Building an intake follow-up cadence that survives contact with a real week

Ask a firm why their lead program underperforms and you will usually hear about the source. Sometimes that is right. More often, the source is fine and the follow-up is a set of good intentions that collapses the first time two people are out sick.

A cadence is not a marketing document. It is an operating rule that decides what happens to a record the moment it lands, and what happens when nobody answers.

Start with a definition of done

Before touching a new lead list, agree on what a worked lead looks like. Not a signed case, which you do not control, but a completed attempt: contact made, notes logged, and a clear next step or a clear no.

Without that definition, "we called them" covers everything from a five-minute intake to a dial that rang twice.

The first 48 hours do the heavy lifting

A simple structure that holds up in a busy week:

1. Same day — first attempt on every validated record, with the competitor context visible to the person calling.
2. Next morning — second attempt at a different time of day. Morning and late afternoon reach different people.
3. Day three — a written touch if your compliance rules allow it, referencing the matter type rather than a generic follow-up.
4. Day five — final attempt, then a decision: keep in nurture, or close the record out.

Two dials and a written touch in the first 48 hours is not aggressive. It is the minimum required to find out whether the lead was real.

Route around absence

Every cadence breaks when the person who owns the list is unavailable. Decide in advance who inherits unworked records, and make that visible somewhere the whole team can see. A shared feed with a visible status beats a personal spreadsheet every time — it survives a vacation.

This is exactly what the admin CRM in this site is for: each demo request has a stage, an owner trail and an activity log, so nothing depends on someone remembering.

Measure attempts, not just outcomes

Case counts arrive late and reflect too many variables to manage weekly. Attempts, time-to-first-attempt and records left untouched are all measurable today, and all of them move the number that matters.

A firm that knows its time-to-first-attempt can fix an intake problem in a week. A firm that only watches signed cases is guessing.

None of this changes your obligations around calling, texting and marketing. Your firm makes every decision about contact and case acceptance.