Why We Might Decline Your Business for Lead Generation Services

James Dooley and Kasra Dash explain why some businesses get declined for lead generation because weak branding and slow sales processes damage conversion rates. They show how companies improve results when professional websites, strong reputations and fast follow up increase trust. Their breakdown highlights how lead quality only produces profit when business fundamentals support conversion.

Creators and Guests

Host

James Dooley

James Dooley is a UK entrepreneur.

What is James Dooley Podcast?

James Dooley is a Manchester-based entrepreneur, investor, and SEO strategist. James Dooley founded FatRank and PromoSEO, two UK performance marketing agencies that deliver no-win-no-fee lead generation and digital growth systems for ambitious businesses. James Dooley positions himself as an Investorpreneur who invests in UK companies with high growth potential because he believes lead generation is the root of all business success.

The James Dooley Podcast explores the mindset, methods, and mechanics of modern entrepreneurship. James Dooley interviews leading marketers, founders, and innovators to reveal the strategies driving online dominance and business scalability. Each episode unpacks the reality of building a business without mentorship, showing how systems, data, and lead flow replace luck and guesswork.

James Dooley shares hard-earned lessons from scaling digital assets and managing SEO teams across more than 650 industries. James Dooley teaches how to convert leads into long-term revenue through brand positioning, technical SEO, and automation. James Dooley built his career on rank and rent, digital real estate, and performance-based marketing because these models align incentive with outcome.

After turning down dozens of podcast invitations, James Dooley now embraces the platform to share his insights on investorpreneurship, lead generation, AI-driven marketing, and reputation management. James Dooley frequently collaborates with elite entrepreneurs to discuss frameworks for scaling businesses, building authority, and mastering search.

James Dooley is also an expert in online reputation management (ORM), having built and rehabilitated corporate brands across the UK. His approach combines SEO precision, brand engineering, and social proof loops to influence both Google’s Knowledge Graph and public perception.

To feature James Dooley on your podcast or event, connect via social media. James Dooley regularly joins business panels and networking sessions to discuss entrepreneurship, brand growth, and the evolving future of SEO.

Kasra Dash: So in this video we're going to be talking about the reasons why we might decline you for lead generation services. I feel like it's important for us to explain as to why some businesses don't get in and it's not to say that we're too good for you, it's more so the fact that you're not just ready for lead generation. It doesn't matter if you're doing SEO, PPC, you need to get these things set up correctly first for us to then be able to work with you.

James Dooley: For sure. I mean there is a number of reasons why we might not be ready yet to work with yourself and I mean let's just work through it. So with the first one on the list is that you have no website or an unprofessional website. So the main reason that I've put this down is because if we're generating leads for you as a company and let's say it's a quality lead. So I'll do an example of let's say we were to generate you a lead and the customer who applied wanted a conservatory and they've got an £8,000 budget and you came in within that budget at £7,500 but then you came up against somebody else and they had a better looking website with more testimonials, more reviews and just a better kind of brand presence with regards to the website and they went and won the job and took it away from you. That means with us that you guarantee a return on investment on the lead generation have gone and generated a quality lead but because you as the company dealing with that lead wasn't as good as let's say a competitor, that has directly affected us because we don't charge you for any of the leads, any of the SEO, any of the PPC, we don't even charge you for the lead, we only get paid if you convert. So we've got to make certain moving forward that you as a customer are good enough at converting these leads into profit. Is there anything to add on to that with regards if they've got no website or unprofessional?

Kasra Dash: I mean there is ways around it of what they can do. When we decline you potentially you as a client you could just go out, we'll list the reasons why and if you've not got a website or it's not professional go and find yourself a local web design company. We're not saying that we can't work with you in six months' time, we're just saying at present you are not ready yet to take our inquiries. So I think a lot of business owners that I've seen they get declined when they don't have a website is potentially they are an accountant and they're already at an accountant firm and they want to go and set up their own small little thing or potentially they might be a mortgage broker and again they want to go and set up their own thing. Step number one should be setting up a website. It doesn't matter if it's a little side hustle that you're looking to expand on or if it's something that you want to grow into like a multi-million pound business. Just get a website. It's 2024, everybody's searching on the internet to see is James Dooley mortgages or is Kasra Dash accountancy the best accountancy firm in the local area. So if you've not already just go and set up a website. Like what James said we can definitely help guide you on where to get your website so you don't overpay on your website builds as well.

