Guide › Sales pitches and screening

Sales pitches and screening

Put a chat box on a website and the SEO agencies find it within a week. This is what happens to them, and what to do if we ever get one wrong.

What it does

When a conversation ends, we work out one thing: was this visitor asking for something from your business, or selling something to it?

If they were selling — link building, SEO packages, guest posts, web design, staffing, investment, a partnership that is really a pitch — the conversation is screened. You are not emailed, no lead is recorded, and it does not appear in your numbers.

What they are told

Politely, and without pretending to be a person:

When it is not sure

Plenty of messages are genuinely ambiguous — someone mentioning a business of their own, an enquiry about a partnership that might be real work. Rather than guess, it asks:

"Are you looking for help with one of our services, or are you contacting us to offer a product or service?"

And if it still cannot tell, it treats them as a customer and you get the transcript as normal.

The bias, stated plainly

We only screen a conversation when we are confident. Anything short of that reaches you. That is a deliberate imbalance, and the arithmetic behind it is simple:

• Letting a spammer through costs you thirty seconds. You delete an email.
• Suppressing a real customer costs you a job. And you never find out it happened.

So we accept more of the first to avoid the second. If the screening ever feels slightly leaky, that is the setting working as intended.

Nothing is deleted

Every screened conversation is kept, along with the reason it was screened. We review them ourselves, which is how we find out when the judgement is drifting — rather than waiting for a customer to notice.

If we screened a real customer

Tell us — roughly when it happened, and anything you remember about it. We will find the conversation, release it to you, and look at why it was misread.

Releasing is something we do rather than something you click. That is deliberate: it keeps the decisions in one place where we can see the pattern, instead of every customer quietly correcting the same mistake.

What it does not screen

• Rude customers. Someone annoyed about a job is a customer, and you want to hear from them urgently.
• Suppliers you actually use. If your regular supplier messages through the chat, that is not a cold pitch — but if it reads like one, it can be caught. Let us know if it happens.
• Job applicants. Recruitment agencies selling you staffing services are what this is aimed at. A person asking whether you are hiring is not obviously either thing, so it falls into "not sure" — and not sure means it reaches you.