James Dooley: So in this video we are going to be talking about the reasons why we might decline you for lead generation services. I feel like it is important for us to explain why some businesses do not get in. It is not to say that we are too good for you. It is more that you are not ready for lead generation yet. It does not matter if you are doing SEO or PPC, you need to get these things set up correctly first for us to be able to work with you.

Kasra Dash: Yeah for sure. There are a number of reasons why we might not be ready yet to work with you. Let us just work through it. The first one on the list is that you have no website or you have an unprofessional website. The main reason I have put this down is because if we are generating leads for you as a company and it is a quality lead, you still might lose the job because of how you look online.

Kasra Dash: I will give an example. Let us say we generate you a lead and the customer wants a conservatory. They have an £8,000 budget. You come in at £7,500 so you are within budget. Then you come up against somebody else who has a better looking website, more testimonials, more reviews and a better brand presence. They win the job and take it away from you. That means with us that you have guaranteed a return on investment on the lead generation. We have generated a quality lead. Because you as the company dealing with that lead are not as good online as a competitor, that directly affects us.

James Dooley: We do not charge you for any of the leads, any of the SEO, any of the PPC. We do not charge you for the lead at all. We only get paid if you convert. So we have to make sure that you as a customer are good enough at converting these leads into profit. If you are not, we lose. That is why your website quality matters to us.

James Dooley: If you have no website or an unprofessional website there are ways around it. When we decline you as a potential client we will list the reasons why. If you have no website or it is not professional, go and find yourself a local web design company. We are not saying we cannot work with you in six months time. We are saying that at present you are not ready to take our enquiries.

Kasra Dash: I think a lot of business owners that I have seen get declined when they do not have a website are usually already working as an accountant or at a mortgage firm. They want to go set up their own small thing on the side. Or they are a mortgage broker who wants to go and set up their own thing. Step number one should be setting up a website.

Kasra Dash: It does not matter if it is a small side hustle that you want to expand or if it is something you want to grow into a multi million pound business. Just get a website. It is 2024. Everybody is searching on the internet to see if James Dooley mortgages or if Kasra Dash accountancy is the best accountancy firm in the local area. If you have not already, just go and set up a website.

Kasra Dash: Like what James said, we can definitely help guide you on where to get your website so you do not overpay on your website build. If you get that right first, your conversion rate from our leads improves. That helps both of us.

James Dooley: The next on the list is an unprofessional email. What I mean by that is if I had an email like jamesdooley69@hotmail.co.uk
 or bigbadben@gmail.com
, it just looks unprofessional. Compare that to ben@a1conservatories.co.uk
. One clearly looks far more professional than the other and that difference affects trust.

James Dooley: If you have a website you can get professional emails through something like G Suite which only costs about $5 a month. You can get yourself a ben@yourbrand domain. If you do not have it, it affects your conversion. If someone is going to be spending £2,000, £10,000 or £20,000 with you and you go up against a competitor with a professional email and better branding, that might be the difference between you winning and losing that order.

Kasra Dash: All the businesses that we work with, that is step number two really. Go and set up a professional email. If you do not, it will affect your conversion rate. You will think our leads are bad, but actually your presence needs improving. Your brand presence causes trust. Trust causes conversions.

James Dooley: The third one is inadequate branding. When we say branding, we do not expect you to be Virgin, Apple or Coca Cola. We do expect that if someone searches your brand or you as an individual, they can see something solid online. Your brand is basically the first ten results when someone searches your brand or company name.

James Dooley: If there are negative reviews or negative testimonials that show up, that might be the difference between you winning and losing that job. Because we only get paid if you convert the jobs, we need to make sure the people dealing with our enquiries are good enough to win at that final stage. When they go up against a competitor the customer needs to feel that you are a bona fide company.

Kasra Dash: I would probably say do not spend too much time obsessing about perfection. Some people are perfectionists with logos and that just slows things down. If you have nothing, keep it simple. Go and get a low cost graphic designer. Get a couple of images of your office. Get some images of your logo on your vans if you have them.

Kasra Dash: Snap a few photos and upload them to your website. That will definitely help increase conversion when you as the business owner speak to leads. Simple, clear branding builds trust. Trust increases your close rate.

