As usual we started about a month ago submitting fictitious leads on their websites with real phone numbers and email addresses to see how fast they would respond to leads on their own site.

63.2% never responded.

The fastest was Speak2Leads at 4 minutes 23 seconds, they also made 9 different attempts before they gave up. They are actually in the business of responding their leads quickly. I met Sammy Jones, their CEO, and he was pretty pleased with his system and their staff.

The average vendor who did respond sent 2 emails and made 2 phone calls (better than previous audits.)

The average response time was 56 hours, 5 minutes, and 26 seconds (the worst of previous audits.)

Previous audits:

Omniture Summit 2007 – 54 hours 5 minutes
Dreamforce 2008 – 44 hours 31 minutes
Dreamforce 2009 – 41 hours 7 minutes 

Here are the top five companies who responded:

I know it is a really small audit with only 57 websites audited (Dreamforce 2009 had 2875 audits performed), but it was disappointing that the very industry that generates the leads is the slowest so far to respond to them.

The good new is that there is lots of room for improvement.

Gerhard Gschwandtner - Founder of Selling Power Magazine

A friend of mine, Gerhard Gschwandtner, the founder and owner of Selling Power Magazine, just took some time and wrote a post on his blog about when is the best time to call back on leads. 

The post he wrote came from our landmark research study conducted with Dr. James Oldroyd of MIT that was originally presented in October of 2007 at the MarketingSherpa B2B Demand Summit 2007 in both Boston and San Francisco.  This study was the genesis for the new industry called Lead Response Management; a subset of Lead Management that focuses on responding immediately, continually, consistently, and optimally to increase contact and qualification rates of web-based leads.  The interesting information involves the incredible changes in your ability to reach people by calling on the best day of the week, time of the day and most importantly, calling back immediately; as in 5 minutes!

BEST DAY OF WEEK TO CALL

To quickly summarize Dr. Oldroyds research: Tuesday is the worst day to call, while Thursday is best.  In fact, if you call on Thursday you have a 49.7 percent higher chance of reaching a prospect than on Thursday.  Monday and Friday are almost as bad, but Wednesday is nearly as good as Thursday.

BEST TIME OF DAY TO CALL

The next stage of the research was focussing on the best time of day to call.  Early in the morning (8am to 10am) and late in the day (4pm to 6pm) are much more productive than calling between 10am and 4pm.  By calling at 8am your chances of making contact go up 164% versus calling at the worst time of the day, which is from 1pm to 2pm.

IMMEDIATE RESPONSE HAS THE BIGGEST IMPACT

Day of week and time of day make noticeable impact on contact rates, but calling back within 5 minutes versus even waiting 30 minutes increased the odds of making contact BY 100 TIMES.  And possibly more important, the ability to qualify or set an appointment also went up BY 21 TIMES.

In summary… Call back NOW!

This information has changed the lead response management strategies that companies have put in place.  It has become clear that in an internet age people want information now; they don’t want to wait.  Their attention spans are shortening, so you had better reach out to them immediately.  Don’t let a lead sit in an inbox for even half an hour; that is a big problem when most sales reps don’t even attempt a first phone call for 24 to 48 hours and only make 4-5 attempts to reach a lead.  If the average contact rate is 10% (which our research among 450 clients shows it to be) then that means only 45% of all leads ever get contacted!

When we learned this internally at InsideSales.com, we immediately designed our dialer and lead management CRM technology to capture the lead on a website, look up which rep should get the lead, dial the rep, get them on the phone, and start dialing the lead… all in 8-10 seconds on average.  We couldn’t get our own reps to be able to do it by hand fast enough by just asking them (or even mandating) to call the leads back fast enough.  The best they could seem to do was about 30 minutes, which missed the whole window of opportunity.  So our phone dialer software was the key ingredient that launched a new industry that is getting the likes of Gerhard and Selling Power Magazine, the premier media provider for solutions for sales management to recognize it as a key ingredient in the Sales 2.0 initiative.

Recent research shows that quite often the ‘optimal’ time is immediately.  But many companies spend thousands of dollars monthly to generate clicks to their website.  These same companies invest tens of thousands in building a website to attract visitors.  They use analytical tools to analyze how to convert these visitors to leads.  Then they send the lead to the sales department.

