Capturing leads from your website

Leads is one of the apps in your own business suite. It catches the people who ask about your work, from your website, the phone or the front door, and makes sure someone gets back to them quickly. It comes with release 0.1.1. The full owner's guide is in the suite's code: Leads, for the owner.

Why speed matters

The Lead Response Management study (with Professor Oldroyd of MIT and data from InsideSales.com) reports "a staggering 21-fold decrease in the odds of qualifying a prospect if the response time stretched from 5 to 30 minutes". Leads measures that time for you: from the moment a lead comes in to the first contact someone logs.

Put a form on your website

1. In Leads, open Lead forms and make a form: its heading, which fields it asks (name always; email, phone, company, message, the service wanted and how they prefer to be contacted) and a consent box in your own words that the visitor must tick.
2. Choose who new leads from this form go to. If nobody, everyone who gets new-lead alerts hears about it.
3. Put it on your website in one of three ways: a link to the form's own page, the iframe snippet (the form appears inside your page), or the plain HTML form snippet, which your web person can style.

The form records where each lead came from: the page it was on, the site that sent the visitor and the utm_ labels on your ad links.

When a lead comes in

• The person it is assigned to, or everyone with new-lead alerts, hears about it in the app and on their phone. It stays in What needs me on the home page until someone contacts them.
• Open the lead, call or email them, and press Log it. That first contact sets the lead's speed to lead. It turns red when it is over your target, 15 minutes until you change it in Leads, then Settings.
• Phone calls, walk-ins and referrals can be added by hand, with how they reached you.
• When a lead becomes real work, Convert to customer adds the contact and a deal to the Customers app, with where the lead came from in the deal's notes.

Follow-up emails

A sequence is up to five short emails over a few days. You tick the leads and send them a sequence; that is one approval, and nothing is sent until someone approves it. Each email goes out from your own email account (Settings, then Email).

• Your postal address first. US law on marketing email, the CAN-SPAM Act, asks for your "valid physical postal address" in each message (FTC guide). Until you enter it in Leads, then Settings, no sequence can be switched on.
• An unsubscribe link in every email. One click stops the rest for that person. The FTC's guide says an opt-out must be honoured "within 10 business days"; Leads stops at once.
• It stops by itself when the lead replies (press "They replied"), is contacted, converted or disqualified, or unsubscribes.
• No text messages. Leads never sends texts. Under the US rules for automated marketing calls and texts (47 CFR 64.1200), a marketing text needs the person's prior express written consent, signed and naming the phone number, and a reply such as "stop" must end them. That belongs with a texting provider built for it.

What it keeps out

The public form refuses anything that looks like a card number, ignores bots that fill in a hidden field, and turns away a connection that sends too many forms in a few minutes. It never shows one visitor anything about another lead. Leads is not a place for health details, government ids or card numbers.

The funnel report

For the dates you pick, the report shows how many leads came in from each source, how many were contacted, qualified, converted and won (from the deals in Customers), the median speed to lead and the value of the deals won. Export CSV gives you the same numbers as a spreadsheet.

Good to know

• Sequence emails go out when someone uses the suite (opens the home page or Leads, sends a form, or approves something). A quiet weekend can delay an email until the next visit.
• If a very old browser will not show the iframe, use the plain HTML form or the link.
• On the first day with your intern, send yourself a test lead from your own website and check it arrives, and send yourself a sequence to see the email in your own inbox.