If your average contact time is over five minutes, you aren’t getting the most out of your lead generation efforts.
Commonly known as “speed to lead,” the time it takes your salespeople to contact new leads can make or break you. As more marketing budgets favor online spending, many companies are not seeing the ROI they need from their web leads because their response rates are lacking.
Lacking brevity, that is.
The issue of lead contact immediacy is discussed in InsideSales.com’s Annual 2014 Lead Response Report, beginning with the 2007 findings of Dr. James Oldroyd’s Lead Response Management Study, which states that the odds of making a successful contact with a lead are 100 times greater when the attempt occurs within 5 minutes of lead capture, compared to 30 minutes after the lead was submitted.
In addition, the odds of the lead becoming qualified by the sales team are 21 times greater when contacted within 5 minutes versus 30 minutes after the lead capture.¹
The study’s conclusion? “Companies need to respond more quickly and more persistently to web leads.”¹
What can you do to increase your speed to lead?
- Lead Management
- Persistency of Response¹
- Marketing Automation
1. Lead Management
Investing in a quality lead management tool is crucial to compete in today’s lead generation landscape. Depending on how aggressive and crowded your vertical is, you may need top-of-the-line technology in order to simply compete. Do you need Salesforce integrated with Marketo? Look at your needs as an organization and find a product that fills the gaps. Lead qualification, lead routing, CRM, analytics… make sure you have the tools you need to be successful. (Watch for our upcoming post on essential lead management tools.)
2. Persistency of Response
We mean persistency as in “multiple attempts to contact.” We have included it here due to the 47% of test leads in InsideSales.com’s 2014 research that did not receive a response. Not a single one. Another 24% received only one response.¹ That’s 71% of the almost-10,000 test lead submissions that horrifyingly failed in persistency. Maybe I should have listed this one first: call your leads. All of them. More than once. Preferably, many times.
3. Marketing Automation
Multiply the lead response process by implementing marketing automation technology. Products like Marketo and Hubspot allow salespeople to be notified about pre-defined web activities, which then allows them to reach out to leads within five minutes of each online engagement, not just lead form fills — increasing the likelihood of contacting the leads. Why have a single chance at speed to lead when you could have multiple? Marketing automation tools give you the opportunity to reach out to a prospect when they are thinking about your product — at their computer and near their phone.
In addition, developing a nurture program — or even better: custom nurture programs— will help keep your leads warm and/or progress them through the buying cycle while you improve your speed to lead.
In summary, the formula is: get the tools you need in order to route your leads quickly and accurately, call your leads — more than once, and use marketing automation to increase your opportunities for contact potential. Your ROI is waiting for you.
¹ InsideSales.com,Annual 2014 Lead Response Report, 2014.
