Marketing automation The money goes after the lead arrives.
Most businesses buy enquiries competently and answer them badly. Four hours to the first reply, nothing at all on a Saturday, one attempt and then silence. Marketing automation exists to make the follow-up happen every time without a person having to remember, and to put the outcome somewhere it can be counted.
250+ live client engagements · Melbourne-based, working across Australia, the UK, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and New Zealand · First call inside one business day
Seven ways a paid
enquiry quietly dies.
None of these are advertising problems, and none of them appear in an ad report. They all happen in the hour after somebody decided to contact you.
Four hours to the first reply
The enquiry came in at nine and somebody rang back after lunch. By then the same person had filled in two other forms and one of those businesses answered while they were still looking at the screen.
It arrived on a Saturday and was read on Monday
Enquiries do not observe your opening hours. Burst pipes, blocked drains and end-of-lease deadlines are worst on weekends, which is exactly when there is nobody at a desk.
Everyone owns the inbox, so nobody owns the lead
A shared inbox is where leads go to die. Three people can see it, each assumes one of the others has it, and the enquiry ages quietly with nobody's name against it.
One attempt, then silence
Called once, no answer, marked as no good. Most of the jobs that eventually close needed more than one contact, and most businesses stop after the first.
Nobody can say whether the quote was ever sent
It was written in a van, texted from a personal phone, or promised on a call and forgotten. There is no record, so there is no follow-up, and the customer assumes you were not interested.
The same customer, three times, three spellings
Duplicates from a form, a phone call and an import that was never de-duplicated. Now one person is on three sequences, sees the same message three times, and unsubscribes from all of it.
Where the lead came from is a guess
Nothing on the contact says which ad, page or channel produced it, and nothing says what happened to it. Marketing is then judged on form submissions, because form submissions are all anyone can count.
Smaller than it sounds.
This is not an enterprise programme. It is a short list of decisions about who answers, how fast, how many times, and what gets written down — and most businesses have never made any of them deliberately.
1
person an enquiry lands on
Every enquiry gets a named owner at the moment it arrives. One person, by name, who is answerable for it until it is quoted, booked or closed.
0
enquiries with nobody's name on them
The target for how many leads reach an inbox that belongs to everybody. A shared mailbox is not a routing rule, it is the absence of one.
6
fields the rest of it stands on
Where the lead came from, what they asked for, what stage they are at, what the job is worth, who owns it, and what happened last.
3
sequences a service business needs
One after the enquiry, a different one after the quote goes out, and a third for the people who went quiet. They are not the same message.
2
things the CRM has to record
The source going in and the outcome coming out. Without both, nobody can say which channel produced booked work rather than form fills.
7
days a week enquiries arrive
The follow-up has to cover the days nobody is at a desk, which is the entire reason any of this gets automated in the first place.
Automation is not a robot. It is a habit the business cannot forget.
Every good operator already knows they should ring back faster and chase the quote a second time. The reason it does not happen is that it depends on a person remembering, on a day when three jobs ran late. Automation removes the remembering, and nothing else.
Which is also why the CRM matters more than the sequences. If the source going in and the outcome coming out are both recorded, marketing can be argued about in booked jobs. If they are not, the argument stays stuck on form submissions, which nobody has ever paid a wage with.
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The SoudCoh Standard v1.0
41
Clauses published in full
The operating rules, written down where you can read them first
Firm-level figures from the SoudCoh record, not campaign forecasts. Automation and CRM work is measured against your own account before we started — your response times, your follow-up rate, your booked jobs — because that is the only honest comparison.
Ten things happen on an automation engagement. Here they are, in order.
The order matters more than the list. Data first, then routing, then the messages — because a sequence built on a database full of duplicates simply sends the mistake to more people, faster.
Audit what happens to an enquiry today, minute by minute
We submit your own forms, ring your own number and time what comes back. Where it lands, who sees it, how long it sits, and what a person on a Saturday actually receives.
Clean the contact data before anything is built on it
Duplicates merged, dead addresses retired, suburbs and phone formats made consistent, and the six fields filled in. Automation built on dirty data automates the mistake at speed.
Route every enquiry to a named owner
By service, by area or by roster — with a rule for after hours, for weekends, and for the days the usual person is on a job. Nothing lands in a mailbox with no name on it.
Send an acknowledgement the person actually reads
Immediate, short, and written like a human wrote it: we have your enquiry, here is who is calling you, here is roughly when. It buys you the time the four-hour reply loses.
Notify whoever is on the tools, not just the office
The alert reaches the phone of the person who will do the calling, with the detail they need to ring back informed. If nobody picks it up, it escalates rather than going quiet.
Write the follow-up sequence in your voice
A short run of contacts after an enquiry, using the words you use on the phone. Template English gets read as a mass mailing, and a mass mailing gets deleted.
Run a separate sequence after a quote goes out
A quote sent is not a job won. This is the one most businesses skip entirely, and it is where the highest-value follow-up in the whole system sits.
Re-contact the ones who went quiet
Most people who say not yet mean not yet, not never. A planned re-contact weeks later, with a reason to reply, is cheaper than buying a stranger.
