How To Respond To Leads

Kasra Dash and James Dooley explain why rapid replies increase conversions because fast response times create trust and reduce drop off. They show how simple plain text emails improve deliverability because fewer elements lower spam risk. They outline how one click responses speed up service because prebuilt answers remove delays. They explain why exclusive leads convert better because fewer competitors reduce price pressure.

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.

James Dooley: so you've got your first inquiry and or actually you might have had multiple inquiries by now and you are now responding to the leads obviously yourself you've got a lot of experience you've trained up a team on actually this exact process so I've got a few questions for you what should your first message to a lead look like should you have loads of details going back and forth should you keep it simple what what what are you looking at personally

Kasra Dash: instead of the like the first message um is just kind of grabbing the traction to make certain you responding to say thanks a lot I've received your lead and just asking a very simple question for them to respond back to your email so it's for my opinion it's about the service of responding as quickly as possible so we did a lot of data studies and we showed that if people started to respond to a lead literally if it came from like they didn't respond for a day it was pretty much non-existent if responded within an hour it like became like 10x more better response than responding within the day if he was in within 30 minutes it was a lot better and basically more and more as the time reduced down the as you were responding to them leads faster you got much higher conversion so in my opinion for me if I'm dealing with any company I'm generating them leads or we're getting leads ourself we need to be responding as fast as possible so it's about the response time and then physically it's a very simple message not having links or videos or anything in there a plain text thanks a lot for the inquiry please can you give us this bit of information it's the very simple response just asking them for something just so then you've got the communication going back and forth on email y that first email sometimes the first email when you're respond it might go into their spam or into their junk because you've never sent them an email before that's why I like it being plain text if you start having it where it's got like images or videos or links through to their website like all that increases the chances of it going into junk or spam so I just want a plain text very simple response as soon as possible when responding to leads

James Dooley: so when when responding to to the first um inquiry that's come through very super plain super plain email would you have like a a footer template like with with like for example my picture

Kasra Dash: so you wouldn't have that at all on the first email I'm going back with I'm just literally a plain text thanks a lot for the inquiry and then I'm asking him a question so the question could be when you're looking to have these Works done um can you give me more information about this um can you send me some photos with regards to what you're inquiring about so you kind of super plain email and you're just striking a conversation with exactly that I'm just prompting that that fast response wow that was impressive how quickly they responded it's Unique specifically to them and asking them a question and it has to be an open-ended question you need them to respond back to you and then after that so once you've inboxed and they responded they're going like the save senders list from there and then from there

James Dooley: so then obviously right now you're talking a lot about email but what should you be replying back to it is should you always be replying back to email or would you potentially sometimes send them an SMS I know WhatsApp is pretty big right now um or potentially even F them

Kasra Dash: yeah for sure I mean it it completely depends on the niche so like if I'm if I'm an emergency locksmith and someone does fill in a form online I'm ringing them straight away because they're not going to be waiting for an email to come back they're wanting to speak to someone they're locked out the car or they locked out the house but some people if they're wanting information and data it might be better via email that it goes back and forth on this times like within the call center what they'll do is they'll email but then they'll also WhatsApp or text to say when's the best time to call do you want to call and you're asking them do they want to pick up the phone and speak to someone if they do they can booking a call with the right engineer or the right mortgage broker or the right financial advisor or it could be the the business owner or whoever it could be the surveyor like whoever what department needs to speak to them but normally prior to speaking to them I like to get the information ideally on an email or or Whatsapp can work but I'd like to get the information to pass it to the right person who can then speak to them within whatever company that they're dealing with

James Dooley: so um another another question and you've kind of went over this already but how quickly should I be responding to leads

Kasra Dash: so the faster the better right so prime example we do a little bit of um lead generation in the financial sector we've got KPIs set in place that we want to respond within 23 seconds right so that is like ridiculously fast I'm not saying that every business can do that but that is the ideal so the closer you can get the faster as soon as the inquiry comes in the faster you respond the better the chances are of converting that job sometimes we decline clients and sometimes a business owner might come to us and say that they're the ones that are going doing let's say loft installation or installing artificial grass in a garden and they're the ones that are going doing it and the other night they come back and then they try to do the emails on the quotes and like they might not responded for six or seven hours that affects my inquiries that I'm sending to that company because they're not responding fast enough so we might end up saying look we're going to have to send these to a company that's going to respond faster to the lead the answer to your question is the faster you can respond to the inquiry and get that conversation going the better that it is because they might fill that form in or inquire with three or four different companies and generally speaking once they've had that interaction with the first company they going wow these are good and they're going back and forth they're getting the photos that they might need or they getting the information that they might need the faster the better

James Dooley: right okay and then let let's say for example for some of the the the more established businesses that this might be an issue how should I decide which leads to respond to