James Dooley: Yeah. Next on the list is an unprofessional email. So what I mean by that is that if I had the email and it was [[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail]) or it was [[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail]) as opposed to [[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail]), one just looks so much more professional than the other. And with guys if you do have a website and you can just get them with G Suite which only costs like $5 a month, you can go and get yourself a Ben at your brand domain. If you don't have it that does affect your conversion. If someone's going to be spending £2,000, £10,000, £20,000 with yourself, if you're going up against a competitor and you're doing it with an unprofessional email and these look more professional that might be the difference between you winning and losing potentially an order.

Kasra Dash: For sure. All the businesses that we work with that's step number two really. Go and set up a professional email. If you don't it's going to end up affecting conversion rate and you might think that our leads are bad but it's actually your presence that needs improving on.

James Dooley: Third one is inadequate branding. So when we say branding we don't expect you to be a Virgin or an Apple or a Coca-Cola but what we do expect is that if someone went and searched your brand or you as an individual if you were dealing with the situation, you as the business owner dealing with the inquiry, if they went and searched your brand or company name what can they see online? Your brand kind of results the first ten results of when you search for your brand or company name. If there's any negative reviews or negative testimonials again that might be the difference between you winning and losing that job and because we only get paid if you convert the jobs, we've got to make certain the people dealing with our inquiries are good enough to be able to deal with them and at the eleventh hour if they go up against a competitor the customer who's inquiring will think yes these are a bona fide company, these are good. Is there anything to expand on with branding?

Kasra Dash: I would probably say don't spend too much time on it because some people are perfectionists when it comes to logos and stuff like that but again if you've not got anything it's simple. Go and get like a £1 graphic designer, get a couple images of your actual office, get some images of your logo if you've got it on like potentially your vans and stuff. Snap a few photos and upload that to your website because that will definitely help increase conversion rate when it comes to you yourself as the actual business owner speaking to the leads.

James Dooley: The next one on the list is that you've got nobody, no salesperson to be able to deal with the leads quickly. Now we're not expecting you to have a 50 person call centre. It doesn't need to have a call centre but what we do expect is that if you are just you yourself or the business owner but you're also the technician going and doing the work and then you're not responding to the inquiry until the weekend, well that lead's probably gone elsewhere. That customer has inquired which could have been a very very very good inquiry might now have built a relationship with one of your competitors through no fault of our own. We've generated you a quality inquiry and you've not responded quick enough. So we expect you if we're generating you the lead to be able to respond fast to any sort of inquiry or if they're ringing we need you to answer the calls. The amount of times that previously when we didn't have the vetting process we were sending so many phone calls through to businesses and they weren't answering and they were good bona fide leads that were coming through and they weren't answering, it was going to our overflow call centre and then two days later they're ringing back to say no one's got in touch with us, like no one's responded and stuff. So we've got to make certain that someone is dealing with the inquiries quickly so that hopefully they can do it from a cold web lead online into a conversion. Obviously we only get paid when you make profit so we've got to make certain that you're quick to respond to any inquiries.

Kasra Dash: In some cases in some industries it's actually more important to reply to the lead within a matter of minutes really. Like for example if it is if you're in the locksmith space and somebody's locked out their house, if you don't reply to them in two days guess what, they've went to your competitors. So again obviously you might not need to reply back in seconds but obviously at least within the same day.

