New Research Released at salesforce.com’s Dreamforce 2012 Shows Companies Responding Faster to Leads

SAN FRANCISCO – Sept. 20, 2012 – XANT, the leading cloud-based provider of sales automation and analytics for inside sales professionals today announced the results of the largest research study ever done on the response practices of companies to their own internet leads. The announcements were made initially to companies on the show floor at Dreamforce 2012, the industry leading trade show of salesforce.com.

Two months prior to the show, the XANT research team submitted a fictitious web lead that looks real enough to get past lead scoring algorithms of even the very best marketing automation companies (Marketo, Eloqua, and Act-On are all customers). The leads have a compelling identity, website, phone number, and email address that is a corporate domain (not Gmail or Hotmail account, for example).

Then the patent-pending technology tracks how fast companies respond by both email and phone call attempts, voice messages left, and emails sent. The system then pulls all of this information into a benchmark report for the individual company. All of these individual reports are available in .pdf format by contacting an XANT representative.

“The average response time dropped significantly this year for the first time in five years of doing this,” said Dave Elkington, CEO and Founder of XANT. “Companies are starting to realize that immediacy and persistency in responding to leads make a huge impact on the results that come from those leads. This improvement appears to coincide with the recent wide spread adoption in enterprise companies of inside sales teams and practices. We are excited that our publicity and educational efforts are finally paying off.”

The average response time prior to this massive study was 46 hours and 53 minutes across more than a dozen research studies in five years and over 10,000 companies studied. The average response attempts to reach a lead before giving up have been only 1.3 attempts. This year, companies are being far more persistent with an average attempts at 2.63, more than double previous research studies.

“The biggest issue is that only 27 percent of leads actually get contacted by sales teams.” explained Ken Krogue, President and co-Founder of XANT. “Imagine what a CEO or CMO would think if they knew that only a fourth of leads are getting spoken to, when with better techniques and technologies they could be speaking to 92 percent of leads. That is a 3.4x improvement in wringing value out of leads by just making sure they get contacted.”

The top 100 companies with their response times and response attempts are listed below:

*We added an additional listing in the Top 100 to replace our own XANT team; which responded in 17 seconds with 15 contact attempts.

To download a subset report of the Dreamforce 2012 ResponseAudit data, visit the XANT research page.

To learn more about ResponseAudit, access your own ResponseAudit, or request a one-time free lead response analysis, visit www.ResponseAudit.com or call sales rep at (866) 498-6434.

About XANT, Inc.

XANT delivers a high velocity sales platform enabling inside sales representatives to respond to Internet generated leads in five minutes or less. The need for this rapid response was identified in research originally conducted by XANT, in conjunction with Dr. James Oldroyd. The PowerDialer platform, designed for business-to-business and high-end business-to-consumer sales environments, has been the most popular dialer app on the salesforce.com AppExchange for five years. XANT enterprise customers include ADP, BMC Software, Dell, Gannett Local, Inc. magazine, Marketo, ON24, Re/Max Cornerstone, Groupon and Seagate. To learn more, visit: www.www.insidesales.com.