The lead often sits 24 to 48 hours before it gets called back.

A recent survey done by Dr. James Oldroyd while at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University shows that the majority of companies expect 4 to 5 attempts are made by their reps to contact a lead.

Why spend thousands of dollars on generating clicks, high conversion websites, and powerful analytics if you are going to let your leads sit for 2 days and only contact roughly half of your potential prospects?

The question is almost insulting, yet that is what most organizations do.

More research by Dr. Oldroyd shows that calling back a lead quickly has dramatic effects on actually making contact with and qualifying that lead.  His research says that if you can call back a lead within 5 minutes, you are 10 times more likely to contact a lead, and 6 times more likely to qualify a lead than by waiting even 30 minutes.

And if you wait more than 20 hours to contact a lead, you actually hurt your chances of contacting and qualifying your lead with each successive attempt to make contact.

Technology now exists that can trigger callback attempts within seconds.

Technology can also schedule callback attempts at different times of the day and different days of the week to boost contact rates above 85%.  Also, these solutions can automatically market to leads and continue to generate prospects every 3-4 weeks for 2 years or more.

We at InsideSales.com coined the phrase ‘Lead Response Management’.  To us it means wringing every last ounce of value out of leads by responding quickly and consistently.  Interestingly, sometimes responding at just the right time is more important that responding quickly.

Lead Capture is the process of getting someone who clicks to your site to fill out a form. 

The look, feel, and length of the form are technically part of the web design; but what does the form do?  Does it put the data into a table, send an email, or populate directly into some form of database?  The form is the transition point between lead conversion and lead management.  Most companies still have to manually type in a lead from the website into tracking systems that range from simple spreadsheets to a customer relationship management (CRM) database.  Ideally a lead is able to be captured and redirected to the appropriate department for response in real time.

Lead Routing is the process of getting the lead into the hands of the most appropriate salesperson.

Speed is critical.  We are finding that most leads sit somewhere between forty-eight and seventy-two hours before the salesperson actually attempts the first live contact.  Much of the slowdown in routing leads is because there isn’t a pre-defined process to decide which salesperson get’s to work the lead.  Many sales managers still dole out leads by hand after considering who is best suited to work each of the leads. 

Most lead routing is still defined by geography.  In a day when the Internet is removing geographical boundaries and there are many effective tools to allow a full sales process to be done remotely, this is a practice that should be reconsidered.  If the sale is followed up through an inside sales or remote sales strategy, then geography should have very little bearing on the decision.  If outside sales or face-to-face sales strategies are required because of product constraints, then geography may have a strong bearing on lead routing.

If fairness is important to management, then routing by a ‘round-robin’ process that systematically and evenly distributes leads is also available.  This often creates a more desirable final result.

Better alternatives to geographical and round-robin routing are routing by performance, skills, or specific vertical market knowledge.  Both the company and the salesperson do better when leads are matched up to the best qualified salesperson.

Lead Source Tracking is an extension of the web analytics process.  The end-goal is the flow of source data from the original search engine, keyword or partner source all the way through the sales process.  This can only be done if all of the associated systems are at least partially integrated with each other or if one system is able to do it all. 

Ideally you’d be able to track closed and paid revenue back to the level of original lead sources.

Lead Response Management is a process to immediately and systematically push leads into the hands of qualified salespeople so they may contact and qualify the leads.

This is the portion of the solution that is most often neglected.  Our experience and studies show leads generally sit for an average of forty-eight hours and get called between four and five times with a ‘contacted’ ratio of only fifty-five percent.

This is the most common hand-off point between the marketers that drive the web leads and the salespeople who are in charge of responding to them.  The baton gets dropped. 

Who drives the process?  Who owns it? 

The marketers want data on how fast and how many times the salespeople respond until they make contact.  They often get frustrated because they lose control of the lead at this point. 

The sales department wants a lot of quality leads quickly.  There is a fine balance between quality and quantity.  They don’t want junk or ‘tire-kickers’ that waste their time, yet they want a continuous flow of qualify leads. 