James Dooley: The next on the list is to do with that you've come to us with an idea and it's too niche down. So what I mean by that is I'll try to give you an example. So let's say someone's a mortgage broker and then they come to us and say we only want to deal with first time buyers and the house property needs to be over £400,000 and we're like well we can't just segment those leads to only give you first time buyers where the property value's over £400,000 and there's many other niches as well. Someone might come to us and there just might be no search volume for it. They might come up with an amazing idea but if people aren't searching for the idea and they don't even know that they need that, well we might not be able to generate you a volume of inquiries and I don't want to spend a lot of money on trying to grow out a niche when we feel the niche is potentially too small.

Kasra Dash: I think on the counter side to that is try and think of shouldering niches as well. So for example if you're going after £400,000 plus and first time mortgages, why is probably the best answer and then think can you not do remortgages, can you not do first time buyer mortgages for everyone as opposed to just niching down on that one subsection. I know that's very profitable that one subcategory but there are definitely a wider spectrum.

James Dooley: Next one is that you only cover a very small area. So in an ideal world we like to work with companies that work nationwide in the UK. If you don't work full nationwide from the highlands in Scotland all the way down to Devon but you do cover a large proportion then we might say okay we can work with you. But if you basically come to us and say we work in this town and within five miles of this town then at that point we're saying the area covered, the geolocation of where you cover, is just too small and again we won't be able to then deal with you if you are just within even within just one county. We need to try to make certain we're working with companies over a larger area.

Kasra Dash: One thing to add to what you've just said is after COVID like after 2020 basically a lot of accountants and a lot of lawyers do a lot of consultancy over Zoom. So if you've not already set that up within your business you're probably not innovating enough. Try to set up certain things like that if you haven't already and then reapply in six months' time.

James Dooley: The next one on the list is to do with no marketing budget. Now you might come back and you might say yeah but you told us it was a guaranteed return on investment which is true but if we're looking at your company and we see that you have no marketing budget whatsoever that doesn't mean just with us but it's telling us if you've got no marketing budget to spend on promoting your latest case studies, trying to get testimonials and reviews online, getting yourself into maybe Google News or just getting some new nice images, new nice videos. All of them help you convert and if you say that you've got no marketing budget whatsoever then we're probably going to start thinking well maybe you're not going to be able to have like nice letter-headed paper, your quote designs might not be very good and everything else might not be present to who you are today so we want to try to work with companies that have got some sort of marketing budget that can be making certain that they do look good online.

Kasra Dash: Marketing is just the oxygen for any company. If you're not dominating your online presence, if you're not dominating PPC, SEO, lead generation, your competitors are just going to destroy you.

James Dooley: The next one on the list is to do with online reputation management. I've kind of touched on this a little bit already with regards to with a marketing budget you want to be promoting your testimonials, your reviews. It could be to do with awards that you've won so can you go and scream and shout all over the internet about what awards that you've won, what accreditations that you have. But with regards to a poor online reputation you want to be making certain that you're sinking any negative press so that you do have a positive sentiment when someone's searching for your company. So a poor online reputation with regards to one-star reviews and stuff like that. A lot of businesses can get one-star reviews, that's fine, but respond to them in a positive manner. Reply to the one-star review, ask them to get in touch with you or see whether you might be able to turn it around in some way. If you can't then you just admit to it in a response. At least you're looking professional. Don't start arguing with these customers but try to sort out your online reputation as best as you can.

Kasra Dash: One thing to add to what you've just said as well is if your Google Business Profile all it has is two and a half star reviews on average, that's going to again affect your conversion rate. So again we could be sending you the best leads in the world but if everybody that's searching James Dooley solicitors or Kasra Dash accountants or whatever the case may be and they're seeing two and a half star reviews and everybody's saying that your work is poor, nobody's going to end up really converting with your business.

