Lead management in a B2B company: how to handle enquiries from first contact to signed contract

In many companies, the enquiry handling process exists in three versions: in the sales director’s head, in the salespeople’s inboxes and in marketing’s spreadsheet. Each looks different, so what happens to an enquiry depends on who received it and when.

Take a hypothetical distribution company where a salesperson gets a list of 80 enquiries on Monday. They take the 20 best-described ones, prepare a few quotations and win some of them. The other 60 wait, and after a few weeks they are out of date – the customers have bought elsewhere. Nobody knows how many of them were genuinely good opportunities.

This pattern recurs in different forms. We most often see three:

The foundation is a shared list of stages that every enquiry passes through. For a mid-sized B2B company, the nine described in the table below are usually enough. A smaller company can merge some of them, and a company with a long sales cycle can add more.

The response times in the table are example values to adapt. More important than the figures themselves is that each stage has one person responsible and clear information on what must be confirmed before moving on.

Two stages need special attention. When a deal is lost, the salesperson always records the reason, because without it you will never know whether you are losing on price, timing or missing features. The “follow-up” stage, in turn, takes over customers who are not buying today but may come back in a few months.

The list of stages is only half the work. The other half is making sure enquiries actually move through them. In practice, the process most often gets stuck in three places.

The first is the handover from marketing to sales. The manager gets several dozen enquiries a week and puts off the decision. A simple rule helps: within one working day, every enquiry is either accepted or rejected with a reason. Rejections with reasons are valuable information for marketing.

The second is negotiations with no deadline. The salesperson has sent a quotation, the customer has gone quiet, and the CRM has shown “awaiting decision” for weeks. Every quotation under negotiation should have a date for the next contact. If it has had none for a week, the case goes to the sales manager.

The third is customers who say “not now”. The salesperson marks them as lost and the contact disappears. Six months later, the customer is ready to buy, but nobody gets in touch. A “follow-up” stage with a review date solves this problem without any extra tools.

A customer who has sent an enquiry through a form is usually asking competitors too. A study published in Harvard Business Review in 2011 showed that most companies respond to online enquiries too slowly. According to the authors, the chance of speaking to a decision-maker was by far the highest when the company got in touch within the first hour.

For a mid-sized company, the conclusion is practical. You do not have to start calling within five minutes straight away, but it is worth measuring your current response time and setting a target. That might be, for example, contact on the same working day for all enquiries and within an hour for those marked as urgent.

The simplest measurement: take the last 30 enquiries from your web form and check how many hours passed between submission and a salesperson’s first contact. The result often surprises the management board more than any sales report.

Any popular CRM can handle the stages described above. The differences lie in how well it fits the rest of your company’s tools and where most of your enquiries come from. Treat the list below as a starting point for a shortlist.

We describe the detailed selection criteria in a separate guide on choosing a CRM for a mid-sized company. When it comes to handling enquiries, one thing matters most: the tool should reflect your process, not impose its own.

Automation makes sense in places where people most often forget or put things off. Each of the automations below can be configured in popular CRM systems or in Power Automate.

When following up by email, keep the law in mind. Since 10 November 2024, the rules have been set by the Polish Electronic Communications Law: sending commercial information by email requires the recipient’s prior consent. Most commentators believe this also applies to business addresses. So a series of messages to customers put on hold must be based on consents you have collected.

A few metrics, calculated monthly from the same source, are enough for the management board. Take a hypothetical company that receives 200 enquiries a month. Marketing verifies 120 of them, sales accepts 70, the need is confirmed for 35, and 9 end in a contract.

These figures show that sales wins 9 of 35 conversations with a confirmed need, or about 26%. It accepts 70 of the 120 contacts from marketing, or about 58%. Only by comparing these values month on month and across enquiry sources can you see where the problem lies.

Do not compare yourself with “market averages” from the internet, because it is rarely clear how they were calculated. The best reference point is your own result before the changes. Below are the metrics worth starting with.

The most expensive mistake is buying a new CRM before describing the process. A few months later, the company has the same chaos, just in a new tool. The second is too many mandatory fields: when a salesperson has to fill in dozens of boxes, enquiries stay in email.

The third mistake is having nobody on the sales side responsible for the process. A rollout run solely by the IT department ends with a system that nobody develops further. The fourth is reviewing sales once a quarter, when it is already too late to react.

The tidying up is best done in the steps listed below. Add artificial intelligence, for example for summarising calls or forecasting, only at the end, once the CRM holds complete and reliable data.