If by some serendipitous circumstance you were allowed to hang out at the InsideSales.com offices for day, you’d discover pretty quickly that we are passionate about the power of immediate lead response.
We help businesses get better sales intelligence, and effectively manage their sales and lead generation processes in a lot of ways. But we focus a lot of our efforts on immediate lead response for one simple reason:
It’s the #1 way to increase Web-generated leads’ contact and qualifying rates–and thus lead to more productive sales pipelines.
And the other reason we’re so zealous about it is that 65-70% of the business world frankly, well, sucks at it. (see our research with Dr. James Oldroyd, SKKU, Dreamforce ’08, Omniture Summit, and AA-ISP for proof).
In summary:
The aggregate data between the Dreamforce ’08, Dreamforce ’10, Omniture Summit, and AA-ISP Boston research studies shows that approximately 40 percent of all companies NEVER RESPOND A SINGLE TIME to a Web generated lead of any kind. Not “Follows up slowly and ineffectively.” Simply doesn’t do it at all.
Average response time for a first contact attempt OF ANY KIND (phone or email) for a Web-generated lead: 43 hours (when the MIT research shows […]
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 . . . .
I absolutely loved this recent post by Copyblogger. As someone who took piano lessons for over eight years, I’ve played my fair share of Bach minuets, and hearing about the sheer amount of effort he put into creating his music inspired me.
And I think there’s a lesson to be learned here that’s eminently applicable to sales:
“Researchers concluded that the rate of [musical composition] hits to misses was pretty constant between major and minor composers. The truly great composers produce more masterpieces than the others, mainly because they produced more work overall.”
Change “musical composition” to “prospects,” and “masterpieces” to “sales” and suddenly we’re on to something.
You want to know one of the secrets of the top sales people? The agents in the “20 percent” category of the “80/20 Rule of Sales” (i.e., “80 percent of all sales are generated by 20 percent of the reps”)?
I just finished a phone conversation with Trish Bertuzzi, the founder of The Bridge Group, one of the leading Inside Sales Consulting firms in the US.
The topic of our original MIT Study with Dr. James Oldroyd came up and the fact that many people have thrown around a lot of numbers since that research was released.
Trish asked a very poignant statement, “All the immediate response data is very important when a person is wanting you to contact them, but what about when they download a white paper, and probably don’t even want you to call them?”
Her question cuts right to the point.
What is more important, making immediate contact with somebody, or waiting and biding your time to engage them into a later opportunity in hopes of higher chances at a sale?
Let’s say somebody goes to your website, downloads a whitepaper, and you call them minutes or seconds later and they haven’t even had a chance to read it yet. How do they feel? Are they turned off or impressed with your immediate follow through?
Is it worth the dramatic increase in the odds of reaching them (100x) and the significant increase in setting an appointment (21x) for the potential chance of appearing too […]