James Dooley: Another flip side to what we've spoken about previously which is kind of going too niche down into a specific product where there's not enough volume for it is going after a niche that is just way too competitive. So you're basically turning around saying okay we want to go after chartered accountants of London and that's the only term you want to go after and it's just too competitive. We know that it's going to take us years for us to properly build up that authority and we don't even know yet whether you're good enough yet to deal with the leads properly. So if the niche is too competitive we would be asking you look we know this might be profitable but is there a wider demographic that it's not just London that you can cover, is there any other variations and sub niches within the products and the main products of what you're selling that we might be able to go after to try to build through and start generating you some leads now to make some profit and then work up to the most competitive niches. But when we just start out if you've not got much budget and you're trying to go after the most competitive markets it might be a sorry we're not able to work with yourself.

Kasra Dash: Yeah I agree.

James Dooley: The next one on the list is that a lack of target audiences. So not knowing who exactly your demographic of audience is. There's too many people that want to set up a company and they think of let's say they wanted to get into pressure washing and you're like okay pressure washing is great but who's your target audience and they say everyone and you're like well how are you going to get in front of people to let's say clean the driveways and do you want to clean people's driveways because if you became VAT registered you won't be that competitive in cleaning driveways. So if you're looking down the commercial market, is it schools? Are you looking to clean playgrounds or tennis courts or multi-use games areas or are you looking to clean cladding with pressure washing? What is it that you're looking to do and understand exactly who your demographic and who your audience is because that makes a big difference for us when we're trying to target you the services and the products that you're selling and understanding who your audience is and if you don't know who it is then obviously we don't know what it is and therefore with regards to marketing one of the first things you need to be looking at is what products and services you sell but who you're going to try and sell it to. So try to understand who your target audience is as well.

Kasra Dash: I think this is kind of like the previous reason. If you're just going after pressure washing Manchester that's probably going to be a little bit competitive but if you're going after pressure washing for schools that's going to be way less competition and it's going to be higher profit margins as well.

James Dooley: Not only that is if you specifically targeted schools there might be certain accreditations or health and safety or insurances that you need to work in a school. So if you then within that we can shout and scream about how all your labourers are CRB checked because you need to be making certain if you're working in a school and there's obviously children there that everyone is checked with who's entering that school. It's important for people to do that. So if you basically come along and say that you've got CHAS, Constructionline, that you've got all CRB checked labourers and anything else that might be needed at that point the schools are going to say yeah these are qualified, this is the company that we want to deal with. We then start generating loads of videos trying to get images of you working in a school because what we don't want to do is you say our target audience is a school and then you've got loads of pictures and case studies of you're cleaning driveways. Well that's not specifically targeting schools then is it. So then like try to understand who that is and how we can go about it. This leads on to the next one of non-compliance of industry regulations. So like with a school if you don't have certain insurances or CRB checks for the labourers you're not getting on site. If you're working on a construction site and let's say you're doing roofing or plumbing and you're some sort of tradesman but you're going to work for main contractors you need to make certain you've got the right health and safety, CHAS and Constructionline. Again the right insurances to be able to work on there. You might need the certain things in the UK like SMSTS and stuff like and it's certain certifications with regards to health and safety to say yes these know what they're doing and these are okay to visit our site. So making certain you've got industry regulations and accreditations is also for some industries very important.

Kasra Dash: I'll try and dumb down what you've just said. There was a lot of abbreviations but for example if you're an accountant and you want £4 million revenue businesses, if you're not chartered £4 million businesses ain't going to work for an unchartered accountant. So just make certain that you have the correct accreditations within your industry.

James Dooley: The next one is when we're first trying to communicate with yourself we've gone down the road of being async first communication. The amount of people that are just demanding us to give them a one hour call when we don't yet know whether you're good enough to take our leads. We're not going to waste an hour and if you don't like this move on and find another lead generation company. That might sound very arrogant but if you think of the offer that we're doing we're offering a no risk supply of inquiries. We're taking all the risk so we need to be understanding are you good enough to take these leads. So we're asking you maybe 10, 15 questions. That's it. Because we need to understand that before spending an hour on the phone. And you're a carpet cleaner just based in a really small village. Sorry we can't work with you. There are lots of other things that you can do. You can go and do SEO yourself, PPC yourself, create your own website, maybe run Facebook ads, whatever you want to do to generate leads. That's great but initially we're an async first communication company when we're trying to do the onboarding just to see whether you're good enough to be able to take the leads. Some business owners don't like the sound of that because they're like I just want to speak to someone. But by the time we've spoke to them for 30 minutes we could have within two minutes understood looking at the website or looking at the branding that they're not good enough to take the leads or the niche is too competitive and we can go back and forth very quickly on email or on WhatsApp, get that information. If they're not willing to give us this information and just want a call well then again we apologize. We would have to decline you as part of the onboarding because we need to go and understand whether you qualify to start with.

