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Why Lead Response Time Matters – and How You Can Improve Yours

August 23, 2016

3 MIN READ

If you are in the business of selling a product or service, leads are everything.

When someone submits a contact form or leaves a message for your company, you should be responding immediately–but are you?

InsideSales.com reported in 2012 that 40% of companies never responded to a submitted inquiry. The average time until a first call was made to a lead was 40 hours and 56 minutes–nearly 2 days.

Co119-Why Lead Response Time Matters-Aug16 With every minute that passes, your lead becomes colder and you lose the opportunity to have a meaningful conversation. The truth is that when a prospect contacts you, they’ve likely already done a great deal of research online. When they reach out, they are ready to talk–and likely ready to buy. If they can’t reach you, they’ll move on to your competitor. Or, they’ll interpret your delay in response as disinterest and won’t be as willing to hear what you have to say.

A Lead Response Management Study published by Dr. James Oldroyd found that “the odds of making a successful contact with a lead are 100 times greater when a contact attempt occurs within 5 minutes.” Is your sales team prepared to achieve a 5 minute lead response time? The following will be key:

Have a system in place to alert you to leads in real-time.

There are advanced tools available today to give us detailed information about our leads and the actions they are taking. For example, what if you could receive a phone call or text message the instant that a lead completes a contact form on your website? Instead of letting a voicemail o
r contact form sit unnoticed for a long period of time, you would be alerted in real-time.

Prepare relevant content in advance.

When you respond to a lead, it helps to have helpful resource information prepared and available that you can send to them directly. If you anticipate your prospect’s questions and concerns, you can develop relevant content in advance.

There’s one other option: Make the first contact.

You know your prospects will contact you when they’re ready to buy. You also know that before they do that, they’ll be doing their research–and this will involve visiting your website. Using analytics for your website, you can generate reports of your prospects’ behavior. When did a prospect last visit your website? What pages, or product listings, did he or she view? How much time did they spend perusing the site? This information is invaluable to you, as you can then reach out to a prospect at exactly the right time. Just as they may be preparing to contact you, you can reach out to them. You can meet your prospects where they are in their customer journey.

Are you struggling to improve your company’s lead response time? Company 119 can help you put a system in place to help provide digital sales support to your team. Give us a call today to learn more.