The salespeople often don’t realize that it is their sales manager and the routing system that often slows down the process.  Sale departments get frustrated because there aren’t enough quality leads.

One elegant solution is to embed a web-form onto a website that captures the lead and pushes it real time into a database.  It then quickly routes the lead to the best suited sales rep, a telephony tool immediately gets the rep on the phone and automatically calls and connects the lead to the rep.

Why dial them immediately?

1-    Because this is the only time you know where they are.

2-    They are surfing the internet because they want help now.

While it does this, the system also moves all of the lead source data into the database for further analytics, tracks the number of calls, tracks the call time, and drives a lead response process to ensure quality control on each and every call.

Another solution is to have someone else do it for you.  LeadQual.com is the first company of it’s kind, an outbound call center that specializes in immediate lead response on behalf of it’s clients. 

Lead Qualification is the process of contacting a lead and turning it into a prospect based on the lead’s interest level.   A prospect enters the Sales Process and is further qualified for need, urgency, budget, and decision making capability.  The skill sets for this process are usually different than lead generation, in fact, they are often the reverse.  Qualifying for interest often casts a wide bucket, qualifying for need casts a small one.  Interest is often the counterfeit of need.

This process is usually done by the Sales Department, but two big problems make it difficult:

1-    Leads lose Interest very quickly.

2-    People are difficult to make contact with. 

Jacques Werth, from High Probability Selling, quotes the average Business to Business Contact Ratio is 14%.  That means you need to make 7 dials to get 1 contact. 

Our experience shows this varies dramatically by industry. Our average is closer to 10% when trying to make contact for the first time.

What is the solution to increasing your contact ratio? 

It goes back to Lead Response Management: Acquire a system that immediately and systematically pushes the leads to the best qualified salespeople, a system that also allows the salespeople to immediately and frequently respond to leads and turn them into prospects.  Again, this simple but overlooked approach can boost net results by 20 to 200%.

Jacques Werth, the author of High Probability Selling, quotes a 14% contact ratio in a business-to-business environment. Our studies show B2B prospecting contact ratios hovering around 10% across most industries. However, our studies also show that if a sales rep attempts to contact a lead 4 to 6 times, he or she reaches a lead contacted ratio of 55%. Such low actual contact ratios tell us one thing: most sales reps are giving up too early! 

We also found that most sales reps make follow-up calls at roughly the same time each day. This seems counterintuitive: if a lead is unavailable in the morning, continuing to call them each morning for five days will waste time and yield little result.

A recent study we did in conjunction with FranklinCovey and published by MarketingSherpa yielded some very interesting data about what time of day is most productive to call leads back.  See MarketingSherpa Article

A dialer can help solve these problems, particularly one that can try calling a number at different times of the day and on different days of the week in order to ‘wring dry’ a leads’ potential value. Some of our clienets make twenty to fifty attempts on each lead, calling mornings, afternoons, and evenings. Our internal staff and many of our clients contact between 80% and 90% of all contactable leads.

Best Practice: Track every dial and every contact. Separate your contactable leads from those without viable contact information. Track how many attempts your sales reps make to contact leads and the actual percentage of contacted leads for 30 days. Once you form a baseline, begin increasing contact attempts to increase your contact ratio up over 80%.

Laura Ramos, of Forrester Research, studied how effectively companies respond to their leads and wrote an article entitled “How Mature is B2B Lead Management?” (November 2006). In her study, only 10% of sales departments respond to leads within 24 hours and 41% respond to leads in one to three days. Nearly half of the sales departments she studied had yet to standardize how to route and respond to leads within the organization.

Hot leads cool off quickly. Our best clients know their key action is to call them back immediately. Response time should be measured in seconds and minutes, not hours and days.

WAIT!  Our latest research is starting to show that with some lead offers it is actually better to wait a specific period of time before you call back.  We show the results can vary significantly.

Best Practice: Respond immediately to leads that are requesting demonstrations, pricing, or have immediate questions.  Other forms of lead offers should be tested to find the optimal time to respond for the highest conversion and qualification ratios.  Automate lead qualification and routing to eliminate delays in entering your lead information into your system and getting them to the right sales rep.