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# Reputifly — sales playbook review and payment follow-up redesign
## Who I am
I run a small Singapore web agency. Productised offer: a custom-coded multi-page website at S$590,
built and shown live before the client pays anything. 70% deposit to start, 30% on go-live.
Upsells sit on top: SEO, an AI-search visibility product, Meta ads management, blogs, Google Business setup.
I have one employee who does the selling on WhatsApp. He is early in his career, executes written
scripts extremely well, and improvises badly. That is the key constraint on every decision below:
**rules he can pattern-match work; rules that need judgement do not.**
I am currently unavailable during working hours for the next two years, so the system has to run
without me correcting it in real time.
## The tool
A single-page HTML "closer playbook" my employee works from. 27 nodes, each with a DO THIS panel
and a set of copy-paste WhatsApp scripts. Deep-linkable by node.
Two of those nodes are 30-day follow-up ladders, 30 scripts each, 60 total:
- one for leads where a sample site was already built and sent
- one for leads who never gave enough info to build
Both ladders instruct: **"COPY, SEND, MOVE ON. One a day, in order, never the same one twice."**
## What went wrong
A corporate lead (a car dealership group, not an owner-operator) enquired. Sequence:
1. Day 1 of contact he received ladder messages 1 and 2, verbatim.
2. Later, on a call, he was shown a live site and said in writing:
*"corporate doesn't work this way, not my own business. Need time to discuss and agree."*
3. He was then offered a "confirm tonight and I'll add a free year of hosting" bonus. Twice.
4. He said "Ok go ahead" and "will get my finance to paynow you tomorrow." No money followed.
5. Over the next 4 days he received **12 chase messages** and sent 3 replies.
One day had 4 outbound. Another had 6, including four inside a single minute,
84 minutes after he had already replied "let me check with my finance".
6. He wrote: *"you chasing me like i owe you money bro"*, and *"i dont wish to work with your company anymore"*.
Deal size was roughly S$1,000 including an upsell already agreed in principle. Nothing was ever paid.
## My analysis so far
- **The cadence was not the root cause.** Daily follow-up after a broken promise is defensible.
- **The content was.** All the chase messages were status checks ("any updates?", "haven't received",
"can the deposit be settled today?"). None advanced anything.
- **The deeper failure**: the confirm-tonight offer extracted a "yes" from someone who had just said
he had no authority to give one. So all 12 messages were chasing a commitment that was never real.
- **The structural defect**: the 30-day ladders have **no exit ramp**. Nothing routes out when the
lead replies, gives a date, or says yes. My employee ran the ladder correctly, then ran off the end
of it and improvised in the same aggressive register.
- **And the fix already exists but is unreachable**: another node already contains
"invoice is out but no money yet" AND "3 payment promises broken, stop chasing".
The ladders never point at it.
## What I have already tagged for cutting
Roughly 20 of the 60 ladder scripts are restatements of about six questions:
five copies of a keep-or-delete binary, five of ask-for-the-no, three of invite-the-criticism,
three of what-would-you-change, two of a rebuild offer, five of just-give-me-your-business-name,
two of what-is-stopping-you, and two pure status checks that my own rules forbid.
One ladder announces on day 10 that the preview is being deleted, then sends 20 more messages.
## The system I am proposing
1. **One message, then stop.** Never a second before they reply. An invoice goes out as one message with the file attached.
2. **Three touches maximum**, then an artifact with a stated deadline, then wind-down.
3. **Never twice in one day.**
4. **"Checking with finance" counts as an answer** — acknowledge, set the next date, send nothing.
5. **Corporate buyers get half the cadence**, triggered by a keyword list
(finance, team, boss, corporate, marketing, approval, need to discuss, we, they)
rather than by anyone judging the buyer. No confirm-tonight offers to that group, ever.
6. **Exit ramps on both ladders**: they replied → stop; they gave a date → stop; they said yes or an
invoice went out → stop and switch to the payment node.
7. **A payment-pending state in our lead tracker** with a next-touch date and a touch count.
## What I want from you
Pressure-test this. Specifically:
- Is a three-touch limit right, or too few for a deposit that has been verbally agreed?
- Is the keyword trip-wire a robust way to separate corporate buyers from owner-operators,
or will it misfire too often?
- What is the correct move when someone verbally commits but has no authority to commit?
Is there a way to detect that at the point of the yes rather than four days later?
- Am I wrong that this is a routing problem rather than a content problem?
Be blunt. I would rather be told the design is weak now than find out through another lost deal.