XANT Research Stuns 2007 Marketing Sherpa B2B Summit
San Francisco, CA— 17 October 2007— At the Marketing Sherpa B2B Demand Generation Summit in San Francisco, XANT CEO David R. Elkington presented ground-breaking new research this week on the question, “How long should you wait to respond to Web-generated leads?”
In conjunction with Dr. James Oldroyd, Sloan School of Management Fellow at MIT, Elkington’s keynote address highlighted that though the day and time leads are contacted can affect qualification and close rates, when it comes to Web-generated leads, immediate response is by far the most critical factor in both contacting and qualifying an inquiry. Data showed that contacting a lead in five minutes or less yields 21 times more qualifications than even waiting 30 minutes.
“This data is revolutionary in the scope of how businesses should manage their leads,” Elkington stated. “For a long time, lead qualifying had been run by smart sales managers, but a lot of initiatives are being done based on ‘gut feeling,’ rather than on hard data. This study makes significant strides in adding some real, hard data to the mix.”
Dr. Oldroyd stated, “XANT’s technology allowed us to gain some significant insight into how sales calling is actually done. Without the ability to link calls, dates and times, and outcomes, this type of research would not even have been possible. With tens of thousands of calls and associated call data available to us, we were able to identify some of the startling trends Dave shared with the Marketing Sherpa Summit attendees.”
“In the future,” Elkington added, “we’d like to take this and apply it to our clients, and to others who are interested in improving what they do as a sales team. This research is amazing because it opens up dozens of new avenues that most sales teams have never explored in how to manage their leads to produce higher sales.”
For example, Elkington said, many sales organizations have no real process for managing incoming Web leads, don’t measure the amount of time it takes them to respond to leads, and don’t have the tools to improve performance in these areas.
“I can’t give too much away, but we’re working on some additional research for the 2008 Omniture Summit in the spring that addresses these critical issues. We’re very interested to see, in light of Dr. Oldroyd’s research, just how well companies meet the best practices we discovered here.”
About XANT
XANT is the pioneer of lead response management and the leader in phone dialer software for inside sales professionals, offering a full suite of software tools available in salesforce.com or separately. XANT offers a full platform solution with online CRM, power dialing, lead nurturing, and lead management for companies who sell over the phone and on the web. XANT has over 400 clients in industries like insurance, education, financial, debt relief, marketing, and high tech.