Record the source going in and the outcome coming out
Every contact carries where it came from and what happened to it — quoted, won, lost, junk, and for how much. That is what turns a lead count into a job count.
Work the list you already own
Service reminders, seasonal jobs, and the quote from last year that never got a second call. Your customer list is the cheapest pipeline you have and the least worked.
The ninth row is the one that connects this page to everything else. With the source recorded against the contact and the outcome recorded against the lead, a channel can be judged on booked work rather than on form fills. Until that exists, no channel can honestly be given a cost per job at all — and how it is measured is described in tracking and measurement.
There is also a line on where automation stops. Nothing we build pretends to be a human when it is not. Nothing goes out at a volume the business cannot service, because a sequence that books more work than you can do is a complaint generator. And nothing automates a judgement a person should be making — pricing, whether a job is worth doing, or how to answer somebody who is upset.
The first ninety days, honestly.
- Week 0
The audit and the first call
Half an hour on how enquiries reach you and who touches them, then we test the path ourselves and write down what actually happens, including after hours.
- Week 1
The data, then the routing
Duplicates merged and the fields fixed first, because everything after this reads from them. Then routing, so every enquiry has an owner from that day forward.
- Weeks 2–4
Acknowledgement and alerts
The immediate reply, the notification to the person on the tools, and the fallback when nobody picks up. This is the part that shows in the diary soonest.
- Weeks 4–8
The sequences, drafted with you
We write, you read them aloud, and anything that does not sound like you gets rewritten. Consent and unsubscribe are wired in at the same time, not bolted on later.
- Weeks 8–12
The loop back to the advertising
Source and outcome recorded on every contact, so reporting can move from enquiries to booked work. Then the first reactivation run across the existing list.
- From there
Rhythm
Sequences reviewed against what they produced, the database cleaned on a schedule, and reporting on a fixed cadence — including the months where nothing moved.
You keep the audit findings whether or not you hire us. Wherever the platform allows it we take manager access rather than ownership, so the contacts, the history and the consent records stay with you throughout.
Follow-up work lives in two of the six stages.
Compound is how our team works on any account — six stages every change passes through. An automation engagement puts most of its weight on these two.
Sweep
Waste is found daily, named, and priced.
On an automation engagement the sweep is the database and the queue: duplicates, contacts with no owner, sequences that stopped firing, enquiries sitting past the hour they should have been answered. Unglamorous, and cumulatively the difference between a lead and a job.
Statement
A fixed rhythm, good news or bad.
Once source and outcome are recorded, the report changes shape. You get enquiries by channel, what happened to them, how long each one waited before somebody made contact, and what the sequences produced — including the months where the honest answer is that nothing improved.
What we publish.
These are paid search lead generation accounts and every tile says so. Two turn on the subject of this page — leads routed to a named rep by CRM rather than by inbox, and a pickup result after reminders. We publish no automation case study, so nothing here is offered as your result: this work is reported against your own baseline.
- Paid search · Solar · Australia189qualified leads in four weeks18,858 people reached · every lead routed to a rep by CRM rather than by inboxSolarMan
- Paid search · Mortgage broking · NZ85%call pickup rate after remindersFour times the 20% baseline · 70% of budget moved onto refinance intentInnovest
- Paid search · Cleaning · Melbourne138jobs booked in 41 daysA$20.43 cost per job · 21.20% conversion rate · A$2,819.92 ad spendPink Flamingo
- Paid search · Antennas · Australia38%drop in cost per acquisition57% more qualified leads on the same account · 4.6x return on ad spendAADT Antennas
Before you ask us anything
Here is what everybody asks first.
Automation, answered.
Which CRM, whether we can use yours, how long it takes, consent, who writes the words, who owns the data, cost and reporting.
The first call is free and there is no deck.
Book a free strategy callThis is the middle of a chain, not the whole of it.
Something has to produce the enquiry, and something has to count what happened to it. Lead generation is the page above this one, if you would rather start at the front of the chain.
- Counting what the follow-up producedThe measurement layer underneath the CRM. Nothing here can be judged on cost per job until this exists.
- Sending the outcome back to the platformsOnce the CRM knows who bought, that outcome can teach the advertising to go after more people like them.
- Where the enquiries come from in the first placeThis page assumes you already have enquiries. That one is about which channels produce them for your business.
- Getting more enquiries from the same trafficThe step before this one. A form nobody completes never reaches a sequence, however good the sequence is.
- Asking for the review at the right momentThe same trigger that closes a job can ask for the review. It is the one sequence with an obvious end point.
- When the tools will not connectSome job-management systems have no usable connection. Sometimes the honest answer is to build the piece in the middle.
- The advertising this is measured againstCost per job only becomes a real number once the CRM records what happened to every enquiry the ads bought.
Four parts of this work have a briefing of their own: how two common platforms differ once a small team has to live in one, the six contact fields worth fixing before you spend anything, re-booking the customers you already have and sequences written to close a job rather than to fill an inbox.
Get the follow-up audit
We send your own forms, ring your own number, and time what comes back — on a weekday and on a weekend. Then we hand you the list of where enquiries are being lost. Yours to action, with us or without us.
No pitch deck. No upsell. A real conversation and a written list of where enquiries are being lost.