Ken Krogue

Inc. Magazine has just become another major publication to note the importance of our research on responding immediately and persistently to inbound leads.

Eric Markowitz is a well known writer for Inc., Vanity Fair, and the Washington Square News and summarizes the research of Dr. James B Oldroyd, a former professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and our own CEO, Dave Elkington. His Inc. article on July 6th, 2011, is entitled “How to Best Harness Inbound Marketing Leads.”

Inc. Magazine links to the original downloadable MIT study here. It was originally titled “How Much Time Do You Have Before Web-Generated Leads Go Cold?” and has been quoted now by hundreds of blogs, speakers, and publications around the world.

Original MIT Study by Dr. James Oldroyd & Dave Elkington

Every now and again you discover something that changes the world. This did for us.

At last count we have had nearly 70,000 companies access and / or download this landmark study. A more complete summary of all the research started originally by Dr. James Oldroyd and InsideSales.com is readily available at www.LeadResponseManagement.org.

I travel to several different trade shows, summits, and conferences a year and it is still fun to have someone quote our study back to us.

Has it changed anything? Only for those who are taking advantage of the windfall of immediate and persistent response. We have “secret shopped” nearly 5000 companies over the last four years to find how fast they response and how many times they persist before they give up.

The bar is still very low.

The average company still takes 46 hours to attempt their first callback, and the average sales rep only makes 1.2 call back attempts before they give up and move on. Our continued research shows that only 27% of leads ever get called.

With our technology and the awareness of these principles of immediacy and persistency, we have been able to keep our contacted rate between 85 and 92% for over three years. Our customers who follow our lead also receive this immediate bonus of a 2.5x increase in results based on the most common sense principle, “just call them back, and do it quickly.”

Top 20 Articles on www.KenKrogue.com (with total views)

1. What is Inside Sales? Our Definition of Inside Sales | Ken Krogue – 16,115 Views
2. Inside Sales Best Practices - 1,623 Views
3. Inside Sales Tips by Ken Krogue - 1.026 Views
4. KPI – Key Performance Indicators – 867 Views
5. Inside Sales versus Outside Sales – 542 Views
6. Is Leaving a Voicemail Worthwhile? – 456 Views
7. 6 Reasons Salesforce Users Need Hosted Dialer Technology - 382 Views
8. Behind the Cloud – Ken’s Notes – 310 Views
9. Inside Sales Tips – No Vacations Last Week of the Month – 298 Views
10. Funny Inside Sales Videos – 290 Views
11. Inside Sales Tips – Skip to the Beep – 273 Views
12. Demand Generation Tactics and Strategy – 258 Views
13. Inside Sales Tips – Interest is The Counterfeit of Need – 252 Views
14. Inside Sales is Top Method of Lead Generation – 231 Views
15. Inside Sales Training – 214 Views
16. Inside Sales Tips – How LinkedIn Gives you 3 Free SEO Backlinks - 206 Views
17. Inside Sales Tips – Specialize – 174 Views
18. Marketing B2B 4 Quick Email Tips – 168 Views
19. Leadscon East Vendors Need to Drink their Own Medicine - 137 Views
20. What is Lead Response Management – 137 Views

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.