We just put out a press release about a ResponseAudit we did on the 57 vendors of LeadsCon East 2010.
As usual we started about a month ago submitting fictitious leads on their websites with real phone numbers and email addresses to see how fast they would respond to leads on their own site.
63.2% never responded.
The fastest was Speak2Leads at 4 minutes 23 seconds, they also made 9 different attempts before they gave up. They are actually in the business of responding their leads quickly. I met Sammy Jones, their CEO, and he was pretty pleased with his system and their staff.
The average vendor who did respond sent 2 emails and made 2 phone calls (better than previous audits.)
The average response time was 56 hours, 5 minutes, and 26 seconds (the worst of previous audits.)
Previous audits:
Omniture Summit 2007 – 54 hours 5 minutes
Dreamforce 2008 – 44 hours 31 minutes
Dreamforce 2009 – 41 hours 7 minutes
Here are the top five companies who responded:
Rank
LeadsCon East 2010 Exhibitors
Time (hh: mm:ss)
1st
Speak2Leads
0:4:23
2nd
TellUs Leads
0:15:33
3rd
BMI Elite
1:51:20
4th
TARGUSinfo
24:50:56
5th
SnagAJob
26:53:43
I know it is a really small audit with only 57 websites audited (Dreamforce 2009 had 2875 audits performed), but it was disappointing that the very industry that generates the leads is the […]
I’m going to share a little secret about a mistake we made about a year and a half ago when we redesigned our Web site.
On the surface it was a beautiful redesign. Oh, so very beautiful.
Slick, shiny, “the new hotness,” slick, and slick (did I mention it was slick?).
And it killed our Web site conversion rate.
After two months of awful performance, we finally bit the bullet and furiously rolled the old site back out, and started from scratch . . . .
As a C-level manager for my company, I get pitched on new technology products a lot.
Now obviously I’m a big believer in the power of technology to transform inside sales and marketing processes. When I started 20 years ago as a sales manager at then Franklin Quest (now Franklin-Covey), the coolest technology on the market at the time was a fax machine.
Now we have CRM, dialers, sales force automation, automated email and drip campaigns, iPhones in every pocket, streaming video, the Web, SEO and PPC, blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn . . . .
But the fact is, the longer I stay in this business, the more I realize that in many cases, when a company uses technology to help them solve a problem, the most valuable part of the process isn’t the technology—it’s the reexamination of the process itself.
Sure, new technologies can make dazzling improvements to productivity, but it’s the insight gained by really focusing on the problem that often becomes the most valuable asset of change.
Sales consultant Dick Lee has a fabulous article that partially addresses this issue, stating that throwing technology at a problem without redesigning the process and attitudes surrounding its use is […]
I don’t normally like to do shameless self-promotion of my company on this blog, but Steve Watts, one of my chief marketing gurus, posted something interesting today on the InsideSales Insider. He brings up an article from CopyBlogger discussing Chet Holmes’ book, The The Ultimate Sales Machine.
Having read Chet Holmes’ books for a number of years now, I was interested to re-read the principle of the “Desperate Three Percent,” and immediately associated it with “The 15 Time Wasters of Marketing and InsideSales.”
The “Desperate Three Percent” are the three percent of buyers—in any product category or market—that are specifically ready to buy.
But as CopyBlogger points out, there’s a whole bunch of people not ready to buy who can be nudged into buying with the right approach and strategy.
And one of the ways you can start “nudging” is to stop marketing broad and shallow.
Here’s what I mean.
In “The 15 Time Wasters,” I talk about the fact that when you market yourself broadly, it becomes too hard to differentiate yourself in all of your target markets. It’s better to serve one market fantastically well than to serve 10 or 12 markets “mediocre-ly.”
The solution is instead of trying to reach 15 different markets and […]
Inside Sales – Getting More Than the “Desperate Three Percent”
20 July 2010 — Steve Watts
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CopyBlogger recently posted an incisive blog about The Desperate Three Percent.