James Dooley: The next one on the list is that you have nobody, no salesperson, to deal with the leads quickly. We are not expecting you to have a 50 person call centre. You do not need a call centre. We do expect that if you are the business owner and also the technician doing the work, you still need to respond to enquiries quickly.

James Dooley: If you are not responding until the weekend, that lead has probably gone elsewhere. That customer, who could have been a very good enquiry, might now have built a relationship with one of your competitors. That happens through no fault of ours. We have generated you a quality enquiry and you have not responded quickly enough. Speed causes contact. Contact causes sales.

James Dooley: We expect that if we are generating the lead you will respond fast to any enquiry. If they are ringing you, we need you to answer the calls. Previously when we did not have the vetting process we sent many phone calls through to businesses. They were not answering. There were good bona fide leads coming through and they were not picking up. Those calls were going to our overflow call centre instead.

James Dooley: Two days later they would ring back and say nobody has got in touch with them. We have to make sure someone is dealing with the enquiries quickly so they can turn a cold web lead into a conversion. We only get paid when you make profit. So we have to make sure that you respond quickly to enquiries.

Kasra Dash: In some cases, in some industries, it is more important to reply within minutes. For example, if you are in the locksmith space and somebody is locked out of their house, if you reply in two days they have already gone to your competitor. That is obvious.

Kasra Dash: You might not need to reply in seconds, but at least within the same day in most industries. Speed to lead is basic. If you are slow, you lose deals and then complain about lead quality when it is actually your response time.

Kasra Dash: The next one on the list is that you have come to us with an idea that is too niched down. What I mean by that is this. Let us say someone is a mortgage broker. They come to us and say they only want to deal with first time buyers and the property needs to be over £400,000.

Kasra Dash: We cannot just segment leads to only give you first time buyers where the property value is over £400,000. There are many other similar examples. Someone might come to us with a niche where there is no search volume. They might have an amazing idea, but if people are not searching for that idea and do not know they need it, we cannot generate a reliable volume of enquiries.

James Dooley: We do not want to spend a lot of money trying to grow out a niche that is too small. On the flip side you should think of shouldering niches. If you are going after £400,000 plus first time buyer mortgages, ask why. Then ask whether you can also do remortgages. Ask whether you can do first time buyer mortgages for everyone instead of just that one subsection.

James Dooley: That one subcategory might be very profitable, but there is a wider spectrum of profitable business. Wider markets cause more volume. More volume causes more data and profit.

James Dooley: The next one is that you only cover a very small area. In an ideal world we like to work with companies that work nationwide in the UK. If you do not work fully nationwide from the Highlands in Scotland all the way down to Devon, but you do cover a large proportion of the country, we might still work with you.

James Dooley: If you come to us and say you work in one town and within five miles of that town, that is too small. The area you cover is just too limited. If you only work in one small town we will not be able to deal with you. Even one county can be too small. We need to try to work with companies that cover a larger area.

Kasra Dash: One thing to add to what you have said is that after Covid, after 2020, a lot of accountants and a lot of lawyers started doing consultancy over Zoom. If you have not already set that up in your business you are probably not innovating enough. Geography became less of a barrier because video calls exist.

Kasra Dash: Try to set up things like that if you have not already. Then reapply in six months. If you expand your effective service area through remote work, you become more viable for us and you make more money.

James Dooley: The next one on the list is to do with having no marketing budget. You might say that we told you it was a guaranteed return on investment. That is true. But if we look at your company and see that you have no marketing budget at all, that is a red flag.

James Dooley: That does not just mean with us. It means you have no budget to spend on promoting case studies, getting testimonials and reviews online, getting yourself into Google News, or getting new images and videos. All of those things help you convert. If you tell us you have no marketing budget whatsoever we start to think your letter headed paper will look poor, your quote designs will be weak, and your brand will not reflect who you are today.

James Dooley: We want to work with companies that have some marketing budget, so they can look good online and offline. Looking good causes trust. Trust causes higher close rates, which then allows our model to work.

Kasra Dash: Marketing is just oxygen for any company. If you are not dominating your online presence, if you are not dominating PPC, SEO and lead generation, your competitors will destroy you. If you starve marketing, you starve growth. That is your choice, but then you are not a fit for our performance model.

