Yes, Darryl Praill You Should Respond Quickly to a Customer Who Wants to Talk With You

Darryl Praill and Chad Burmeister have a post out there arguing some non-sense about lead response time and how it's not important to respond to leads quickly. I tried to respond in the comments on LinkedIn but I ran out of space....totally me.

Come on your guys, seriously? Do we have to do this every week? Here is my response:

1) Make it about the data - Darryl, I need to see the research man and I'd prefer to see it in HBR like our piece to know that it was really vetted. I'm a data guy and it the data says something, it means something in my book. Here is our HBR. Where is yours? https://hbr.org/2011/03/the-short-life-of-online-sales-leads

2) Balance Speed and Score - I'm with a company in Austin and they have 45,000 inbound leads a month and only 13 reps. Can they respond to every lead quickly NO! But if someone comes to the website and says I want to talk to you right now, don't wait 30 min, TALK TO THEM! 

3) Don't Starve Your Sales Team - I'm with a company in in NY. They get 10 leads per month and they only have a few sales reps. Marketing doesn't want to give the sales team those 10 leads until they are properly nurtured. WHAT??? The sales team was dying for pipeline. Give them the leads and have them respond ASAP and let the sales team turn interest to need. 

4) Be Pleasantly Persistent - Don't think you can reach out to someone one time and get them. Our data says the average lead gets 1.73 phone calls. I'd do more than that if you're serious about getting the value out of your marketing spend.

5) People Don't Read Your Content - I'm sorry but people don't read your content. I know, you think they download a 50-page research study and you think they are going to actually read the whole thing. Sorry but I don't believe that. You can read this article https://time.com/12933/what-you-think-you-know-about-the-web-is-wrong/ and lot of others that show you people don't read content. The reason people came to you is they have a PROBLEM just be a Challenger and go solve it.

6) It's Not Creepy to Respond Quickly to Customer Requests - Guys I've been doing this for years and when you respond to high priority inbound requests, prospects don't think it's creepy, they are impressed. Come on! We are an instant gratification generation! We should be talking about real-time response tools like Drift rather than debating if people who say they want to talk to you actually want to talk with you.

7) I Don't Care if a Prospect Doesn't Think They Want to Talk to Me - Look, we built a billion dollar company off lead response. Did you know according to Zodoc, 80% of people avoid doctors. That's crazy! People don't want to talk to doctors? Don't people realize doctors can help them? It's the same in sales. I believe people don't want to talk to sales people but if they only knew how awesome the InsideSales.com product tool set is they would want to talk to me and it's my job to make sure that happens.

I gotta run guys but look, 5 min or 6 min or 7 min, let's use our brains here and data. I think we can all agree if a customer or prospects want to talk to us, let's make sure we do it. I get there are grey areas. I do. But until we figure out how to do the first part do we really need to argue every single exception especially since the average response time to inbound leads is in days and not hours?

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