When is a lead actually dead?

There's a list somewhere — a notebook, a spreadsheet, a pile of texts you keep meaning to sort out — and on it are forty people who once asked you about a job. Some of them are from last week. Some are from two years ago. You don't know which of them are real and which are ghosts, so the list just sits there quietly making you feel behind.

Most advice about this is about chasing harder. The more useful question is the opposite one: which of these can you confidently cross out, so the ones that are left get proper attention?

Dead is a decision, not a fact

Nobody tells you a lead is dead. There's no notification. That's the entire problem, and it means "dead" is something you have to define rather than something you discover.

So define it. A lead is dead when the cost of carrying it — the mental space, the guilt, the checking — is more than what it's worth. Once you write down what that looks like, the list stops being forty unresolved things and becomes four real prospects and thirty-six closed ones. That shift is worth more than any follow-up technique, because the forty-item list is the reason you aren't following up at all.

The signals that mean it's over

They said no. That's obvious, and it's worth stating, because plenty of owners keep a polite no on the list out of hope. It's a no. Close it.

Two follow-ups, no response, more than a month gone. If someone hasn't answered two reasonable messages across several weeks then they aren't deciding, they've moved on, and the silence is your answer.

The trigger has passed. They wanted it done before the party, before the tenants moved in, before Christmas — and the date has gone, so whatever they needed either happened without you or stopped mattering.

The job changed shape. They were selling the house and now they're not, or they were going to extend and now they're moving, and the thing you quoted for doesn't exist any more.

They've asked you to stop. Rare, and absolute when it happens.

Any one of those, and it comes off the active list — not out of your records, but off the list you actually look at each week.

The ones that look dead and aren't

Three kinds get closed too early, and awkwardly they're the ones most likely to turn into actual work. Each needs a date rather than a decision.

The big job with a long fuse, meaning extensions, commercial work, or anything involving planning permission and several trades. Six months of silence there is normal rather than a rejection. These shouldn't be on a weekly list at all; they belong in a diary note for a specific future date.

The one who's waiting on money. They told you they would do it after the bonus, after the house sale, or in the new tax year, and they meant it. Put the date in and forget about them until then.

The seasonal one, meaning anybody who enquired at the wrong point in your year. The person who asked about the garden in November is not a lost cause, they're an April customer.

None of those should be chased now. All of them should have a date attached, which is a completely different thing from sitting on a list being vaguely guilty about.

The three-month message

Here is the single most useful habit for this whole problem, and it's one almost nobody bothers with.

When you close a lead, put a note in the diary three months out. Then, when it comes up, send one light message that doesn't reference the quote at all.

Hi Sam — we talked about your bathroom back in March. Just wondering whether you got it sorted in the end, and if not whether you still want a hand.

The response rate on these is much better than a second or third chase, for a reason that's easy to miss. Enough time has passed that neither of you is embarrassed, and a good number of people simply never did the job. They put it off, and by now they've forgotten who quoted.

You are, at that point, the only person who's still thinking about their bathroom. That's a strong position and it cost you one message.

Keep the records even when you close the lead

Crossing someone off the active list isn't deleting them. Keep the name, what they wanted, what you quoted and when.

Two reasons. A past enquirer is a far warmer contact than a stranger if you ever need work, and a quiet January is much easier to fix with a list of forty old enquiries than with an advert. And if they come back in a year, being able to say "you were after the vinyl in the back bedroom, wasn't it?" does more for you than any amount of marketing.

Why so many go cold in the first place

Worth looking at the pattern rather than the individuals. A lot of these were never really deciding against you — they hit one unanswered question and drifted, and you never learned which question it was.

Whether you'd do the smaller version, whether you cover their village, what a visit costs. How far out you're booked, and whether the date could move if their work went mad.

Those get asked at ten at night, into a search box rather than a phone, because asking a person feels like a commitment. If nothing answers them, the enquiry quietly becomes one of your forty.

That's the gap hailera was built for: you write those answers once, check them yourself, and publish them as an agent so your website and the AI apps people ask can answer directly, rather than leaving somebody to guess and give up. A plain page on your site headed "how we work" does a fair share of it for nothing, so write that first and see how much of the drift it prevents.

Do the clear-out once

Set aside forty minutes and go through the whole list, marking every entry as one of three things: active, dated, or closed.

Active means you're waiting on a specific answer and it has been under a fortnight. Dated means it's real but not now, so it gets a day in the diary. Closed means it's finished, and it goes into your records and out of your head.

Most people come out of that exercise with three or four genuinely active leads and a great deal of relief.

Today: take your list and put a date next to every entry — either the day you'll message them, or a line through it. Nothing stays undated.

Written by the team at hailera — we help small businesses answer customer questions without being there.