Notes for owners · Industry playbooks
How to stay in touch through a year-long PR decision
A permanent residency enquirer often engages a year after the first call. Write to what changed in their file or in the rules, not to a calendar, and ask consent first.
The GullySales team · Updated 3 Oct 2026 · 7 min read
On this page
Someone who rings about permanent residency today often signs eighteen months later, and in between they are improving a language score, waiting for a draw, or talking their spouse round. So write to what has changed in their file or in the published rules, not to a schedule. Ask permission on the first call, record the date they expect to be ready, and make every message carry a fact they could not get elsewhere.
What is actually happening in those months
The enquirer is rarely stalling. They are doing work you cannot see.
She is booking a language test for the third time because a half-band is the difference between being in a draw and out of it. He is waiting for a credential assessment. They are counting whether another year in the current job pushes the experience band up. Her parents are unwell and this is not the year. He has applied to two provinces and one has gone quiet.
A consultant who knows which of those is true writes one useful paragraph at the right moment. A consultant who does not sends a reminder that the offer still stands, which tells the applicant nothing and marks the sender as a salesperson.
So the first call has to end with three things written down: what is holding the file back, when they expect that to change, and permission to write to them in the meantime. Without the third, nothing else is allowed.
Write to the event, not to the diary
| What changes | What to send | Why it lands |
|---|---|---|
| A published requirement or score grid is revised | What changed, and what it does to their own profile | It is about them and it is time-sensitive |
| A new provincial or regional stream opens | Whether their occupation appears on it | Most applicants only watch one route |
| Their language test date passes | A short note asking the result and offering to rescore the profile | You remembered something personal |
| Their work anniversary moves the experience band | The recalculated score | Nobody else is counting their years for them |
| A credential assessment usually completes | A nudge to send it so the file is ready | It unblocks the next step |
| Twelve months of silence | An honest reassessment, free of charge | It restarts the relationship on expertise |
Nothing in that table is a campaign. It is a record of what each person is waiting for, and a habit of reading the published changes and asking who they affect.
For example, a consultancy in Hyderabad with a list of eight hundred past enquirers, mostly software engineers. The figures are illustrative. When an occupation list is revised, forty of those eight hundred are affected. A note to those forty, naming the occupation and what the change does to their score, brings in more engagements than a broadcast to all eight hundred ever has, and costs an afternoon.
The thing almost nobody sends
Offer a fresh written assessment to people who enquired a year ago and never came back. Not a discount. A reassessment.
Their age band may have moved against them. Their experience may have moved for them. The rules have almost certainly changed. A page of arithmetic with their current position, what it was when they first called, and what would lift it most, is a piece of work no competitor is doing for free. It also gives you a reason to ring that is not a sales reason.
Say the uncomfortable parts in it. If age has now put the route out of reach, write that. The applicant will tell three colleagues that you were the one who did not take their money.
Keep it out of a bulk tool
Three habits separate this from marketing that applicants mute.
Send from one number and one name, and let them reply to it. The person who assessed them should be the person writing. Second, never mix a rule update with an offer in the same message; the update is the whole value and an attached pitch cheapens it. Third, keep the list clean. Somebody who landed abroad two years ago should not be getting draw updates, and they should be getting a note asking who else in their old team is thinking about it.
Settled clients are the strongest source of new ones in this trade and the least contacted. They are in a new country, in a WhatsApp group of people from home who are all asking how it was done, and nobody from your office has spoken to them since the visa came.
What to start with this week
- Write to your last fifty enquirers who never engaged, ask what is holding them back, and record the answer and a date.
- Add two columns to whatever list you keep: the blocker, and the month they expect it to clear.
- Pick two published sources to read for changes. Name who reads them.
- Draft one honest reassessment template and send it by hand to ten dormant enquirers before automating anything.
- Ask three clients who have settled abroad to introduce one person each.
What is usually not worth it for a small practice: a general newsletter about migration news. Everyone in this market already follows three forums and two YouTube channels, and your summary of what they read yesterday adds nothing. The value you have is the arithmetic on their specific profile, and that cannot be broadcast.
What to do next
Count how many enquiries your office took last year and how many of those people you could contact today with something true and useful about their own file. If the second number is small, the list is the problem rather than the advertising. We start a free audit by looking at exactly that list, and at what happened to the people on it.