Answer every inbound inquiry within the hour (and book the call)

In 2011, Harvard Business Review published a study of how fast US companies answered web leads: “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads” by James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington, March 2011.

The buyer who fills in your form on Tuesday morning has a free half hour on Tuesday. They will spend it explaining the problem to whoever answers first. If you answer on Wednesday, they have explained it to someone else, and you are the second quote.

Know your own number before you change anything. Open your last ten inquiries and write down the time from the form to your first reply. That median is your baseline. If it reads in hours, the rest of this page is for you.

Count it for a firm of ten people: fifteen inquiries a month, three of them real projects. If one of those three goes to the firm that answered first, you lose a quarter’s best deal to a reply you wrote at 6:00 PM.

The first reply has one job: get a call on the calendar. Four parts do it.

1. 1

   A direct answer to what they asked.

   If they asked “Do you do load tests for Shopify stores?”, the first sentence says yes and names one you did. If they asked for a price, give a range and say what moves it. A reply that dodges the question tells them to keep looking.

2. 2

   Two concrete times.

   “Thursday at 10:00 AM ET or Friday at 2:00 PM ET.” Two times in their time zone, inside the next two business days. “When works for you?” starts three emails of back and forth; two times let them answer in one word.

3. 3

   A booking link.

   For when neither time works. The link shows your open times and puts the call on both calendars with a video link. Put it after the two times, so the buyer sees a quick answer first.

4. 4

   No homework before the call.

   No questionnaire, no brief to fill in, no NDA to sign before you talk. Ask for what you need on the call. Each step you add before the call is a place where the buyer can stop.

Keep it under 120 words. Sign it with your name and a phone number. Send it from your own address, not from info@.

The question at the end gives them something to think about, not a form to fill in. They answer it on the call.

• The form goes to a shared inbox. Inquiries land in info@ or hello@, and each person who sees one thinks someone else will answer. Route each form to one named person, and give that person a phone alert.
• No calendar link. You offer “any time next week,” they offer Wednesday, you are busy Wednesday. Three emails later the call is a week away. Two times and a link settle it in one reply.
• Waiting to write the perfect reply. You want to read their site, think about scope and sound expert, so you save it for the evening. The buyer wanted a time to talk. Send the short reply now and do the thinking before the call.
• An auto-reply that promises 24 to 48 hours. It tells the buyer to keep looking. If you use one, put your booking link in it.
• Homework before the call. A ten-question intake form or an NDA before a first call filters out the buyers who were in a hurry, and a buyer in a hurry has a deadline and a budget.

Fix it this week, with the tools you have:

1. Send every form to one named person’s address, and turn on phone alerts for that address.
2. Save the email from section 5 as a template in Gmail, with your booking link in it.
3. Block 15 minutes at 11:00 AM and 3:00 PM to answer what came in. Two checks a day keep a morning inquiry from waiting until the evening.

Two checks a day still leave an inquiry waiting while you are on a client call. Tommos (tommos.ai) is a CRM with AI agents in it, and its first agent, Tommo SDR, answers inquiries. It reads each new form, booking or inbound email, drafts the reply in your voice with two or three open times from your Google Calendar, and books the call when the buyer picks one. You press Send from your phone. It comes with the Book plan, $299 a month for the firm, with no seats and the AI model included: $3,588 a year, to set against one project you lost to a slower reply.

1. 1

   The inquiry landsBook

   A form on your site, a booking or an email to your inbox. Tommo SDR opens a record for the person and their company and starts the reply.

2. 2

   The replyBook

   Tommo SDR drafts the first reply in your voice: an answer to what they asked and two or three times that are free on your Google Calendar. The card: the email, with Send, Change and Skip, on your phone between two meetings.

3. 3

   The call is bookedBook

   The buyer picks a time. The call goes on your Google Calendar with a Meet link. If the buyer goes quiet, Tommo SDR follows up inside their working hours until they reply.

4. 4

   The form answers at onceBook

   Put the Tommos form on your contact page. AI triage reads each answer against your rules, and a real lead gets your calendar the moment they press Send. The form takes your site’s font and color.

Each reply waits on a card until you let Tommo SDR send that kind on its own; on the card, Change lets you fix a line in place. After twelve approvals in a row of one kind of email with nothing to fix, it offers to. You switch it on per form, on a paid plan, and switch it off the same way.

What Tommo SDR does · Every plan