James Dooley: The next one on the list is online reputation management. I have touched on this a bit already. With a marketing budget you want to promote your testimonials and reviews. It could be about awards you have won. Can you go and scream and shout all over the internet about what awards and accreditations you have?

James Dooley: With a poor online reputation you want to sink negative press so you have a positive sentiment when someone searches your company. A poor online reputation with one star reviews is a real problem. Many businesses get one star reviews, that is fine. Respond to them in a positive manner. Reply to the one star review. Ask the person to get in touch. See whether you can turn it around.

James Dooley: If you cannot fix it just admit it in the response. At least you look professional. Do not argue with customers online. Sort out your online reputation as best as you can. Repairing public sentiment causes higher trust. Higher trust causes more conversions from the same leads.

Kasra Dash: One thing to add to that is your Google Business Profile rating. If all it has is two and a half star reviews on average, that will affect your conversion rate. We could send you the best leads in the world. If people search James Dooley solicitors or Kasra Dash accountants and see two and a half star reviews and everyone saying your work is poor, hardly anyone will convert with your business.

James Dooley: Another flip side to what we spoke about earlier, which was going too niche where there is not enough volume, is going after a niche that is way too competitive. That is another reason we might decline you. You might say you want to go after “chartered accountants London” and that is the only term you want to target. It is just too competitive.

James Dooley: We know it will take years to properly build up authority for that market. We do not yet know whether you are good enough to deal with the leads anyway. If the niche is too competitive we will ask you whether there is a wider demographic than just London that you can cover. We will ask if there are other variations and sub services within your main product that we can go after.

James Dooley: Then we can start generating some leads now, making some profit, and working up to the most competitive niches. When we start out, if you do not have much budget and you try to go after the most competitive markets, the answer will likely be that we cannot work with you.

Kasra Dash: I agree. The next one on the list is a lack of target audiences. That means not knowing exactly who your demographic is. Too many people want to set up a company and they just say “everyone” when we ask who their target audience is.

Kasra Dash: For example, they say they want to get into pressure washing. Pressure washing is fine, but who is your target audience? If you say everyone, that is nonsense. How are you going to get in front of the people who actually need you?

Kasra Dash: Do you want to clean people’s driveways? If you become VAT registered you might not be competitive in simple driveway cleaning. Are you looking at the commercial market instead? Is it schools, where you clean playgrounds, tennis courts or multi use games areas? Are you looking to clean cladding with pressure washing? You must know.

James Dooley: Understanding exactly who your demographic and audience is makes a big difference to us when we are targeting your services and products. If you do not know who your audience is, we do not know either. With marketing the first thing you must look at is what products and services you sell and who you are going to sell them to. Clarity on target audience causes better campaigns. Better campaigns cause better results.

Kasra Dash: This is similar to the previous point. If you go after “pressure washing Manchester” that is going to be competitive. If you go after “pressure washing for schools” it will be way less competitive and the profit margins are higher. Specialising in the right sub niche improves margins.

Kasra Dash: If you specifically target schools there might be certain accreditations, health and safety or insurances that you need. If you have those we can shout about them. We can shout that all your labourers are CRB checked. You need to make sure that if you are working in a school and there are children there, everyone entering the school is checked. That is basic.

Kasra Dash: If you have CHAS, Constructionline and similar accreditations, plus all CRB checked labourers and anything else needed, schools are more likely to say yes. They will see you as qualified and safe. That is the company they want to deal with.

James Dooley: We then start generating videos showing you working in schools. We try to get images of you actually working in that environment. We do not want you saying your target audience is schools while all your case studies are just driveway cleaning. That is not aligned at all.

James Dooley: Try to understand who your audience is and shape everything around that. This leads on to the next one, which is non compliance with industry regulations. With a school, if you do not have the right insurances or CRB checks for labourers you are not getting on site.

James Dooley: If you are working on a construction site and you are doing roofing or plumbing or some other trade work for main contractors, you need the right health and safety credentials like CHAS and Constructionline. You need the right insurances. You might need UK qualifications like SSSTS or SMSTS and other safety certifications to show you know what you are doing.

James Dooley: Having the right industry regulations and accreditations is very important in some industries. Compliance causes trust from clients. Trust causes consistent work and revenue.

