What's the success rate of a lead if answered in 5 minutes compared to 30 minutes?

Leads and the Buyer's mindset

In this internet/digital age our customers communicate with us and visa versa via websites, phone or email. We've all experienced anger and frustration when we write to a company and never get an acknowledgement or response or its a few days after. When you get a quick response you are really surprised, because this is not the norm but should it be? Read the interesting facts below to answer this...

The Problem: Slow Lead Response Time

You’d be surprised to learn that In general, leads receive staggeringly slow responses from many sales teams. Consider this: a lead response study of 2,241 US companies found that:

The average first response time of companies to their leads was 42 hours

• Only 37% of companies responded to their leads within an hour
• 16% of companies responded within one to 24 hours
• 24% of companies took more than 24 hours
• 23% of the companies never responded at all

This is both a sobering statistic of businesses failing to make lead response a priority, and also a brilliant opportunity for responsive brokers who are willing to engage with leads before their competition does.

42 Hours

- the average first response time of companies that responded within a month.

So it takes a day or two for sales to follow up with leads, why is this a problem?

In short, it’s a problem because of the quality of a lead degrades over time. A good lead today can become a bad lead three days, so there’s a short amount of time to respond before leads become “cold.”

The Odds - when a lead is submitted...

• within 5 minutes - making successful contact is 100 times greater than compared to contacting the lead 30 minutes after.
• similarly, the odds of the lead entering the sales process, or becoming qualified, are 21 times greater when contacted within 5 minutes versus 30 minutes after the lead was submitted.

The Internet Has Changed Your Buyer’s Behaviour

People consume content differently now. With millions of webpages’ worth of information, your buyers, can spend countless hours online performing research on their future purchase prior to ever contacting sales.

According to a white paper authored by Google and CEB:

“Customers reported to being nearly 60% through the sales process before engaging a sales rep, regardless of price point. More accurately, 57% of the sales process just disappeared.”

Businesses need to meet their buyers where they’re at in the sales process. If your buyer has performed significant research on the boat before contacting you, they are ready to have a more informed conversation, so do check their view log. More accurately, if your buyer is already 60% through the research process, they are warmed up, educated and ready to talk — now.

35-55%

- of sales go to the company that responds first.

In fact, research from InsideSales.com shows that 35–50% of sales go to the company that responds first. And this makes sense. Think about it. Buyers contact you when they are ready to talk; think about the mindset they must be in when they fill out a contact form. It’s likely they’ve been doing a fair amount of research and when they fill out that contact form they are actively thinking about buying or selling a boat.

That exact moment would be best the best time to talk to them because they are “in it.” But if the lead must wait for your sales team’s preferred timetable, on average that means the lead will be engaged a day and a half from now, when they are likely working on another task and are thus being interrupted.

Measuring Your Sales Response Time: 

A basic question all businesses should ask themselves is this: “What is my average lead response time?”

Most business cannot rattle off their average lead response time because they simply do not know. And in the immortal words of Peter Drucker: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

And if you can’t manage it, how on earth will you ever be able to improve it? Improving a process requires having baseline data and then setting goals around improving it.

1.3

- number of calls made on average for a new lead before giving up.

• Do you call all your contact request forms.
• Do you call or email?
• Within what time frame do you usually respond?
• What measures can you take so that you answer leads in a shorter time frame?
• Are you persistent in how you follow-up?
• Or do you only follow up once or twice and then give up?
• Or do you follow up until you get a response?

If you have a baseline, then you are empowered to have a discussion about it and, more importantly, improve it.

The Opportunity

Imagine you’ve taken a potential buyer on a couple of viewings for the same boat, and your competition calls them back at this time, the buyer is already more invested in the buying process with you — and the competitor is simply too late.

This presents an opportunity for any company who is willing to commit a quick and comprehensive lead follow-up strategy. This is an area of your business you can optimize to quickly outperform the competition. If the average response time of your competitors is 42 hours, and you call everyone back within the first 2 hours, and call back multiple times in the week following, you will be the first company to start a relationship with the buyer. If you are the first company to start a relationship, you have the opportunity to move that buyer further down the buying process before your competition even contacts them.

Making changes within your company’s lead response strategy can be a daunting task — one that requires buy-in from your entire sales team and marketing department. Even if you’re not yet sold on making these necessary changes, at least consider trying them out. Implementing a swift lead response strategy for a week, a month — maybe even an entire quarter — can’t hurt. And at the end of the day, attempting to be MORE responsive to your customers is an overall best practice every company should employ.

I'll leave you with these questions...

A customer has been looking at various boats on Boatshed, they’ve done lots of research and you can see that they have looked several times at a particular boat or very similar boats. They contact you via Phone, email or the website.

DO YOU...

• Call immediately
• Email immediately
• Within 3 hours
• 12 - 24 hours
• 24 - 72 hours
• Send a message saying you’ll contact them within 24 - 48 hours?
• ignore as looks like Spam, wait for them to come back to you again, then respond?