Small Timeframe to Impress...

Lead conversion is determined?57%?by lead?quality?and?43%?by lead?response time!

Sales and lead scoring demand your 100%.?

Your effective lead response time gauges how long it will take for your sales rep to get in touch with a prospect who has contacted your business.?The more time they take, the more leads they miss.?If you closely look at the statistics,?more than 70% of sales rep ‘DO NOT CALL’ within the first hour?or as soon as the client makes a query. Managing lead response time can effectively?boost your team’s confidence?and can assure them to have a meaningful conversation with 7?times more probability of actually securing the deal.?This can happen if they ‘just call’ within the first hour. Most of the agents think it is better to wait for at least 24 hours before making the first contact with the customer.?This is absolutely antiquated.?This practice came into being in the earlier days, when not everybody had a cellular phone or an email address and therefore, it would take 24 hours to just get in touch with the customer.?In this present age of super-fast connectivity, your customers are omni-present. They look up for information on your website, your promotional marketing content, email campaigns, etc. And if he is doing his bit of research, you must?do your bit competently?in order?to have conducive lead response time.

Overcome barriers and achieve faster lead response time:

1. ??Affiliate Sales and Marketing:?If you think that your sales team can work independently and doesn’t require assistance from any other department, you are hugely mistaken. Sales and Marketing are birds of the same feather.?Without aligning sales with marketing, it becomes easier for leads to fall through the cracks.?By clearly defining processes of how/when leads are transferred, each team can focus on what they do best with proper coordination.
2. ??Set Parameters to Define a Qualified Lead:?Work closely with your marketing team, ask?what is a qualified lead based on demographics and behavior. This parameter can help you sort out clear customer profiles (personas) and keep an efficient lead sorting funnel in place. Getting in touch with high priority leads, which have successfully passed?your ideal profile filters can help you close more leads?and enable faster response time.
3. ??Be Better Than What you were Yesterday:?This mantra not only works in day to day life, but in sales as well. If you set your own benchmark and repeatedly try to excel your best self,?there is no stopping you.?Establish current benchmarks for how quickly your sales team is following up on leads. From there,?set goals to shorten this timeframe.
4. ??Establish a Disciplined Phone Follow-up Schedule:?The reality is that you cannot call all your leads in the first five minutes, unless you are a superhero.?On an average, it takes about 7 dials before a successful connect. To get this straight, you need to put in extra effort on planning how things should work out. Plan ahead and plan wisely, keeping enough bandwidth to give appropriate attention to all your leads.
5. ??Time of the Day and Day of the Week Matter:?Ensure that your calling schedule aligns with the best time of the day and best day of the week. They both are extremely important to be considered, which often sales rep miss. Mondays and Tuesdays are not at all good days to make your first contact with the customer.?Wednesdays and Thursdays are considered better options with the ideal time being 3-5 PM (the lazy hours of office). [#NHGBe note: See the charts under this article!]
6. ?There’s a famous saying in sales and marketing -?“You cannot improve what you cannot measure.”?So, start tracking your team’s response Time and manage it effectively for better lead generation.

Inspired by:?Hemani Sehgal*

If you have more suggestions and insights, let us know in the comments section.

Published by #NHGBe 2022-03-21 -Be-Time 13:30 AM

*Any opinions expressed are those of the author.

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