for leads is flexible and can change.  During a busy season, we can move to a lean version of our lead follow up process, and when it is calm, we can work a more comprehensive system of engagement.

Here is how a dynamic lead follow up works in practice:

In a normal time of year, an in-home personal training service has the admin capacity to do 3 lead-follow-ups for every new client inquiry that comes in.  The first follow up is 2 days after sending the program information, the second is a week after that, the third is 10 days after.  On each touch-point, the administrator leaves a voice message and sends a text.

The “normal time of year” for this business is really only 2 months in Spring and 3 months in late Summer / early Fall.  All other times of year, they are either in a peak or valley with lead traffic from their Google and Meta Ads campaigns, due to seasonality (nothing specifically wrong with the channels).

Rather than maintain this same lead follow up frequency, the dynamic lead follow up system looks different as traffic waxes and wanes:

During the seasons where leads are starting to pile up and there are more than 25 leads in the queue for follow ups, the admins move to text-taps only:  they send a personalized text message, rather than the former call plus text.  Then, they only do 3 lead follow ups (as normal) for the strongest inquiries that include completed details from the contact forms.  All others receive 2 text follow ups before leaving the follow-up queue.

By contrast, during the slower seasons, the administrators have time to go back to the less active leads from the busy season and re-work them through a specialized marketing campaign.  This adds a project to the slower times of year to make sure all opportunities are worked as far as possible, while also using down time constructively to continue marketing.

The impact of dynamic lead-follow ups on workflow:  reducing admin time and increasing productivity

With a movable system for working sales leads in an ongoing service business, your company has the ability to take control of the workload coming in without losing the ability to move forward.

If the dynamic approach feels like too much sales power would be lost with the dropped follow ups, we completely understand the concern.  This concept is counter-intuitive.  But businesses with an ongoing service and a subscription model are also unique and touch many industries – from landscaping to life coaching to music lessons.

These recurring revenue businesses can get stuck managing leads that are not going anywhere rather than having time to serve their immediate base…rather than having time to work NEW and promising leads more fully than the lead that you know is much less likely to close.  Being able to keep moving forward is the art of running a subscription business, while equally serving your current clients too.

If you are feeling the bottlenecks and backlogs in your workflow systems in any sales realm, it may be a good time to consider a dynamic lead follow up approach that gives you the ability to drop the back-log without guilt. 

Too often, we stick with a certain set of follow up steps on sales leads, because we think “I have to, because this is the way it should be done…”, or worse, “my team has to, because this is the way it has to be done to work…”  With sales, nothing could be more flexible than the way you manage your leads, other than the concept that some type of follow up should be done to maximize their potential to turn into a sale.

How many times we should reach back out, and how intensely lead follow ups should be pursued is a different matter. For certain industries, like service businesses, the year is just too dynamic to keep the exact same format stationary without overwhelming your operations.

Your challenge as a leader: create a sales lead follow-up workflow that scales.

If you are the owner of a service business that has an ongoing enrollment of your clients, and you feel the exact seasonal build-ups and shifts I’m describing, I challenge you to think beyond the advice you have heard on this topic and the right way to follow up on your leads. 

If your lead quality is poor, and your conversion rate is low for your service, your problem isn’t the lead follow ups…it’s the quality of your advertising.  You should be receiving a more qualified buyer who is closer to closing, rather than working lead follow ups to death in an attempt to generate business.

Or if your conversion rate is so strong you can’t process all the sales coming in quickly enough, because every other follow up converts to a sale, it’s time to expand your admin team.  This is a great problem to have, and the cost of adding an administrator will pay for itself with the sales growth you see.

Your call to action:  free yourself and your team from the workload burden of fixed sales-lead follow up systems and expectations year round. Instead, add flexibility and natural seasonal shifts to how your team approaches the intensity of working leads, and you will feel a positive change that gives your operation room to scale!

In an ongoing service business, you do not have the time to lose when your operation is active, and the burn out from trying to maintain an unrealistic workflow standard takes all the joy out of the work itself.  Let yourself off the hook, and try moving with your workload, instead of letting it dominate your productive hours.

If you are seeking ways to adjust your sales strategy and optimize your service business’s operations, please contact us to share your challenge!  Our coaching and consulting solutions are designed to help businesses in any stage of development.