Why Promptness in Lead Follow-Up Matters

Last week, we hosted a joint webinar featuring Conversica CMO, Carl Landers, and Inside Sales VP of Marketing Strategy, Gabe Larsen, on the importance of promptness in lead follow-up.

The Impact of Lead Follow-Up

Why does response time for lead follow-up matter? Well, it turns out that the longer companies take to respond to inbound inquiries, the more money they end up leaving on the table. In our two independently conducted studies, we uncovered a number of findings that support this theory.

In Conversica’s 2017 Sales Effectiveness Report, more than 800 U.S. companies were secret shopped by submitting product inquiries on their websites. Not only did most companies miss the mark of responding to lead within the 5-minute sweet spot, ⅓ of the companies didn’t respond at all. No phone call. No email. For businesses that rely on lead generation to fill their sales pipeline, it makes little economic sense to ignore customer inquiries.

Inside Sales accumulated more than three years of data to study how companies responded to leads. Their Best Practices for Lead Response Management Report revealed a correlation between the contact rate and qualification rate. The longer it took to respond to a lead, the less chance there was to establish contact with the person and qualify the lead.

It makes sense when you think about it – the moment when a lead submits an inquiry is the perfect time to follow up. The lead is on the phone or computer, researching your product and ready to be engaged. An hour later – over even a half hour later – and the person has already moved on to something else.

We’re living in a world today that values instant gratification. Want to watch a movie at home? Millennials most likely don’t even remember having to trek to Blockbuster to rent a movie to watch. Okay, I’m really dating myself with that last comment. The point is, people want information, fast.

The 2017 report, The Cost of Bad Leads by Integrate, asked B2B buyers to rate the most important attribute of a winning vendor. 72% said the most important reason was “timeliness of a vendor’s response to inquiries.”

Even though responding to leads in a timely manner is a challenge for most companies to do consistently, there are tools to automate key stages in the lead follow-up process that will enable your sales and marketing teams to work more efficiently and ensure that each lead receives personalized, relevant follow-up.

Check out the full webinar on “Promptness: How much revenue are you losing due to slow response time?” and see what your organization can do to optimize the lead follow-up process.