What to do with the leads that went quiet six months ago

Written by Michael Nadalin, CEO and Founder · 19 Oct 2026 · 6 min read

Why did they go quiet in the first place?

Most machinery dealers I talk to have a few hundred enquiries sitting in a CRM or a spreadsheet that nobody has touched since autumn. Someone asked about a sprayer in April, got a quote, and then nothing. The rep moved on to fresh leads. Fair enough. Fresh leads feel better.

My view is that a lot of that old list is the best money you'll spend this year, because the hard part has already been paid for. You bought those leads through Google Ads or Meta Ads at somewhere between $40 and $150 each for agricultural machinery, and most of them didn't say no. They said not yet.

Farmers don't buy on your timeline. They buy around the season, the bank and the accountant. An enquiry in April is often someone gathering numbers during seeding who then disappears for winter, sits down at tax time, and gets serious once they can see what harvest will look like. Six months later, many of them are closer to buying than the day they first filled in your form.

Sort the list before you send a single message

The worst thing you can do is blast all 400 old leads with the same email and call it a campaign. You'll get a handful of replies, a few unsubscribes, and you'll learn nothing.

Spend an afternoon sorting first. Someone who asked about trade-in on a specific header is a completely different conversation from someone who downloaded a brochure at midnight. I sort into tiers and give the rep's phone time to the top tiers only. Everyone else gets the automated stuff.

Be ruthless with the bottom tier too. A hobby block owner who asked about a 400 horsepower tractor isn't a lead, and keeping them on the list just makes your numbers look worse than they are.

The re-contact sequence I actually run

This doesn't have to be complicated. Over a couple of weeks, the order you do things in matters more than any clever wording.

The phone call comes first for the hot tiers, and it should come from the rep who actually knows the machine. Rural buyers can pick a call centre script within ten seconds. After that, everything else is there to catch the people the phone missed.

What do you actually say to someone you haven't spoken to since April?

Don't open with "just checking in". It tells them you've got nothing new and you're chasing them. Give them a reason to pick up the conversation that has something to do with their situation.

The best reason is a change. The price moved, a demo unit came free, a trade-in arrived that suits them, or a finance offer ends before the end of the financial year. If nothing has changed, ask a straight question about where they're at. Farmers respect being asked directly.

What to expect, and how to tell if it worked

Expect modest numbers. From a list of a few hundred old farm equipment leads, you'll reach maybe half, have real conversations with a third, and find a smaller group who are still in the market. A handful of sales in the next 90 days is a good result, and on big ticket agricultural machinery a handful of sales pays for the whole exercise many times over.

Here's where most dealers get it wrong. They count replies or form fills and call it a win, or a loss. The only number that matters is sales, and the margin on those sales, tracked back to the original lead. That means the rep marks the deal in the CRM against the old enquiry, not as a new walk-in. If you can't do that, you'll never know whether reviving old leads beats buying new ones, and in my experience it usually does.

Then make it routine. Every quarter, the leads that went quiet 90 to 180 days ago get the same treatment. Do that and your agriculture marketing budget stops leaking out the bottom of the pipeline.

Written by

Michael Nadalin

Founder, Market Lead & Harvest Lead

Michael is the founder of both Market Lead and Harvest Lead, building lead and sales systems for agriculture and machinery businesses across Australia and the USA.