The Sales Insider

I was just asked again a question I get a lot. This comes from my friend Gail Milton, of The Bridge Group, Inc., “Do you have metric for the increase in productivity gained by using your power dialer?”

Here is my response:

Gail,

Thank you for thinking of us. As you know, we love research and I’m happy to share what we have:

1- The average inside sales rep makes 38 calls a day (your data I believe,) we help reps make 200-250 calls a day. Our internal lead gen reps make as much as 350 calls a day but that is all they do. We call them ‘Specialists’. Generalist reps who generate and close their own leads typically use us in ‘spurts’ where they will use the dialer for 1-2 days to book the following week with appointments or they use us for just a few hours a day. Their optimal rate seems about 130-170 calls a day in this mode, but they don’t do it day in and day out.

2- The average company responds to a web lead in 46 hours, we can help them respond in 9 to 30 seconds (depending on if there is enough reps to take leads.) This increases the average contact rate by about 700%.

3- The average sales rep only makes 1.2 calls to respond to a web lead, and only contacts 27% of leads. The PowerDialer can be set to drive as many repeat attempts as needed. We recommend 8-12 attempts before setting it to an ongoing lead nurturing model. We contact between 87% and 92% of all contactable leads. That is a 3.5x increase in leads actually contacted. Sort of common sense, eh?

4- Our Local Presence technology that lets people call from a local line in every local market increases call answer rates by 80 to 400% depending on B2B/B2C and industry.

What does all that mean? We don’t like to overpromise. In the real world we see increases of between 70% and 250% in overall net sales results. We have actually tripled overall net results even against traditional predictive dialers in as few as three weeks. Other times, in more ‘telemarketing’ environments, the old predictive dialers will beat us.

Our CRM solution by itself without all the ‘power tools’ is between 15% and 30% in increased results over not having one at all.

Does that help?

Ken

Inc. Magazine has just become another major publication to note the importance of our research on responding immediately and persistently to inbound leads.

Eric Markowitz is a well known writer for Inc., Vanity Fair, and the Washington Square News and summarizes the research of Dr. James B Oldroyd, a former professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and our own CEO, Dave Elkington. His Inc. article on July 6th, 2011, is entitled “How to Best Harness Inbound Marketing Leads.”

Inc. Magazine links to the original downloadable MIT study here. It was originally titled “How Much Time Do You Have Before Web-Generated Leads Go Cold?” and has been quoted now by hundreds of blogs, speakers, and publications around the world.

Original MIT Study by Dr. James Oldroyd & Dave Elkington

Every now and again you discover something that changes the world. This did for us.

At last count we have had nearly 70,000 companies access and / or download this landmark study. A more complete summary of all the research started originally by Dr. James Oldroyd and InsideSales.com is readily available at www.LeadResponseManagement.org.

I travel to several different trade shows, summits, and conferences a year and it is still fun to have someone quote our study back to us.

Has it changed anything? Only for those who are taking advantage of the windfall of immediate and persistent response. We have “secret shopped” nearly 5000 companies over the last four years to find how fast they response and how many times they persist before they give up.

The bar is still very low.

The average company still takes 46 hours to attempt their first callback, and the average sales rep only makes 1.2 call back attempts before they give up and move on. Our continued research shows that only 27% of leads ever get called.

With our technology and the awareness of these principles of immediacy and persistency, we have been able to keep our contacted rate between 85 and 92% for over three years. Our customers who follow our lead also receive this immediate bonus of a 2.5x increase in results based on the most common sense principle, “just call them back, and do it quickly.”

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