01Why Nobody Calls
Why the seller does not call the lead back
Five Real Causes
In factory sales teams the same five causes show up, and only one of them is about effort. Naming the right one changes what you fix.
One: the seller is carrying live orders. A rep who has a delivery delayed at a customer and a technical revision on a quote will always prioritise the order over the stranger who filled in a form — the order has a name, a value and an angry buyer. Two: the lead came without context, so opening the call costs 15 minutes of research the seller does not have. Three: the cadence does not exist, so "following up" means whatever each person decides, and one call with no answer already counts as done. Four: the commission structure rewards closing the deal already in hand, not opening a new one that will take 90 days. Five: nobody looks at the number, so nothing happens when a lead is never touched.
Cause two is not a follow-up problem at all — it is a broken transfer, and it is fixed in the lead handoff. Causes one, three, four and five are what the rest of this page addresses. Note that none of them are solved by asking the team to try harder in the Monday meeting.
02The Written Cadence
The written cadence: 5 touches in 12 business days
A cadence is a calendar, not a suggestion. This one fits a manufacturer with a technical buyer who is hard to reach and rarely answers an unknown number on the first try:
The 12 Business Days
Day 0 — Touches 1 and 2
Phone call within 2 business hours. If unanswered, a WhatsApp in the next 10 minutes naming the company and what the person asked about. Same day, same hour — the buyer still remembers filling in the form.
→
Days 2 and 5 — Touches 3 and 4
A call at a different hour of the day than the first one, and an email carrying something useful: the spec sheet for the application, a similar case, the standard lead time. Not "just following up".
→
Day 12 — Touch 5
The closing message: state plainly that this is the last attempt and leave the door open. This one has the second-highest reply rate of the whole sequence, right after the day-0 call.
After touch 5:
The lead is marked no-contact and goes back to marketing for nurturing — it does not stay parked in the seller's list forever, and it does not get deleted either. Parked leads are what makes the pipeline look full while nothing moves.
Two details that decide whether the cadence survives contact with reality. First, vary the hour of the day: a technical buyer who does not answer at 9am often answers at 4:30pm, and calling three times at the same hour is one attempt repeated three times. Second, every touch has to be registered with date and channel — a touch nobody can see did not happen, and that is exactly the argument that poisons the Monday meeting.
03How to Measure
How to measure follow-up without starting a fight
Metric 01
Leads With Zero Touches
How many leads that arrived this week ended it with no registered contact attempt. This is the only number that must be public to the whole team, because it does not judge anyone's skill — it just says the lead was never opened. Target is zero and it is reachable in the first month.
Public
Metric 02
Median Time to First Touch
Median, not average — one lead answered in 4 days drags an average and hides the real behaviour. Measure in business hours, not calendar hours, otherwise every Friday lead looks like a disaster. Target under 2 business hours.
Weekly
Metric 03
Cadence Completion Rate
Share of leads that received all 5 touches before being closed as no-contact. When this sits below 40%, the team is giving up on touch 2 — and the leads being written off as bad were mostly never actually reached.
Diagnostic
04What the Owner Does
What the owner does on Monday morning
Three moves, in this order, none of them requiring new software. First: pull the leads from the last 30 days and count how many have zero registered touches. Do not discuss it yet — just get the number. Second: write the cadence on one page and hand it to the team as a rule, not as a recommendation, with the day, the channel and the content of each of the 5 touches. Third: open the weekly meeting with the zero-touch count and nothing else, every week, until it is zero.
Do not start by changing the commission plan. Changing pay is slow, it is political, and it takes three months to show an effect — while posting the zero-touch count changes behaviour in the first week and costs nothing. Fix the incentive later, once you know whether the problem was really incentive.
Two adjacent decisions come up as soon as the count starts dropping. If the team argues that the leads did not deserve the 5 touches, the discussion is really about eligibility — see who should qualify the lead. And to turn the cadence and the deadlines into something both teams formally sign instead of something the owner enforces alone, see the SLA between marketing and sales.
05FAQ
FAQ
What do I do when sales does not come back to the leads? +
Publish a written cadence of 5 touches over 12 business days with the day, channel and content of each one, make the first touch mandatory within 2 business hours, and post the number of leads that ended the week with zero registered touches. Behaviour changes when the number is visible, not when effort is requested.
How many times should a seller try to reach an industrial lead? +
Five touches over 12 business days, across phone, WhatsApp and email, varying the hour of the day. A technical buyer who does not answer at 9am often answers at 4:30pm — three calls at the same hour is one attempt repeated three times.
How long can I take to call a lead that came from the site? +
Two business hours for the first attempt. The buyer who filled the form is usually comparing three suppliers on the same afternoon, and the first one to make contact sets the terms of the comparison. After 24 hours you are calling someone who has already talked to a competitor.
How do I get the sales team to record contact attempts? +
Reduce it to one click with three options: contacted, no answer, wrong number. Registration dies when it demands a written summary of the call. Ask for the outcome only, and only for the touch itself — the call notes belong to the seller, the count belongs to the company.
Should I change the commission to make sellers work the leads? +
Not first. Changing pay is slow, political and takes about three months to show an effect. Posting the zero-touch count weekly changes behaviour in the first week at no cost. If the count stays high after 60 days with the cadence in place, then the incentive is genuinely the problem.
What should I do with the lead after the fifth attempt? +
Mark it as no-contact and return it to marketing for nurturing. It should not sit parked in the seller's list forever, and it should not be deleted. Parked leads are what makes the pipeline look full while nothing actually moves in it.
The seller says the leads are bad — is that why there is no follow-up? +
Check the cadence completion rate before accepting the claim. If most leads were closed after 1 or 2 touches, the team never actually reached them, so nobody knows whether they were bad. Only leads that got all 5 touches count as evidence about quality.
Does WhatsApp work for follow-up with an industrial buyer? +
Yes, and in Brazilian manufacturing it usually outperforms email for the second touch — provided the message names the company and what the person asked about, and is sent in the 10 minutes after an unanswered call. A generic "hi, are you there?" reads as spam and burns the channel.
How many of your leads got zero touches last month?
We pull the last 90 days, count zero-touch leads, measure time to first touch and cadence completion, and hand back the one-page cadence your team can adopt on Monday.
