A Shockingly Simple Idea To Improve Your Business

Respond.

Yep that’s it. When an inbound lead comes in, respond (and faster).

Source: Harvard Business Review ... www.hbr.org

In the March issue of Harvard Business Review, an article, The Short Life of Online Sales Leads, practically stunned me. Written by two graduate business professors and the CEO of InsideSales,com, it speaks to the glaring gap in the response time of businesses to leads generated online.

A survey that audited 2, 241 U.S. companies revealed the following data when measuring response times to a web generated test lead:

• 37% responded to their lead within an hour,
• 16% responded within one to 24 hours,
• 24% took more than 24 hours—
• and 23% of the companies never responded at all.

The average response time, among companies that responded within 30 days, was 42 hours.

Further data from a separate study cited in the article offered the following:

U.S. Firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead (which we defined as having a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker) as those that tried to contact the customer even an hour later—and more than 60 times as likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer.

You are no doubt spending a significant portion of your budget to drive people to your site (paid media), attract people to your site (owned media), and influence people to your site (earned media) … all that effort goes to waste if you don’t respond.

What should you do to make sure you are not in the 23%? At a minimum consider the following:

1. Set a standard response time
   Everything starts with having a timeframe upon which sales and marketing have agreed. Further, your decision should be a customer centric one … i.e. you should determine the answer to the following question, “When someone completes a web based contact form, how quickly would they like me to respond?”
2. Assess Your Current Lead Capture Processes
   What information are you asking for? Where does that information go? To a person, a database, an email address? Is all the data being captured?
3. Test Current Internal Lead Workflow
   What happens once a lead is received? Where does it go? Who is responsible for it? Has that person’s duties changed? (say to social media?). Establish regular real-life testing of all your incoming lead AND contact forms on your website, landing pages, blog etc to protect yourself. If you not testing it, you have no idea whether or not it is working properly.
4. Adopt a Real Time Enterprise mentality.
   From a technology standpoint, the notion of the Real Time Enterprise is possible today. Yes, it requires significant changes in business processes and a customer centric approach to sales and service delivery. Yes, it different than how you are most likely conducting business today. That said, if you can increase your ability to qualify leads by seven times, it sort of make sense to at least be thinking about it, no?
5. Marketing Automation Is No Longer A Nice To Have
   While part of item number three, in a world of doing more with less and prioritizing how sales teams are most effectively deployed, it almost goes without saying that marketing automation is now a must.

Respond. That’s all I am asking. Start the conversation with those interested in doing so.

Being too big, understaffed, dealing with distributors, proper field assignment etc, are all poor excuses and clear indicators that you are being “company centric” and not “customer centric.”

Author: Jeremy Victor | Website | Twitter

Jeremy's the founder of Make Good Media and Editor In Chief of B2Bbloggers.com. B2Bbloggers.com is a B2B Marketing online magazine discussing the evolution of B2B marketing. Topics include content marketing, B2B social media, demand generation, marketing automation, and more. Sign up. Get all the articles via email.