Most of your enquiries are the same five questions.
Whatever the channel, the list is short and it repeats. Finding your own five is the cheapest hour you will spend this month.
Ask any owner what customers ask them and they will say "all sorts of things". It feels endless. Every message looks new.
Then they sit down and count. And it is five questions. Sometimes six.
It surprises people every time, because the messages arrive one at a time, in different words, on different apps. Spread out like that, a short list feels like a long one.
Why it always looks bigger than it is
The same question rarely arrives in the same words twice.
"Do you cover Harrogate?" "Would you come out to HG1?" "Is Harrogate too far for you?" "We are just outside town, is that ok?"
Four messages. One question. You answered it four times and it felt like four different jobs.
What the five usually are
Yours will differ. But across trades the list tends to look like this.
- Do you cover me? Area, distance, whether you leave the city.
- What will it cost? Not an exact price. A range, and what moves it.
- When can you come? This week, next month, or a waiting list.
- Do you do this exact thing? The odd version of the job that half your enquiries are about.
- How does it work? Deposits, cards, whether they need to be in, how long it takes.
Why this matters more than it used to
It used to be that only a person could answer those five. So they rang you.
Now people expect to find out without asking. If they cannot, plenty of them will not ring. They will go to the business whose site did tell them.
So the five questions have quietly stopped being an annoyance and started being a filter. And you do not get to see who it filtered out.
The objection, taken seriously
"But I want them to call. That is how I win the job."
That is true, and it is worth protecting. But look at which call you are protecting.
Answering the five in public does not stop people ringing. It changes who rings. You lose the calls that were only ever going to end in "sorry, we do not cover that". You keep the ones where the person already knows your price and wants to book.
Fewer calls, better calls. Most people find that trade worth making.
Find your own five
Do not guess. Guessing gives you the questions you like answering.
Take two weeks of messages, from every app you use, and tally them. It takes an hour. Here is how we do it.
The hour is worth it for one reason. Until you have the list, every fix you make is a guess about your own customers.
Written by the team at hailera — we help small businesses answer customer questions without being there.