Kasra Dash: so that's a great question so if you don't work in a certain area and it goes out of your area then you can just delete the inquiry if needs be but generally speaking you want to try and deal with a company that you're generating leads for that one they do the service that the person that's inquiring is asking for and two it's in the area of where they're kind of inquiring and then hopefully then like you go yeah this is a perfect lead for him if it's not this is where it definitely poses a problem if you're paying per lead and then you're getting on what why class is being unqualified leads well that's a problem I'm paying 50 60 80 100 for a lead that isn't really a service or a product of what I do and it's outside of my geolocation of where I cover well that's not good but if you're working with let's say someone like fat rank that don't charge you for the leads and it is a product that you don't do if you spoke to one of the sales representatives and said look you generated me a lot of leads for this we don't do it we only do that if they say well look this is the same it's the same search for this and this you're going to get some at that point if it's one that you can't convert you either delete or fat rank might decide to send on to another company that might be able to deal with that inquiry

James Dooley: right okay and then um is it is it normal for all leads to to reply back to you like there's a lot of people that say like why have I not heard back from this customer

Kasra Dash: so that's a great question and I don't know why this is but generally speaking 50 percent of leads that get generated online you don't get a response from and that goes across all Industries now we're in over 500 different Industries and still to this day it's the B of my life of being why has someone inquired and you responded Within 2 minutes and then they don't end up responding back to you and you're like you've just inquired yeah and you're saying you want Loft insulation and we're saying not a problem can you send us a picture of your Loft and they don't respond and you're like why have you just inquired it could be Bots it could be competitors seeing who you are um it could be that it does go into the spam and it doesn't get sent through to him this is why sometimes a follow-up with regards to maybe a WhatsApp or a text or a phone call if they don't respond an email could be worth it because they might go well they've not responded they a bad client their inbox might have declined it it might not even gone into the junk or the spam or it could have gone in the junk and spam and it's been lost so for that reason this is why a follow-ups important with a second email or with a text a WhatsApp or a phone call but yes even when you do everything from a a text a WhatsApp an email call sometimes they just the numbers incorrect the email Isn't there and it's just like wow so generally speaking when you are looking to purchase leads 50 percent you're not even going to get hold of and then normally if you got a good lead generator a good lead generator 50 percent of the 50 percent you get hold of normally are interested in exactly the what you sell so you're down to one in four or 25 percent and then it then comes down to price so you're up against a few of the others generally speaking around it does vary from nich to nich about 10 to 15 percent of cold web leads would turn into an order

James Dooley: right okay and then you you're obviously a really big fan of this you've literally got the entire team trained up on this but for anybody that doesn't know what is oneclick response and how can it help me

Kasra Dash: one click response is input so it's just about again it just comes back back down to speed so you've got to be trying to get your systems and processes in place that people ask the same questions so if you are brilliant at fitting grass and Gardens well generally speaking they might start saying is it dog friendly they might start asking um what's what subbase is needed can I install it on top of this so if you're ready for those questions and you've got one click responses to them and you've got all your frequently asked questions in place again the response is so quick you're getting them from a cold web lead and then filling it in to answering all their questions into being wow these know everything what I'm going to ask and they're actually answering it once you've got like a oneclick response and a really nice email set up to explain everything with regards to the subbases or whatever it could be like the watch's the mortgage rates where's the best lender it could be anything what depending on the niche the one quick response is to give that service is key

James Dooley: yeah for sure and then obviously at fat rank we do exclusive leads um can you just tell us a little bit more about what exclusive leads are and why why you prefer that model as opposed to cost per lead model

Kasra Dash: so in my opinion exclusive leads are very important because if you're not getting exclusive leads that means that that inquiry is being sent to five or 10 different companies right generally speaking then it's a race to the bottom on price because you're up against all your competitors that are also getting that exact same lead and at that point majority of people they might not go with the cheapest price they'll like to see they go with best value but normally it's the cheapest price so at that point then you are at a race to the bottom where an exclusive lead you are the only one that's getting the lead now they the customer might fill in a form on several different websites so they still might be looking for different prices but if you can get that service and respond to very quickly and you're the only one that's G it exclusively from the lead generation site of where it's been sent from your conversion rate is so much higher and you can be charging the prices that you think is fair and not be erased to the bottom on price

James Dooley: so for for any business owners that do want exclusive leads where where where should they go

Kasra Dash: so fat rank's got an exclusive lead generation model um if you head on over to fat rank.com and then go to the forward slash contact us page and then what you can then turn around and do is fill in your form explain the industry that you're in and the demographic of where you work it's a completely zero risk supply of inquiries so you don't pay anything for SEO for PPC for social media you only pay on converted jobs big caveat to this is one of the big like this video here is talking about the response time of leads this is one of the biggest questions that we want to be asking you if you are not going to be able to respond to the inquiries and it's going to take two or three hours to respond we're probably not going to work with you because the response time of the lead is very important and because you're responding very slowly it might end up meaning that our leads that we generating which could be a quality lead because of your response times you're not converting it and for that reason we might not want to work with yourself as the company that's taking the leads in so head on over to fat rank.com see whether you qualify if you're in an industry that we can generate leads for then like you said it's a only pay on converted jobs but something we are looking for is the response times of those leads that we're generating it has to be fast to generate that service that the person that's inquiring will go yes I want to work with this company