A due date is the most useful thing a customer can tell you
What an expected date predicts that a lead source never will
In almost every other kind of retail you are guessing at when somebody will buy. In a baby store you are not, because the customer will tell you their due date in the first two minutes if you ask. That single date sets out the whole schedule: the pram and cot conversation runs through the last trimester, the car seat becomes urgent in the fortnight before the hospital bag is packed, and the weaning and high chair questions arrive about six months after the birth. Knowing it means you are talking to a family when the decision is actually open.
HelloGrowthCRM stores the expected date, and after the birth the date of birth, on the customer record, and works the calendar for you. Nothing else you can capture — which advert they clicked, which shelf they stood at — comes close to predicting what a family will buy next and roughly when. A store that records it is running on a timetable; a store that does not is waiting for people to walk back in.
The enquiry that goes quiet for four months on purpose
Baby retail has an odd rhythm that trips up ordinary sales thinking. A couple can come in at twenty weeks, spend an hour on prams, love one, and then genuinely go quiet for months, because many families hold off buying until closer to the birth. Treated as a normal lead, they look dead, and most systems will either drop them or annoy them with weekly chasing.
With the due date on the record you can do the sensible thing instead: park the conversation and set it to come back to life at thirty weeks, with a note of exactly which pram they liked and what stopped them. The follow-up then arrives as though you remembered them personally, which, in effect, you did.