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41% of Your Leads Are Not Ready Yet. Here Is What to Do With Them.

By Amazing Business Results | Certified Zoho Premium Partner

Automation #5 from The Top 20 CRM Automations in the World by Lior Izik

Topics: Lead Nurturing · Drip Campaigns · Behavioural Automation · Zoho Campaigns · Revenue Recovery

In almost every business we work with, there is a bucket of leads that nobody is paying attention to. These are not bad leads. They are not unqualified. They are simply not ready right now — waiting for budget approval, working through a competing solution that is not quite right, dealing with more urgent priorities. They came to you for a reason. They just did not buy yet.

Research consistently shows that around 41% of leads fall into this category. And our experience across hundreds of CRM implementations shows that roughly 15% of those leads will eventually become customers — if you stay in front of them. If you do not, they will buy from whoever did.

Automation #5 in The Top 20 CRM Automations in the World is the system that captures that 15%. It is not complicated in concept. But almost nobody has it built correctly.

The Three Types of Businesses — and Why Two of Them

Are Losing

When we look at how businesses handle their “not ready yet” bucket, we consistently see three approaches.

The first group — the majority — does nothing. A lead goes quiet, nobody follows up after a point, and the lead is quietly forgotten. The marketing budget that generated that lead is effectively wasted.

The second group is better, but still broken. They have a drip campaign. One drip campaign. It goes to everyone in the “not ready” bucket regardless of why they came in or what they are actually interested in. A man came in with a jaw pain problem looking for medical Botox. The campaign sends him beauty treatment offers because that is also part of the business. He unsubscribes. The lead is gone.

The third group is rare. They analyse why each lead came in, and they build a campaign specifically around that problem.

Every email in the sequence speaks directly to the lead’s original intent. Case studies from the same situation. Content that builds trust around the exact thing they were researching. Offers calibrated to where they are in the decision.

This group recovers dramatically more leads — and pays less to do it than the groups running generic campaigns.

Building this third-group capability is exactly what our automated lead nurturing workflows service delivers — segmented sequences built around original enquiry intent, not one generic campaign for everyone.

Commodity vs Service: The Message Changes Everything

Before you build a nurture campaign, you need to answer one question: are you selling a commodity or a service?

A commodity is something where the product is essentially the same regardless of who sells it. iPhones are iPhones. In that case, price is the dominant factor in winning back a hesitant lead. Your campaigns should lead with offers — discounts, bundles, time-limited deals, free shipping. The value proposition is economic.

A service business is different. When someone is hiring a CRM development firm, a surgeon, a legal team, or a consultant, they are not buying a commodity. They are buying trust. Showing up with a discount offer signals desperation, not confidence. The campaigns should build authority — case studies, results, credentials, reasons why this specific provider is the right choice and the risk of choosing someone cheaper.

Getting this wrong is expensive. A service business running commodity-style price-drop campaigns trains their prospects to wait for a discount. A commodity business running long trust-building sequences loses the deal to whoever just offered the better price.

How the Campaign Shifts Based on Behaviour

A static drip campaign sends the same sequence to everyone regardless of what they do. A smart nurture system watches what each lead does and adjusts the campaign in real time.

Here is how we build it: the first set of emails in a sequence is designed to build awareness and knowledge. Content that is useful, relevant to their original enquiry, and positions you as an authority in that specific area. No hard sell. Just value.

The moment a lead clicks on one of those emails — reads an article, watches a video, engages with the content — the system registers that signal. That click tells you something important: this person is still interested. They are just not ready yet.

At the moment of engagement, the campaign automatically shifts.

Awareness emails stop. Trust-building emails begin — testimonials, case studies, proof that your solution works specifically for their situation.

If they engage again, the campaign shifts once more — to an offer. First treatment free. 50% off the first month. Whatever makes sense for your business.

You are not guessing where they are in the decision. You are reading their behaviour and responding to it.

