Lead intake agent for a Singapore grants consultancy
This consultancy helps small and medium businesses in Singapore win government grant funding: the schemes that cover a large share of the cost of upgrading a business, entering a new market or building new systems. The application is long, technical and easy to get wrong, so business owners pay specialists to run it for them.
It is a high value, low volume business. One client is worth $30,000 or more, and the work is the consultants' own hours, so the constraint is not demand. It is how many of the right conversations the team can get to.
- Industry
- Government grant consulting
- Location
- Singapore
- Deal size
- $30,000 or more per client
- Where leads arrive
- WhatsApp, from paid ads and referrals
The challenge
Almost every enquiry started as a WhatsApp message, and most of them landed outside working hours. Evenings, weekends, or from an owner who only gets a free minute at 11pm. The reply went out the next morning at the earliest, and often the next afternoon. By then the owner had messaged two or three other consultancies, and the first one to answer usually got the meeting.
Nobody chased the ones that went quiet, either. An enquiry that did not respond to the first message was simply gone. Nothing in the process brought it back, and at $30,000 a client, a handful of those a year is a serious number.
The other half of the problem was qualification. Grant funding has real eligibility rules, and plenty of businesses do not meet them. Whether the business is registered locally, how long it has traded, its revenue, what the money is actually for, and when it needs to happen. All of that decides whether a consultant should spend time on the conversation at all. Nobody found out until fifteen minutes into a call.
So the team was losing good leads to slow replies and losing hours to bad ones.
Our approach
The work started by reading how they already sold. We went through 290 of their own past WhatsApp conversations and pulled out what actually worked: the order the questions were asked in, the phrasing their best closer used, the objections that came up over and over, and where good conversations died.
That became the agent. It answers first and qualifies second, because a real business owner asking a question should get an answer before an interrogation. It asks the eligibility questions in the order a consultant would, one at a time, in conversation rather than as a form.
The rules that matter live in code, not in a prompt. The booking link is unreachable until every qualifying question has an answer, so nothing can talk its way onto the calendar. Follow ups fire from the lead's last message rather than chaining off each other, so a quiet lead gets chased inside the window where WhatsApp still allows a free reply. The consultancy edits the questions, the tone and the booking link on their own settings page, with no developer involved.
Before it went anywhere near a real lead it was run against 42 adversarial scenarios: people trying to get free advice, people asking it to write their application, people testing whether it would invent a number. It holds.
Outcomes
Every enquiry gets an answer in seconds, at any hour, in the voice the team already uses. Leads that fit are qualified and booked. Leads that do not are told honestly and early, which is worth nearly as much because it gives the consultants their week back.
The follow ups are the part that pays for it. A lead that goes quiet now gets chased politely instead of forgotten, and that is where most of the lost money was sitting.
Why this matters
At $30,000 a client, this was never a chatbot problem. One recovered lead a month pays for the system many times over, and the consultancy stops competing on who happened to be awake.
The interesting part is what it protects: the consultants' hours. Their whole business is billable expertise, and every unqualified call is inventory they cannot sell twice.
Runs on WhatsApp's official business platform, on the client's own number, with a settings page so they change the questions and the tone themselves.
