Selling with Data #7 - Time Kills Leads - How Fast to Respond to Client Activity

Note: Reposting the Selling with Data to LinkedIn Newsletter.

Prospects are active on your website, downloading content, and signing up for trials. Those activities are being shared with sellers. How fast should a seller reach out to a prospect who is showing signs of interest?

A few weeks ago, I met with an enterprise software company that sources a large percent of their revenue from converting inbound leads from trial signups. One of the IBMers I was with signed up for their trial and was contacted by one of their sellers in under 5 minutes. Everyone in the room was impressed.

In the digital world, the expectations of time have compressed to as quick as possible. When I want something, I want it now. When I reach out for information, every minute that I am waiting to hear back seems like an eternity, until I grow distracted and move on to the next thing. When I finally hear back, I must really focus to remember why I was reaching out to the person in the first place. The time that passes between my request and the response reduces the chances of my acting.

When I need a service that has multiple service providers to choose from, I narrow my list to a few of the top options and contact each vendor around the same time. Whoever responds back first is who I typically work with. Everyone else I “punish” by placing them on the back burner because they took too long to respond back to me.

I don’t think that I am unique in my thinking. Enterprise buyers have the same mindset. A quick response is important, whichever seller makes contact first has an advantage, and a quick call back is welcome not creepy.

How Fast do Customers Expect to Hear Back?

A survey by Xant, formerly InsideSales.com and acquired by Aurea, reports that enterprise customers expect a response time of 10 minutes or less, especially when it comes to sales related items. The expectations are an even faster response for sales support or customer service items. 74% of people who sign up for a newsletter or trial expect an automatic welcome email within an hour.

How Fast are Sellers Responding?

A Harvard Business Review study found that only 37% of sellers responded to inbound leads within one hour and the average response time for a web lead is 17 hours.

I am surprised by these stats and guess that it includes both inside and field sellers. My experience is that only a small percent of field sellers responds to marketing activities within 3-5 days and most field sellers never respond at all. Let me say that again, most field sellers never respond or follow up to the client interest activity in their accounts ever. Missed opportunity.

Does Speed Matter?

Speed helps with two key things: catching the buyer when they are still focused on the topic and being the first person to help set the stage.

Acting quickly closes the gap between the customers’ activity when the topic is still fresh in their minds. The same Harvard Business Review study found that businesses that respond within an hour are almost seven times more likely to have meaningful conversations with decision-makers.

Acting quickly also increases the odds that you are the first seller to respond. The first vendor to respond wins 35-50% and, in some cases, up to 78% of the time. That initial interaction sets potential prospects' expectations. If you aren’t the seller setting the stage, you need to beat those expectations. If you are first, however, you can set the stage.

Speed matters, but do minutes matter? A Velocify survey showed that responding within one minute can improve lead conversions by 391%. Responding just one minute later (for a two-minute response time) offers less than half as much improvement at 160%. The lead conversion drops even further every minute after that. The likelihood of reaching buyers within five minutes is 10 times higher than if you were to wait 10 minutes. Minutes matter.

The following are actionable tips to improve response time.

1.????Sellers and Sales Organization Make Speed a Priority - Many sellers don’t connect speed to more opportunities and more revenue. If they did, most sellers would focus more on speedy response. There is a saying in sales: Time Kills Deals. I would extend that to: ?Time Kills Leads.

2.????Use Your CRM System - CRM systems, such as Salesforce, are game changers because they provide information to sellers on the client activity that in many cases was only known to marketing. Client interests are often scored to help with prioritization and include contextual information like marketing activity,.

3.????Notification - If minutes matter, being alerted to a high urgency inbound activity when it happens versus when the seller refreshes their screen can increase response time. Austyn Carter, a top IBM Digital Sales Rep, showed me how she uses the Salesforce app on her iPhone and notification center to create alerts on her Apple watch the moment new MQLs come in. She told me she will walk out of some internal meetings to respond quickly to an urgent alert. Her typical response time is under two minutes. That is awesome! Anyone can do this.

4.????Automation - Top sellers prepare templates and cadences in anticipation of different scenarios. These templates are high quality pre-written outreach samples that include room for personalization. The best templates I have seen are written collaboratively between product marketing and sales. Templates save a lot of time, especially with new leads and personalization.

5.????Personalization - Generic, non-authentic outreach doesn’t work and, in many cases, will hurt more than it helps. Sellers should take a few moments to personalize the outreach. Examples are highlighting mutual connections, work you are doing with their company, work that you are doing with similar companies, interesting information that you have in common.

6.????Track Progress - The good news about speed is that it is easy to measure because the events are already captured in the CRM system. Once you start tracking speed and how effective the quality of the outreach is, it is a great motivator to continue to make progress or even to start a contest between sellers.

Just like Time Kills Deals, Time Kills Leads.

The original question was how fast sellers should respond to customer marketing activities. The answer is under 10 minutes, in most cases.

Sellers that respond quickly will catch the decision maker when the topic is fresh on their mind for a more meaningful conversation, be the first to show up and gain an advantage over the competition, and ultimately create more opportunities and win more deals.

If you have any ideas or comments that help increase the speed of your response, please leave comments below.

Good Selling.