Guides

Follow-ups: chasing leads who go quiet

Last updated 2026-09-14

Most enquiries send one message and vanish. They are not uninterested — they messaged four businesses the same evening, and they will buy from whoever is still there when they resurface.

Following that up by hand is the job nobody does consistently, so Vesma schedules it the moment a lead arrives and cancels it the moment it stops being appropriate.

The problem it solves

The first reply is the easy part and the assistant already handles it in seconds. The follow-up is where deals are actually lost: the person went quiet, everyone got busy, and three weeks later nobody can remember whether they were ever chased.

Follow-ups are scheduled per lead as durable jobs, so they survive restarts and are visible before they fire — you can see what is queued rather than hoping something is.

The default cadence

Five touches spread over two weeks, front-loaded because attention decays fast:

Immediately. The first reply, within seconds of the enquiry arriving.
After 1 day. The first nudge, while they still remember enquiring.
After 3 days. Still inside the week they were shopping in.
After 7 days. A week out, for people whose timeline was never this week.
After 14 days. A final closing message, then it stops.

Then it stops for good. There is no indefinite drip: a business that is still messaging you a month after one enquiry has told you something about itself, and it is not flattering.

The five things that stop it

Any of these cancels every remaining touch for that lead:

An appointment is booked. The sequence has done its job — chasing now is noise.
The lead is marked closed. Won, lost, or completed.
They are marked not interested. By your team or from what they said.
They opted out. Replying STOP suppresses business-initiated messages entirely, as Meta requires.
They asked you to stop. In their own words, without needing the exact keyword.

Cancellation is checked again at the moment a follow-up is about to send, not only when it was scheduled. A lead who books an appointment an hour before a queued nudge does not receive it.

Why timing is not only about politeness

On WhatsApp, what you may send depends on when they last messaged you. Inside the 24-hour window after their last message you can reply freely; outside it, only an approved template. The cadence is shaped around that as much as around courtesy.

If a follow-up cannot be delivered it is recorded as failed rather than quietly dropped, so a channel that has stopped working is visible instead of silently eating your pipeline.

Changing it — and when not to

The sequence is a default, not a law; you can set your own steps and timings. Two cautions from watching people do it:

Do not judge it before two weeks have passed. The sequence runs for fourteen days. Changing it on day three means you never saw the thing you are changing.
Adding touches rarely helps. The lift comes from the first two, which most businesses never sent at all. Going from five touches to nine mostly buys opt-outs.
Where this falls down

The cadence is per workspace, not per lead type — a buyer with a six-month timeline gets the same schedule as one who wants to move next month. If your business has genuinely different rhythms, set the cadence for the commoner case and work the exceptions by hand.

Follow-ups are not broadcasts

A follow-up is one message to one person continuing one conversation they started. A broadcast is the same message to a list. They are governed by different rules and carry very different risk — see Broadcasts and re-engagement before you message a list.

Stop losing the ones who went quiet

Five touches over two weeks, scheduled automatically and cancelled the moment they are no longer appropriate.