Imagine you lose your cell phone. All of your contacts, pictures, and videos are gone. You immediately call your phone provider to cancel your plan.
Since you now can’t function without your cell phones you immediately go to the nearest cell phone store to buy a new cell phone. They have the exact model you want but the salesperson can’t help you. They said to come back in 24-48 hours once they finish counting the revenue from last night.
Shocking, right?
What would you do in this situation?
Most people would just go to the next nearest store and buy a cell phone there. That cell phone store just lost a sale. This scenario plays out thousands of times a day every single day with web leads.
This is why most lead generation campaigns fail.
We now have definite proof that most businesses waste over 71% of web leads and the most critical component of lead conversions are how fast the sales person responds to the web lead.
First, let’s define what a web lead is. A web lead is defined as forms filled out from websites.
Each business has different criteria on what constitutes a lead.
The Gap between sales and marketing
In an ideal business scenario, sales and marketing would be perfectly aligned with the same objectives, but this rarely happens. This comes from a lack of understanding of what the most important factor is in conversions. Let’s face it, most small businesses don’t want more leads they want more conversions.
If marketing is sending leads it’s the sales team responsibility to contact as soon as possible and qualify the lead. If your sales teams fulfill this obligation and the leads are not qualified then it’s your marketing teams job to change its message.
Great marketing is supposed to make selling superfluous. However, in most typical lead generation campaigns the business who responds first, wins.
Common knowledge doesn’t always lead to common practice
A recent study showed that even with the insidesales.com study released a few years ago, which has been downloaded over 100,000 times, most companies response time is still 39 hours!
There is now technology that allows you to instantly connect a web lead to a phone. Companies like Call Drip and others allow your sales team to instantly (within 8 seconds) call people that filled out web forms.
There is no excuse as a business owner not to follow best practices in converting more customers.
Lead quality slowly deteriorates over time
According to the insidesles.com study done a few years ago
“The odds of contacting a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 100 times. The odds of qualifying a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 21 times.”
From another study:
“The odds drop off dramatically by the first 30 minutes. Specifically, a rep is 100x less likely to make contact if the first call is made 30 minutes after submission. The odds of making contact drop by 3000x if the first call is made 5 hours after lead submission.”
The odds of contacting an inbound lead dramatically decrease as time goes on.
Even when you break it down by 5-minute increments speed wins. The odds of calling to contact a lead decrease by over 10 times in the first hour.
Why scoring leads is a waste of time
If you can quickly have your sales team reach out to the leads and qualify them then this beats any type of lead scoring matrix. This is a race and speed wins.
Forget fancy lead scoring matrixes. The faster they hear from you the higher chances and better qualified the lead will end up being.
Reaching out and asking questions about their business or situation is the first step in qualifying leads.
If your sales teams can’t manage to get in contact with the prospect then you can put the leads in an nurture campaign.
Old News
Most of these studies are old news. We already know the best practices in converting leads and have the technology to facilitate this. But, even with all this knowledge a lot of lead generation campaigns fail.
Why?
Communication.
It’s the marketing’s job to educate and nail the message and it’s sales job to respond quickly and often. Most businesses owners are not even aware of what their sales teams do.
Once you’ve identified the problem you can correct it.
Best Practices
- Use software like CallDrip to immediately contact web leads.
- If you don’t get in touch with the lead quickly, make sure to persistently follow up and qualify the opportunity.
- Wednesdays and Thursdays are the best days to follow up with leads. In fact, Thursday is a 49.7% better day to call than the worst day, Tuesday.
- Wednesdays are the best days to qualify leads
- 4 to 6 pm is the best time to call to make contact with a lead. It is 114% better than calling at 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 a.m., right before lunch.
- 8-9am and 4-5pm are the best times to call to qualify a lead. 8-9am is 164% better than calling at 1-2pm, right after lunch. That’s a big difference!
Conclusion
Lead response time is the single most important factor in conversions.
Don’t throw your money away on leads. Make sure you have a system in place that follows up with the leads as soon as possible.
It’s amazing how long this information has been out there and how few businesses follow best practices. There is a specific formula for converting leads.
Make sure you follow it.
Source, Source 2, Source 3, Source 4