The core concept is relatively simple. Taking data from Chet Holmes’ The Ultimate Sales Machine, author Sonia Simone states that the reason SEO and PPC marketing continues to ratchet up in competitiveness is because we’re all fighting for the “The Desperate Three Percent”—the top-tier potential clients that are ready to buy now.
I don’t want to summarize the entire article (just go read it instead), but the crux of Sonia’s argument is that the vast majority of any business’s future sales are more than likely people not in the Desperate Three . . . .
Sales 2.0 – Psychology, Self-Selection, and “Getting There First”
19 July 2010 — Steve Watts
2 Comments
I’ve read, heard, and studied lots of talk about the psychology of sales and marketing.
What makes buyers tick.
How decisions are made.
Prestige, Pleasure, Pain (relief), Profits, or Preservation.
But I was reminded today of another key psychological aspect of sales:
Get there first.
“Getting there first” is a simple rule that Paul Castain’s Sales Playbook talks about.
Want to be a budding (sales) rock star?
Get there first.
When it comes to lead management and generating new sales, showing up last is often worse than not showing up at all . . . .
Inside Sales – Lead Management, CRM, and Knowing Something About “Something”
15 July 2010 — Steve Watts
3 Comments
Today Seth Godin stated that one of the revolutions of human economy was when man first discovered that knowing something about “something” was just as valuable, if not more valuable than the “something” itself.
Consider:
How much more valuable is a library when it has a card catalog, digital or otherwise?
Without the card catalog, the usefulness and utility of the library itself decreases by a factor of 50, 100, 1000 or more. How hard would it be to find something in even an average-sized municipal library without an efficient, easy-to-follow system of organization?
Now think about the Library of Congress.
So what does this mean for sales and marketing?
It’s simple:
How much more valuable does your sales team become when you have a “card catalog” of what they do . . . .
Inside Sales: Two Hidden Metrics of Prospecting That are Hurting Your Sales
14 July 2010 — Steve Watts
2 Comments
Most of the common marketing and sales and metrics—click-throughs, impressions, sales cycle, revenue per deal—don’t really need an explanation. But there are two metrics where a lot of companies we’ve worked with have holes in their sales process.
How soon after a new Web lead comes in does a sales rep make the first contact attempt, and how long after it came in did they actually make contact? Every single piece of data we’ve ever researched shows that for Web-generated leads, immediate response is crucial . . . .
Don’t Toss Your Leads and Prospects Out the CRM / Service Back Door
13 July 2010 — Steve Watts
2 Comments
Take a look at this collection of “No Longer With Us” retail stores. I don’t know about you, but I found it highly fascinating.
It’s amazing how many previously successful, nationally-recognized store brands reside on this list.
I bring this up because in a time and age long past, I worked as a humble retail clerk for a major electronics and computer “Big Box” company that is now long gone. I could tell you which one, but there’s really no point; 90 percent of the electronics “Big Box” stores from the ’90s and early 2000s went the way of Britney Spears’ relevance to the music industry for exactly the same reasons.
Each of the now-defunct, “major player” Big Box Electronic stores—Circuit City, CompUSA, Computer City, Incredible Universe, Ultimate Electronic—died because they failed to recognize the reality . . . .
5 Things the iPhone G4 Antenna Fiasco Can Teach Us About Customer Service and PR
13 July 2010 — Ken Krogue
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A few thoughts about Apple’s recent PR problems:
When your client has a real problem, simply telling them “You’re holding it wrong” isn’t a real solution.
Even if it’s the truth, clients and prospects rarely want to hear that their process is to blame. Even if it is actually part of the problem, be extremely careful and proceed with caution. A lot of people at the client’s organization have spent a lot of time and energy putting the current process in place.
As dense as the general public (read: your clients) often seem to be, they can tell when you’re pushing spin, and when you’re really trying to solve their problem.
You think that the G4′s buyers, many of whom had owned earlier iPhone iterations, were excited to hear that their brand new hardware had an engineering defect, only to have Apple saying to the press, “It’s no big deal, just buy our slip case for it!”? Ignoring a problem doesn’t make it go away, it just comes across as arrogance.
Be extremely cautious about what you treat as a “random outlier,” and what you treat as a real problem.
Bad news never travels well. […]
