Follow-up rules that stop loan leads going cold

Where leads actually go cold

A lead is almost never lost in one moment. It slips at a handover, and the handovers in a loan advisory team are easy to predict.

• The after-hours enquiry. It arrives at night or on a Sunday and is still unread on Monday afternoon. By then the customer has spoken to someone else.
• The first call nobody answers. The agent tries once, plans to try again later, and never writes that down.
• The vague promise. The customer says call me next week. The agent remembers it until Wednesday.
• The missing documents. The customer promised payslips, nothing came, and nobody noticed because the case still looks busy.
• The quiet bank. The case went to the bank, and for two weeks nobody asked what happened.

None of these is about effort. Each one is a next step with no owner, no date or no checker. The five rules below close those three gaps.

The five rules

If you adopt only two, adopt rules 1 and 2: no lead without an owner, and no contact without a dated next step. Most of the other rules depend on those.

A first reply you can keep to

Speed matters because an enquiry is often at its warmest when it arrives. But a promise you cannot keep is worse than a modest target you always meet. Look at when your leads actually arrive before you choose.

• If most enquiries arrive in office hours, a target such as 'within the hour during working hours' is realistic.
• If many arrive in the evening or at weekends, decide who is on duty for them, or agree that the first reply happens at the start of the next working day and tell customers so.
• If your WhatsApp setup can send an automatic acknowledgement, use it to say that a person will reply, and say when. Do not use it to pretend that a person already has.

A follow-up pattern for people who do not answer

Most leads do not pick up the first time. People are at work, in a meeting, or ignoring numbers they do not know. You want a pattern that changes the time of day and the channel, and that ends.

Keep each message short, with your name, your company and one question the customer can answer in a word. One message that asks a question beats three that explain.

If you use the WhatsApp Business Platform (the API), know its rules. When a customer messages or calls you, a 24-hour window opens in which you can reply freely. When the window closes, you can only send a pre-approved template message. So the first message to a lead who has never written to you has to be a template, while a reply to someone who wrote this morning does not. Meta also requires the person to have agreed to receive messages from you, so check what your enquiry form or advert told them before you send the Day 1 message.

Follow-up after the lead stage

Follow-up does not stop when a lead becomes a case. Cases stall in two places: waiting for the customer's documents and waiting for the bank.

• Documents. Send the whole list in one message, not one item at a time. Tick items off as they arrive. Agree a date with the customer and put that date on the case. Banks differ in what they ask for, so keep the current list for each bank on the case and ask the bank when it changes.
• The bank. When you submit, note the date and ask your bank contact how long a decision usually takes. Put a follow-up date on the case for that day. Do not guess a turnaround. Ask for one.
• Stalled cases. Decide how many days without movement counts as stalled, write it down and look at that list. Five days is a reasonable place to start. Adjust it to the turnaround your banks actually give you.

What the boss and the team leader check

The checking rule is where most teams fail, because it needs a list to look at. Asking agents how their leads are going gives you what they remember. A list of items past their date gives you what is true.

• Every morning, open everything overdue, oldest first.
• Ask each owner one question: what is the new date? Not why it slipped.
• Once a week, look at leads with no contact for longer than the days you set, and at leads that were parked 30 days ago.
• Once a month, ask which lead sources produce leads that never get answered, and fix the source or the speed of reply.

The tone matters. An agent who is questioned about every overdue item can start to stop writing dates down. An agent who is simply asked for the new date is more likely to keep writing them.

Setting this up in a spreadsheet or a CRM

You need four things on every lead: an owner, a status, the date and time of the next step, and the outcome of the last contact. In a spreadsheet that means four columns, a drop-down for the status, and a filter on the date column that you really open every morning. It works for one or two people. With a team it often fails: copies multiply, nothing forces a date, and nobody sees what is overdue unless they go looking.

In the Loan Advisory CRM, each call ends with an outcome and, for a callback, a booked time. In the phone app, callbacks that are due come first in the agent's day. The pipeline flags cases that have not moved for several days, and the boss can ask the assistant which follow-ups are overdue. None of that replaces rules 1 to 5. It makes them cheaper to follow.