Ken Krogue

I bumped into this post on The New Sales Economy, and thought it was a worthwhile read on inside sales best practices (thanks to Trish Bertuzzi for the link).

Using The Bridge Group’s data, author Chad Levitt asks nine highly relevant, incisive questions about the current state of professional inside sales.

I was particularly interested in one of the questions—”Is there a disconnect between sales management and front line sales reps?”—because in my experience, even the best organizations occasionally have holes, or disconnects in their sales process.

For example, when we did our 2008 Lead Response Management Study, we were shocked to discover that 45 percent of the top 500 companies in terms of Web marketing budgets didn’t even respond a single time to a Web-generated lead.

So why do disconnects like this happen?

Most of the time the root causes are very simple:

• Organizations simply don’t understand the value of the action they’re not taking (e.g., immediate response to Web inquiries = dramatic increase in qualified leads).
• There’s no incentive for someone in the organization to monitor the activity (i.e., because no one understands the value, there’s no expectation of accountability).
• The process they have in place is too inefficient to get the expected benefit (lack of automation, inability to get information to the parties fast enough).
• Changing the process seems like it “takes away” from “more important” activities (i.e., “We need our sales reps and managers selling, not managing leads”).

The bottom line becomes massive disconnect, sales reps not hitting quota, and managers griping about sales performance.

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.

Lead Response Management is the process of responding to leads at the optimal time to achieve the highest contact and qualification rates.

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.