Follow-up
3 min readGetting enquiries but few sales?
PresalePartner · Sales process
Enquiry conversion on a development is decided largely by how quickly a qualified person responds and how consistently the enquiry is followed up. Measure time to a substantive reply, time to first human contact and the number of contact attempts before increasing advertising spend.
When a development is not selling, the first instinct is usually to spend more on advertising. Before doing that, it is worth measuring something much cheaper: how long it takes for a real person to make contact after an enquiry arrives, and how many enquiries never get a second attempt.
Three different things get counted as "the response" and they are not the same. An automatic acknowledgement confirms the enquiry arrived. A substantive AI-assisted reply answers the buyer's actual question from approved project information and captures budget, purchaser type, finance position, timeframe and the stock they are interested in. Human contact is a licensed agent picking the conversation up, giving advice and arranging an inspection.
All three matter, and each should be measured separately. A buyer who enquired on several projects in one evening is comparing all of them, and an acknowledgement counted as a response hides the gap that is actually costing sales.
What to measure
Keep the measurement honest by separating automatic messages from genuine human attempts.
- Time to automatic acknowledgement — should be immediate, and never reported as a reply.
- Time to substantive response — the first message that answers the buyer's question and captures qualification detail.
- Time from enquiry received to first human attempt by a licensed agent — the median, not the average.
- Percentage of enquiries with at least three contact attempts across different channels.
- Percentage of enquiries with a recorded next action and a due date.
- Enquiries that reached an appointment, and appointments that were attended.
Why it matters more off the plan
Off-the-plan buyers are being asked to commit to something they cannot walk through. Confidence is built through responsiveness and clear answers about timing, finishes and settlement. Slow follow-up reads as risk.
It is also the part of a campaign that agency reporting rarely covers, because it happens after the click. If nobody owns it, it usually is not measured at all.