This engagement signal is also what powers the resurrection principle from Automation #4 — the follow-up system NOTE: Update to confirmed Automation #4 URL. When a nurtured lead engages significantly, they do not just shift campaigns — they surface back at the top of your sales team’s priority list automatically. Nurturing and follow-up are two halves of the same system.

Every Channel Available to Win Them Back

Drip campaigns are the most common tool for nurturing not-ready leads — and for most businesses, they should be the foundation. They are inexpensive, they scale, and once built they run automatically. But they are not the only option, and for high-value prospects, they should not be the only tool.

Other channels worth building into your re-engagement strategy:

Events — a webinar or in-person session where an authority speaks directly to the problem your prospect was researching. Conversion rates from events that are properly targeted are significantly higher than email alone.

Content authority — a book, a video series, a course. When a prospect sees you as the leading authority on their problem, the trust gap closes without a sales call.

Geotargeting — for high-value prospects, running digital ads targeted to their zip code or physical address so they keep seeing your brand while they are deciding.

Email targeting — some platforms allow you to target specific email addresses with paid advertising, so a prospect who has gone quiet starts seeing your content across channels simultaneously.

Physical signage — in concentrated industry areas, a physical presence can create brand recognition that makes the next outreach call land very differently.

The channel mix depends on the value of the deal. For a $500 product, email drips are enough. For a $50,000 contract, layering three or four channels around a single high-value prospect is a rational use of budget.

Knowing which leads justify multi-channel investment is exactly what lead scoring from Automation #3 determines — the score tells you which not-ready leads are worth the extra channels. NOTE: Update to confirmed Automation #3 URL.

How This Lives in the CRM

The automation trigger for all of this is simple: when a lead is marked as lost, or a deal is marked Closed Lost, the CRM automatically triggers the nurture campaign in your marketing system. In Zoho, that means Zoho Campaigns receives the signal and initiates the correct sequence based on the lead’s original enquiry category.

From that point, everything is automatic:

The right sequence fires based on why the lead originally came in. Engagement signals from the campaign feed back into the CRM and trigger campaign shifts. When a lead buys, the campaign stops and a different sequence begins. When a lead re-engages significantly, a task or alert can be sent to a salesperson for a personal follow-up. All of this is tracked — so you can measure which campaigns and which channels are generating actual revenue, not just clicks.

The goal is not to measure leads. Leads are not money.

The goal is to measure revenue generated from the “maybe later” bucket — and compare it against the cost of running the campaigns.

When that number is positive, you scale. When it is not, you adjust. That is how a serious business manages its nurture investment.

Measuring revenue back to the campaign requires the attribution infrastructure from Automation #2 — Marketing Attribution NOTE: Update to confirmed Automation #2 URL. Without UTM tracking and source attribution in place, you can see that nurture emails are being opened — but not whether they are generating revenue.

What This Is Worth

With a well-built drip campaign alone — no events, no geotargeting, just email sequences — the typical improvement we see is between 10% and 15% more conversions from the not-ready bucket. For most businesses, that is a meaningful number with relatively low additional cost.

Add the behavioural campaign shifting, the channel layering, and the CRM integration, and the numbers get more interesting. The leads were already in your system. The marketing spend to generate them already happened. This automation recovers value from an asset you already paid for.

Most businesses are sitting on a pipeline of maybe-later leads that they have completely abandoned. Automation #5 is the system that turns that abandoned pipeline into a predictable revenue stream.

The Top 20 CRM Automations Series

This post is part of an ongoing series covering all 20 automations from Lior’s book:

NOTE: Verify all four URLs above against the actual published URLs before this post goes live.

Ready to Stop Abandoning Your Not-Ready Leads?

At Amazing Business Results, we build custom Zoho CRM systems that include properly segmented nurture campaigns, behavioural campaign shifting, and full revenue tracking back to the source. If you have a bucket of leads you have stopped following up with, we would be glad to show you what a working re-engagement system looks like.

The Top 20 CRM Automations in the World covers all 20 automations with real client stories and the exact systems behind each one.

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