Founder & Head of Growth at Crater. Formerly with Alibaba, I specialize in helping Chinese companies expand overseas through independent site development, Google SEO, and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization). I've led multiple foreign trade sites and DTC brands from zero to one, and I closely follow how large language models like ChatGPT and Gemini are reshaping overseas customer acquisition.
In a CRM that's been running for two years, half the leads are usually duplicates or missing fields, and sales has to dig through the mess to find anything. Cleanup has to start at intake: merge repeat submissions from the same email within 24 hours, and backfill company name and country from the email domain.
If your reply to an inquiry lands in spam, even the best-written sales email might as well never have been sent. Miss any one of the three DNS records — SPF, DKIM, DMARC — and your inbox rate at major email providers drops below 80%.
Setting an SLA without monitoring it is the same as not having one. If no one replies to a Class A inquiry within 5 minutes, the system should ping the rep at minute 4, escalate to their manager at minute 10, and auto-reassign it to an available teammate at minute 15.
Phone calls aren't the main channel for converting inquiries, but on high-intent A-tier leads, calling within 5 minutes of submission roughly doubles the rate at which a connected call moves to the next step. B-tier inquiries don't need an immediate call, just one follow-up call 24 hours after your email reply.
The worst thing you can do with an inquiry in a less common language is reply with raw machine translation. When a buyer gets an Arabic or Russian email full of awkward grammar and garbled terminology, they immediately question how professional you really are.
Of the inquiries an independent site receives, usually no more than 5% are worth a salesperson's personal follow-up. The other 95% either get nurtured automatically or blocked outright. Set three gates at the entry point — email domain, IP geolocation, content keywords — and sort inquiries into A/
