The lead went quiet. It is still waiting.
Somebody asked for a price, abandoned a form halfway, or booked an appointment and did not turn up, and then waited. We build the follow-up that goes out while they still care.
Reply“thursday works”
Replied
Routed
Decisions about money and policy.
Stops the moment they say no.
Reads the reply and acts on it.
Rebooked Thu 9:15
Reminder goes out the day before.
Interest has a shelf life.
Leads usually go quiet in a queue. This one arrived on a Friday afternoon, behind forty others, while the person who would have called was busy. A rule can work that queue on a schedule, so no lead depends on someone remembering to call.
0of 114
B2B companies phoned a new lead within five minutes of a demo request.
31% of those companies responded to the request by phone.
What actually happens when a lead goes quiet
Six steps, from the moment a lead goes quiet to the record it leaves.
The trigger.
A form abandoned before it was submitted, a quote nobody replied to, a booking nobody showed up for, a thread that has been silent too long. You decide which events count and how long the silence has to be. Nothing fires on a guess about intent.
The message.
Written from what the record already holds: what they asked about, where they stopped, what your team would have said next. The wording is yours, set once before the first message goes out.
The checks before it sends.
Opt-outs, suppression lists, duplicates, the hours you are willing to contact people, and anyone already mid-conversation with a human. Anything that fails a check is held, with the reason on the record.
The reply.
It answers what it is allowed to answer: the price, the link, the next opening in the calendar. Negotiation, complaints, anything contractual, and anyone who sounds unhappy go straight to your team with the thread attached.
The stop.
It stops on an opt-out, on a booking, on a handoff, or after the number of attempts you set. We write the stop conditions down with you at the start.
The record.
Every message, every check, every handoff, with the reason attached and written back to the same CRM record your team already works in. If somebody asks why a particular person heard from you, the answer is one query away.
What is the chasing costing you?
Your own numbers in, an estimate out: the hours your team spends following up by hand, and what is sitting in the queue meanwhile. The audit replaces it with real figures.
Hours a month spent chasing by hand
13–20
hours a month.
That is 1.7 to 2.5 work-days
out of one person’s 22-day working month.
What’s waiting in the queue · your pipeline todayAt $250 a lead, a month of quiet leads adds up to about $20,000 waiting in the queue.
ContextFor scale: the average B2B email reply to a demo request takes about 12 hours. Workato, 2026 · 114 companies
Assumptions
- Hours a month = quiet leads × follow-ups per lead × minutes each ÷ 60.
- The low figure is the high one minus a third, because estimates like this tend to run high.
- A work-day is 8 hours, and a working month is about 22 of them.
- The queue is quiet leads × your value of one lead. We publish no recovery rate, because there is no sourced one.
Why it’s built this way
This job goes to a rule.
We ask the same question of every workflow. For lead recovery the answer is a rule: the same trigger sends the same message, every time.
Same input, same output
Ordinary code decides what goes out, so a trigger always produces the same message. A model reads what the lead actually said.
Auditable line by line
Why this person was contacted, on which basis, and why the one next to them was not. A rule can answer that, because it takes the same path every time. In this workflow, somebody will eventually ask.
The judgement is at the edge
An unhappy reply, an unusual question or a negotiation stops the rule, and someone on your team picks up the conversation.
SMS and email
We decide with you which one to use, and in which order.
SMS.
Where a short question gets a short answer the same afternoon. It also has the tightest rules around it, which is why we decide it with you.
Email.
Room for the quote, the document, the calendar link, the thing that needs a paragraph. Slower to get an answer, and the right call whenever a phone number, or the permission to use one, is missing.
A few practical questions.
Will it say the wrong thing?
What if someone writes back something it can’t handle?
It stops the sequence and hands the conversation to your team. That covers a negotiation, a complaint, an unusual question or a reply that reads as annoyed.
Will the messages sound like us?
We write them from how your team already talks to leads, in your words. Changing them later is a copy edit.
What if someone doesn’t want to hear from us?
They stop hearing from you the first time they ask, with no confirmation step, on every channel. The opt-out is written to the record so nothing downstream picks them up again, and suppression lists you already hold are loaded at setup.
What exactly does it do?
What makes it send a follow-up?
Events you choose: a form abandoned before submission, a quote with no reply, a no-show, a thread that has gone silent past the point your team would have chased it. Each one gets its own delay, its own message and its own stop conditions.
How fast does it get back to someone?
Soon enough that the lead is still thinking about it, and the exact delay is set per trigger. An abandoned quote wants a different wait from a missed appointment. We set those with you at the start and change them when the replies say we got them wrong.
Will it text people or email them?
Both are available and the choice comes out of the audit. It depends on what your list actually consented to, whether you hold usable phone numbers, and where your leads already answer you. We will tell you if one of them is the wrong idea for your list.
Will it fit what we already have?
Does it work with the CRM we already have?
Yes. It connects to whatever holds the lead: your CRM, your form provider, your booking tool, your shared inbox, an internal API if that is where the truth lives. Credentials are scoped to the task and revocable at any layer.