Kasra Dash: The team work with or well we get daily 100 businesses wanting to work with us and this is part of our SOPs internally. Every business has SOPs, standard operating procedures, where the staff follow day in day out exactly what we've been told. Async first works well for us and we're not going to change it.

James Dooley: The next one is unprofessional letterhead. And you might go you're digging deep here but the truth of the matter is that if we generate you a lead and your branding and stuff might be okay online with your website but you go and send some information, it could be specification details and the letterhead looks really unprofessional. That might be the difference between you winning and losing a job. Go and get a local graphic designer to go and design you a quality letterhead with maybe a logo, maybe a link to your website on there, your address, your telephone number, just a bit of information of who you are. It's only very very small things but it's those little small marginal gains which could be the difference between you winning or losing a job. On from that just very quickly then becomes the quote templates. Designing of your quote template is important because if you're dealing with let's say you were working within a school and the school business manager goes out and gets the quotes and they're really happy with yours and one other and they're presenting both of these quotes. They've not spoken to either company. The headmaster comes along or the bursar comes along and looks at both quotes side by side and let's go back to the example. Let's use a different example. Let's say it's solar panels. This company are £25,000 for supply and installation. This company £25,000 for installation. So cost pretty much exactly well it is exactly the same. The job of how many panels that it is exactly the same all the kilowatts and everything else exactly the same. Who are they going to choose? Because for us if we've generated you the lead we want to make certain all them little marginal gains make you win the job and it could come down to the head teacher just going these look more professional literally just from the design of the quote template. So just make certain as well as your letterhead your quote template looks good because it could be the difference of you winning and losing jobs. Some even without quote templates they're just sending like quotes and it could be for £25,000 just on an email. Especially if it's an unprofessional email the people just are not going to spend that money with you if you're just sending it on an email. So just again it comes back down to branding, letterhead design, quote template. It will probably cost £30, £40 or £50 with a graphic designer to get that right and could be the difference between you're winning and losing jobs.

Kasra Dash: For sure. I think the biggest thing that people need to understand when watching this video is that we're not just a lead generation company. We are genuinely trying to improve not just the quality of our own leads but the actual sales process within your business. And if you were to go through all of the steps that we've mentioned in this entire video there's probably going to be four or five things you don't even have. And if you were to go and set up, reapply, you're probably going to get approved.

James Dooley: The next part on it is outdated marketing material. So it could be like you've rebranded six years ago but half of your letterheads have got the old logo and half have got the new logo. So just again it comes back down to just getting all the ducks lined up to try and give you the best chances of conversion. Like Kasra said we're not just lead generation companies. We're like business advisors. We want to come along and make certain that everything that you're doing is improving from your own inquiries to try to improve that into making more sales and more profit as well. So with regards to outdated or inconsistent branding like it's just so important. I mean how many times have you seen now people coming along with like four or five different letterheads, people sending emails from one company and then something else is coming through from a different email and just that consistency with branding is key.

Kasra Dash: They always say you need to see a brand three or four times before you actually purchase. That doesn't mean just like SEO or Facebook ads or PPC but it can also mean internally like when you're sending emails. For example if you get an email from James the footer and the actual logo everything's going to be the exact same as if you were going to get an email from myself. So just being consistent as well.

