How we gave a stretched sales director his time back, and lifted booked meetings by 20%.
DHS runs a large industrial cleaning operation with strong retention. New business mattered, but it was eating the time of the two people least able to spare it. We built the ads and the follow-up system that fixed both.
An established operation where time, not leads, was scarce.
DHS is a UK industrial cleaning firm with over 18 years behind it and a blue-chip client list. They clean distribution warehouses, chilled and freezer chambers, around live 24/7 operations without disrupting them.
It's an established business with strong retention. New business is the smaller part of the picture, but it takes up a large amount of time, and that time was coming out of the people who could least afford to give it.
Good leads, coming in, worked by people already at capacity.
Before us, DHS ran email marketing only. Leads came in and were handled by hand, by the sales director and one salesperson. The same two people were also out on site visits giving quotes and managing the existing client base.
So the new business process competed with everything else for their attention, and lost. Leads went cold while the team was on site. Meetings slipped. And because the sale here is two steps, an initial call and then an on-site visit to quote, a lead that went quiet between those steps was a lead gone.
The instinct in that position is to get more leads. It was the wrong instinct. The leads were fine. The problem was that a busy operator's time is the bottleneck, and every cold lead was that scarce time spent for nothing.
Add the right leads. Then build the system that works them.
Two moves, one system. First, the acquisition. We added Google Search on top of their existing email, so the pipeline was fed by people actively searching for the service, high intent, not cold outreach. Second, and this is the half that changed the business, the follow-up. We built a system that worked every lead automatically so the team didn't have to:
Auto-email follow-up, so no enquiry sat waiting on someone with a spare minute.
Calendly synced to both their calendars, so leads could book the first call themselves, into real availability across the team.
Prompts that encouraged leads to book, rather than leaving it to chance.
Auto-SMS for leads that didn't book, to bring them back.
Reminder SMS for leads that did book, to cut no-shows before the first call.
The whole thing was built to protect the two-step sale. Keep the lead warm from enquiry to booked call, and from booked call to on-site quote, without a person having to hold it together by hand.
20% more booked meetings. And a sales director who got his time back.
Booked meetings and show-ups rose 20% against email-only. Fewer no-shows. Leads that stayed warm through both steps of the sale instead of cooling between them.
But the number that mattered most to DHS wasn't on a dashboard. The director stopped spending his time on new business that went nowhere. The system filtered and warmed the pipeline so that when they got on a call, it was with someone who genuinely needed the service. His time went back into the operation, the retention, the existing clients, the part of the business that was already working.
It's not just the leads. It's what happens to your time after they arrive.
For a busy operator, the cost of poor follow-up isn't only lost deals. It's the hours spent chasing leads that were never going to close, hours taken from the part of the business that pays the bills.
We added a high-intent channel, then built the system that works every lead without the team lifting a finger. Speed, so intent doesn't cool. Booking built into the follow-up, so leads schedule themselves. Reminders, so they show up. The result is more meetings, fewer no-shows, and a leadership team that only spends time on people worth their time.
That's the whole product. The ads and the follow-up, run as one system, for one fixed fee. We're paid for your result, not your spend.