Original Summary

Hello Redditors, haven’t posted here in quite a while, but a recent project turned out interesting enough that i figured i should finally write it up. It was a two person agency when they came to us doing flights, hotel packages and visa assistance, and profit had been stuck at around $3k a month after almost two years. Six months later it's sitting at around $20k a month. Revenue roughly tripled in that time but profit went up about 7x, and that gap is the whole point of this post. A lot of you running small service businesses will probably recognise the "busy but broke" version of this, so hopefully you guys find something useful here. Here's how we did it: The first thing we did had nothing to do with marketing. We just went through their Whatsapp history. They were getting around 60-70 qualified inquiries a month from referrals and ads.. The problem was what happened after. Average first response was few hours later, and about a third of the people who got a quote never heard from them again. Not one follow up. An international trip gives you a bigger window but is still a 5-20 day decision approx with a lot of back and forth, so if you reply late and then go quiet after the quote, the deal doesn't get lost to a competitor so much as it just quietly expires. Following up feels like nagging, so a lot of people skip that We moved everything into a basic Airtable pipeline with proper stages (new inquiry, quoted, follow-up 1/2/3, negotiating, won, lost). Once a lead has a status, "i haven't followed up with 12 people" stops being a feeling and becomes something you can see. Then two rules. First reply within 2 hours in business hours, even if it's just "got it, sending you options by this evening", because the acknowledgement alone holds the deal open. And a fixed follow up on any unanswered quote on day 1, 3 and 7, and on day 14 a message saying "I'm closing your file on this, just let me know if anything changes." That last one closed a lot of deals and we've seen the same thing with other businesses. My read is it's the only message in the sequence that isn't asking for anything, so people don't reflexively ignore it, and it gives them a reason to reply today instead of eventually. We also scored leads on trip type, budget and how close the travel date was, so someone flying in 5 weeks gets answered before someone browsing for next winter. Quote to close went from about 8-9% to 15% for qualified leads with the same lead volume, and this was the fastest result of everything we did with zero extra ad spend. Next was the offer, we split their bookings by product and looked at what each line really earned. Flights were 58% of revenue and 21% of gross profit. Curated packages were under a quarter of revenue, nearly two thirds of the profit. Flights were a product with a hard ceiling, and the whole business had been built on the capped side. Also flight-only customers al

  • 情报分类：商业与市场研究
  • 分类依据：内容涉及商业、投资或市场动态
  • 信息来源：Reddit · Entrepreneur
  • 发布时间：2026/10/19 19:35:54