James Dooley: Lack of social proof is another. With regards to just making certain that you're being active. If you've got a Twitter account then be active. If you've got a Facebook account then be active. If you've got a Pinterest account be active. If you don't want to be active on it just delete it. But having a lack of social proof is important. We need to make certain you've got some sort of social proof. If you're spending some money with a graphic designer on nice images and videos share it on all your social media platforms especially things like YouTube. If you've got something that's aesthetically pleasing on a job on an installation go and share it. If you're an accountant and you don't really have like a nice service that looks good on the eye but you've got nice offices or you want to just do an introduction of each member of staff of who they are and how friendly they are and you can contact them anytime go and get some videos of each member of staff on the meet the team page. But making certain that you're omnipresent yourself is very very important.

Kasra Dash: For sure. Even just being active on LinkedIn like saying like oh we worked with XYZ company and we were able to save them X amount in tax if you're an accountant or let's say you're a law firm and you win a really big case making certain that you're screaming, shouting about all of that on all social media not even just on your website. That can definitely help as well because again people don't just look at your website, they'll look at maybe your social media accounts like all right okay these guys do kitchen remodels, let's take a look at their gallery on their Instagram profile or their gallery page on their actual website. So making certain that everything's populated then again going back to what we were saying before everything's consistent with your branding and stuff again it can go a very long way.

James Dooley: And leaving the best part to last really is that making certain with regards to you get an inquiry and we said it's very very important for you to respond quickly but we also want to check kind of your CRM system and make certain that you're following up. So if someone was to turn around and leave like email you and you send an email through and the email bounces because let's say the email was wrong are you then just quickly making certain that you're ringing them because they might have a telephone number as well to say look your email's bounced can you just double check this. Oh sorry it was a spelling mistake it's not hotmail.com it's hotmail.co.uk or whatever it is that they've put in there. That follow-up is important. But also if you've sent a quote out for solar panels or whatever it is that you've sent it out for when you've sent the quote out and maybe a week later you say have you got everything with the quote, is everything okay, do you need anything else? Just make certain that they've got the quote, make certain you're chasing it through. In a month's time just make certain is everything all right, do you need anything else, when are you looking to place the order, was the quote okay because they might say no sorry we got another quote from someone and it was £500 cheaper. Try to make certain you're doing that follow-up kind of sequence because it's important and it massively massively helps on winning the work. That sales follow-up is key. But on top of that now when we start looking at it as well is we want to make certain that you as a company understand the two main things that I'd love customers to understand. The average transactional value and the lifetime value of a customer. Because when you understand this and you can get the most out of it you can understand that right on a minute we know the average transactional value is this so when you're a mortgage broker you might be able to upsell them let's say life insurance or see whether they need a will or whatever else that they might need. What other products or services can you help potential customers with? If you're an accountant you might be able to help them with like R&D tax or other tax planning advice. You might be like almost become more than just an accountant from like a business advisor. So there's lots of different things that you could be doing to try to improve the average transactional value. The minute you try to start improving that average transactional value you can also then start to look at the lifetime value potentially of customers. We want to make certain you're making the most profit from the leads that we're generating. So it's just something else that we try to make certain that the customers are able to deal with our leads in the best possible manner. And if they are we've got a great working relationship with thousands of companies throughout the UK. If you don't you can watch this video and try to disagree or actually you can roll your sleeves up and say do you know what you're right, do you know what I do have an unprofessional website, do you know what my email is unprofessional, do you know what my follow-up sequence isn't good enough, do you know what I don't respond to them leads quick enough and you can start working on that. You can start trying to get an office admin or a salesperson or someone just coming in for not a lot of money to come and rebrand or do something that helps you. For why you might have been declined ask us more questions on the email whatever it is, leave a comment in the comment section, just let us know what feedback that you've got. These are the different reasons, the main reasons and there might be others as well depending on the niche or location and what you do. There might be one or two other reasons but we'll tell you the reasons of why we decline certain customers. You might be able to go away, work on that, come back in six months' time and hopefully we can then work together.