All of us have heard the complaints about lead generation and felt the pain of less than hoped for sales.
“The old methods don’t work” … “Buyers are jaded” … “Sales teams need to work harder”.
But even when your marketing is working and leads are incoming how many businesses act as quickly as they need to to convert leads into qualified prospects?
You may be surprised to know just how challenging it is to do this. Act quick enough.
According to Inside Sales, “the odds of making a successful contact with a lead are 100 times greater when a contact attempt occurs within 5 minutes, compared to 30 minutes after the lead was submitted.
5 minutes!
Post contact, the odds of the lead entering the sales process, or becoming qualified, are 21 times greater when contacted within 5 minutes versus 30 minutes after the lead was submitted.”
So stop for a moment and consider how your business is performing?
What is the norm? Harvard Business Review (HBR) set out to measure how long on average it took for companies to respond to a web-generated lead. Auditing more than 2,200 businesses, they found an average first response time of 42 hours for businesses that responded to a lead within 30 days. Surprisingly, 23% of companies never even responded.
In a 2021 Inside Sales Lead Response Research study, they reviewed over 55 million sales activities on 5.7 million inbound leads at 400+ companies and found that 57.1% of first call attempts occur after more than a week.
Yet, after just 5 minutes, conversion rates drop by 8X.
Only 0.1% of inbound leads were actually engaged in under 5 minutes!
So, when considering marketing spend, lead generation, revenue performance and more it is critical to look very closely at the time it is taking for leads to be passed through to your sales team and ensure that they have the tools to immediately reach out to these potential customers.
If you want some help with this feel free to reach out!