Kasra Dash: I will dumb down what you have just said because there were a lot of abbreviations. For example, if you are an accountant and you want £4 million revenue businesses as clients, if you are not chartered those businesses will not work with an unchartered accountant. They just will not.

Kasra Dash: So make sure you have the correct accreditations in your industry. If you want serious clients, you must show serious credentials. That is simple cause and effect.

James Dooley: The next one is when we first try to communicate with you. We have gone down the road of being async first communication. A lot of people demand a one hour call with us when we do not yet know whether you are good enough to take our leads. We are not going to waste an hour.

James Dooley: If you do not like that, move on and find another lead generation company. That might sound arrogant, but think about the offer. We are offering a no risk supply of enquiries. We take all the risk. So we need to understand whether you are good enough to take these leads before we invest time.

James Dooley: We ask maybe ten or fifteen questions because we need to understand this before spending an hour on the phone. If you are a carpet cleaner based in a very small village, we are not going to work with you. You can go and do SEO yourself, PPC yourself, create your own website, maybe run Facebook ads. You can generate your own leads.

James Dooley: Initially we are an async first communication company when we are doing onboarding. We do that to see whether you are good enough to take the leads. Some business owners do not like the sound of that because they just want to speak to someone. But by the time we have spoken for thirty minutes we could have spent two minutes looking at your website or your branding and seen that you are not good enough or your niche is too competitive.

James Dooley: We can go back and forth quickly on email or WhatsApp to get that information. If you are not willing to give us that information and you just want a call, we will decline you as part of onboarding. We need to understand whether you qualify to start with. That is non negotiable.

Kasra Dash: The team work with volume. We get daily enquiries from around a hundred businesses that want to work with us. This is part of our SOPs internally. Every business has SOPs, standard operating procedures, that the staff follow day in and day out. Async first works well for us and we are not going to change it. Our time is finite. Our inbox is not.

James Dooley: The next one is unprofessional letterhead. You might think we are digging deep here. The truth is that if we generate you a lead and your branding looks okay online but your letterhead looks terrible, that can lose the job.

James Dooley: You might send specification details or a formal document. If the letterhead looks really unprofessional that might be the difference between you winning and losing. Getting a local graphic designer to design you a quality letterhead with a logo, your website link, your address, your phone number and a little information about who you are is not hard.

James Dooley: These are small things, but small marginal gains can be the difference between winning and losing. Unprofessional letterhead templates can cost you serious money over time.

James Dooley: On from that, the next point is your quote templates. Designing your quote template is important. If you are dealing with a school and the business manager gets quotes from you and another company, and they are really happy with both, those quotes will be presented side by side to the headteacher or the bursar.

James Dooley: Let us use solar panels as an example. One company quotes £25,000 for supply and installation. The other company quotes £25,000 for the exact same spec. The number of panels, the kilowatts and everything else is exactly the same. Who are they going to choose?

James Dooley: If we have generated you the lead we want all the small details to help you win. It could come down to the headteacher picking the company that looks more professional purely from the design of the quote template.

James Dooley: Make sure that as well as your letterhead, your quote template looks good. It can be the difference between winning and losing jobs. Some people even send quotes worth £25,000 just as plain text in an email, sometimes from an unprofessional email address. People are not going to spend that kind of money with you if that is how you present yourself.

James Dooley: It comes back to branding. Letterhead design, quote template design, email quality. These things probably cost £30, £40 or £50 with a graphic designer. That small spend can be the difference between winning and losing jobs repeatedly over the years.

Kasra Dash: For sure. I think the biggest thing people need to understand watching this video is that we are not just a lead generation company. We are genuinely trying to improve not only the quality of our leads but also the sales process within your business.

Kasra Dash: If you go through all of the steps we have mentioned in this video there will probably be four or five things you do not currently have. If you go and set those up and then reapply, you will probably get approved. Doing the basics properly causes higher approval chances and better results.

James Dooley: The next part is outdated marketing material. That might be that you rebranded six years ago but half of your letterheads still have the old logo and half have the new logo. It might be that your brochures are ancient.

James Dooley: Again it comes down to getting all your ducks lined up to give you the best chance of conversion. Like Kasra said, we are not just lead generation companies. We are like business advisors. We want to make sure that everything you are doing is improving both your own enquiries and the enquiries we send, so you make more sales and more profit.

