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React Faster to Your Leads to Increase Your ROI
You’ve got calls to action and contact forms on your website, and perhaps you’re investing in pay-per-click ad campaigns. But how quickly do you respond to these inquiries? Speed could make a difference in your bottom line.
Recent lead response management research by MIT shows the odds of making contact with Web-based inquiries increases 100 times if attempted within five minutes.
With this in mind, consider the results of this other recent survey:
- Email Response Time: 53.2 percent of the companies in the survey responded by email, with the average email response time being around 13 hours. This translates to the next business day. The average number of attempts by these same companies to follow up by email was 1.45 per inquiry.
Does your company wait until the next business day to follow up with its inquirers? Does it give up on following up inquiries after less than two attempts to reach them? Hopefully not.
- Phone Response Time: 39.5 percent responded by phone, with the average response time of nearly 44 hours. The average number of attempts these companies made to follow up by phone was 1.14 times per inquiry. This means that only a very small percentage of these inquirers got more than a single follow up phone call.
By the way, the fastest average response time was 2 minutes and 47 seconds.
Is your company’s response time closer to 2 minutes… or 2 days?
Consider the times you tried to get information about a product or service you needed. How did you feel when it took what felt like forever to get a response to your request for contact or more information? Did it negatively impact the chance of that company making the sale? I’ll bet it did.
In the B2B world, how responsive your company is to its inquiries, or how it handles the follow up of sales leads, has a lot more impact on prospective customers’ perception of your brand than brand advertising ever will.
What do you recommend for smaller companies who may not be able to follow up within 5 minutes all the time? We have explored using email autoresponders to reply on our behalf. We also looked into outsourcing the initial follow-up call to a call center. Any thoughts?
Posted by: Jake Atwood | Dec 4, 2008 at 11:10 am
My company, ReachForce, was actually one of those included in the survey. We came in second with our response time, woo hoo! The thing that I couldn’t believe is that over 37% of companies never responded at all. I would hate to be a marketer for one of those companies. Someone filling out a contact form is like a lead being delivered on a silver platter. Why wouldn’t you follow-up?
Posted by: Leigh Anne Wallace | Dec 4, 2008 at 4:46 pm
Mac, great post. I took a look at the same study and I would underscore what you wrote by adding the odds of contacting a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 100 times. Forget calling the next day! The time to connect with a prospect is when they are actively buying -which is pretty much NOW! The MIT study says that one way to know this is when the prospect fills out a web-to-lead form but there are also solutions that give you instant insight into a prospect’s web “presence” so you can connect with your prospects before they “move on to something else.” Sales and Marketing ought to be investigating these tools if they want to make their numbers. And who doesn’t in today’s economy?
Posted by: Parker Trewin | Dec 4, 2008 at 8:15 pm
Jake,
You are on the right track. I’d consider using an autoresponder and/or outsourcing.
Regards,
Mac
Posted by: Mac McIntosh | Dec 5, 2008 at 2:14 am
Reality Check
I work in Marketing for a small school in N.Cal. We get between 600 and 900 requests per month for our catalog. We are currently in our open enrollment period with classes beginning in March. Today, I discovered that our sales person had not followed up at all on over 300 some leads that have been sitting our her desk for the past two weeks as she was too busy on other things. When I brought up the fact to management that these leads have been sitting for two weeks and we all need to help if necessary, no one seemed slightly concerned. I was more shocked at their low sense of urgency from them than I was from finding out about the “dying” leads just sitting on the side of the desk. I need to educate them on what these two week response times are doing to their ROI so they truly understand the impact and they won’t be so complacent next time. What would you say to them.
Posted by: Deborah | Jan 15, 2009 at 11:46 pm
Dear Reality Check,
What I would say to them, if I were you, depends on whether you want to keep your job or not. (Just kidding).
In reality (no pun intended) if I were you I would consider sending them a gently worded email suggesting that slow response may be negatively impacting our student registrations. I would include a reference to the research mentioned above and maybe (if you are willing to have them see your comments about it) a link to this blog post.
Unfortunately, others don’t always share your passion for getting the best results, especially if it changes the status quo or means more work for them. And sometimes, if your frustration level rises too high because of that, it means it is time to move one. (I know, easier said than done in this economy!)
Let me know how it all works out.
Sincerely,
Mac
Posted by: Mac McIntosh | Jan 16, 2009 at 1:18 pm
[...] on his Sales Lead Insights blog, Mac McIntosh reviews some research [...]
Posted by: B2B Web Strategy Blog - eMagine » Is your slow response alienating leads you spent good money to get? | Jan 1, 2010 at 10:08 am
[...] Sales Lead Insights: React Faster to Your Leads to Increase Your ROI [...]
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