James Dooley: With outdated or inconsistent branding, it is so important to fix it. How many times have we seen people come along with four or five different letterheads, or sending emails from one company name and then other documents coming from a different email and brand? That kind of inconsistency kills trust.

Kasra Dash: They always say you need to see a brand three or four times before you actually purchase. That does not just mean SEO or Facebook ads or PPC. It also means internally. When you send emails, they should look consistent. For example, if you get an email from James, the footer and logo will be exactly the same as if you get an email from me.

Kasra Dash: Just being consistent goes a long way. Consistent branding causes familiarity. Familiarity causes trust. Trust causes customers to say yes more often.

James Dooley: Lack of social proof is another problem. You need to make sure you are active. If you have a Twitter account, be active on it. If you have a Facebook account, be active. If you have a Pinterest account, be active. If you do not want to be active on a platform, just delete it. An empty profile looks worse than no profile at all.

James Dooley: Having no social proof is a problem. We need to make sure you have some. If you are spending money with a graphic designer on images and videos, share them on all your social platforms. Especially YouTube if you have visual work or nice installations.

James Dooley: If you are an accountant and your work is not visually exciting, you might still have nice offices. You can do introductions of each member of staff, who they are, how friendly they are, how easy they are to contact. Get videos of each member of staff for your meet the team page. Being omnipresent yourself is very important.

Kasra Dash: Even just being active on LinkedIn can help. You can post that you worked with a certain company and saved them a specific amount in tax if you are an accountant. If you are a law firm and you win a big case, shout about it on social media, not just your website.

Kasra Dash: People do not just look at your website. They will look at your social accounts too. Someone might check your website and then look at your Instagram gallery or your gallery page to see your kitchen remodels or other work. Make sure everything is populated and consistent with your branding. That can go a very long way.

James Dooley: Leaving the best part until last is follow up. When you get an enquiry we have already said it is important to respond quickly. We also want to check your CRM system and make sure you follow up properly.

James Dooley: If someone emails you and your email back bounces because their address is wrong, are you ringing them if you have their number? You can just say their email bounced and ask them to confirm it. They might have made a spelling mistake. That simple call could save a deal.

James Dooley: When you have sent a quote for solar panels or anything else, you should follow up. Maybe a week later ask if they have everything they need in the quote. Ask if they need anything else. Make sure they actually received it. Then chase it again in a month. Ask whether everything is all right, whether they are ready to place the order, and whether the quote was okay.

James Dooley: They might say they got another quote that was £500 cheaper. At that point you can decide whether to match or adjust your offer. That follow up sequence is important and massively helps you win work. Sales follow up is key.

James Dooley: On top of that we want to make sure you as a company understand two main things. The average transactional value and the lifetime value of a customer. When you understand these you can get the most out of each enquiry.

James Dooley: If you know your average transactional value as a mortgage broker, you might be able to upsell life insurance or see whether they need a will or other products. If you are an accountant, you might help with R&D tax or other tax planning advice. You might become more of a business advisor than just a basic accountant.

James Dooley: There are many things you can do to improve the average transactional value. When you improve that, you can then look at the lifetime value of a customer. You want to make sure you get the most profit from the leads we generate. That is how our model works at scale.

James Dooley: This is something else we try to make sure customers can handle. If they can deal with our leads in the best possible manner, we have a great working relationship. We already do with thousands of companies throughout the UK.

James Dooley: If you cannot, you can sulk. You can watch this video and disagree. Or you can roll your sleeves up and admit that we are right. You can admit that your website is unprofessional, that your email is unprofessional, that your follow up sequence is not good enough, that you do not respond quickly enough.

James Dooley: You can start working on it. You can start trying to get an office admin or a salesperson or someone to help. You can get someone in for not a lot of money to help with rebranding or other tasks that help you.

James Dooley: If you have been declined and want to know why, ask us more questions by email. Leave a comment in the comment section. Let us know what feedback you have. These are the main reasons we decline certain customers. There might be others depending on the niche, location and what you do, but we will always tell you the reasons.

James Dooley: You might be able to go away, work on those issues, come back in six months and then hopefully we can work together.