Are you leaving money on the table? How to nail inbound lead response in 12 steps

Leads

Ask any salesperson if they could wave a magic wand and change one thing, their answer will almost always be “more leads.”

We invest so much into marketing, nurturing, and working leads that you’d think when one requests a demo or an introductory call, we’d be all over them like flies to honey. Yet what I see all too often is the opposite: slow, minimal, and impersonal response that leaves the customer wondering if this is the right fit in the first place. 

Don’t take my word for it - according to a b2b marketing study conducted by Drift, only 10% of leads were contacted within the critical first few minutes, while only 42% of inbound leads received any kind of response within 5 days at all. Out of 512 companies tested, a whopping 58% didn’t even bother.

MQL conversions (Marketing Qualified Leads that become an introductory meeting) are crucially important in and of themselves, as they’re amongst the highest closing forms of pipeline and one of the best indicators for growth. That alone should be enough motivation not to let anything slip through the cracks, though the importance of lead responds extends well beyond the numbers.

Externally, it’s a representation of your brand to your most important audience - qualified prospects already engaged in a buying journey. Missing the mark here can leave a damaging first impression that’s difficult to recover from. And it’s a fair reaction for your customer to make - if you can’t get a hold of someone, walking through their proverbial front door asking to buy something, how will you ever speak with them after they’ve taken your money? It’s often a silent death knell for an opportunity that never was. Your lead probably filled out several demo requests, and is out talking to the company that did respond properly. 

Internally, lead response is a reflection of your team’s values and culture. While that might sound a bit cliché, most sales teams say they value professionalism, dedication to their craft, or some form of the phrase ‘putting the customer first.’ If you say this and yet you have a red hot lead sitting in your CRM waiting to be contacted, you aren’t practicing what you preach. 

I’ve helped sales teams create inbound response processes with the right combination of personalization, automation, persistence, and visibility/measurement to achieve specific goals for MQL conversions and sustain them. Included below are 12 steps you can take to craft an inbound response process that ensures no one ever falls through the cracks.

First, the basics:

This post assumes your website/social media ads point the customer towards some kind of form fill/lead capture that is synced with your CRM. If you’re like many company websites, this is the end result of most any path your site takes and is painted on every page, often multiple times. 

So let’s imagine your prospective customer clicked one of the many demo request/learn more buttons and filled out your form. Now what? 

1 - Respond immediately (5 minutes or less)

This should go without saying, and yet it’s the most common error I see. Most marketers and inside sales leaders are familiar with the 5 minute rule, that contact decreases 100x from a 5 minute to a 30 minute response time. 

Source: 2007 Original Kellogg/MIT Study, Dr. James Oldroyd

Basically, if you’re not responding immediately, you’re leaving leads on the table. Lots of them. We should pick up the phone too (more on that in a minute), but at a minimum, your lead should be responded to automatically by email to setup a time for your meeting. 

Solution: Within 5 minutes of filling out a demo request or other form fill, your lead should receive an automatic email response.

2 - Keep communication personal (1:1 between your rep and lead)

So we emailed them in 5 minutes? Marketing automation does that right?

Hold on. There are many ways to create an automatic email response to leads, but that doesn’t mean your problem is solved. Too many teams simply ‘check the box’ here, sending an automatic response from their marketing automation platform or CRM. That really doesn’t count - I’m here to set a demo with a sales rep, and an automatic response from a robot that says ‘someone will be with you soon’ is a throw-away email, and gets me no closer to said demo. 

There are a few sales tools that can do this correctly, so that as soon as a lead lands in your CRM via a web form fill or demo request, it’s assigned to the appropriate sales rep and a 1:1 (rep:lead) email is sent from said rep’s email account directly to your lead.

If your customer fills out a demo request to speak to someone, they should speak to someone. Not a robot that responds with email templates from a general domain. There’s a few key advantages here:

• Emails from your rep will deliver significantly better. Emails from your marketing automation platform are much more likely to hit your prospect’s spam filter, leaving them thinking you never followed up.
• You’re shortening the amount of communication (steps) your prospect has to go through to schedule their meeting.
• You’re adding a personalized, human touch that makes your rep and company stand out.

Solution: Automatically send a 1:1 email from your sales rep directly to your lead to setup a time.

3 - Make your customer’s journey simple

The whole point of this is to set that initial meeting right? So minimize the journey your lead has to take and reduce the number of steps needed. 

Our automatic 1:1 email from your rep to the prospect can be supercharged with calendar apps that let your lead schedule easily and directly. Imagine that - within 2 minutes of submitting a demo request, your lead can have already received a personal communication and scheduled their demonstration directly with the right rep. Some calendaring apps (like calend.ly, or an integrated solution in an engagement platform like Outreach Meetings) can even integrate to your website, allowing you to skip the inbox and schedule right from the demo request page (note: if you do this, you still need to follow through with a 1:1 email from your rep).

Additionally, set the bar for qualification in the right place. You don’t want to waste a lead’s time if they’re clearly a bad fit, but if you catch them on the phone to schedule a meeting don’t berate them with a full blown interrogation.

Solution: Invest in a calendaring solution that make clicking to schedule easy, and automate/remove any other unnecessary obstacles to your meeting. 

4 - Call now, later today, and often

Most demo requests or web leads involve filling out a (hopefully brief) questionnaire about contact information, interests, and maybe a few qualifying questions. If I could only ask one question, it would simply be ‘what is your phone number?’ 

Whether evaluating tech for my team, or opting into a potential client’s funnel to better understand their approach, I’ve often been disappointed by how quiet my phone stayed. Some of the quickest teams to personally email me were also shy to pick up the phone, even though that’s usually where the most meetings are set. Your reps should be calling the lead as soon as possible. If they’re not able to consistently call them within 5 minutes of a lead alert, it may be time to invest in a dedicated market development rep (responsible for contacting leads, qualifying, and booking meetings) to ensure the best experience for your prospective customers. 

Solution: Mandate a 5 minute response time to call (within reason), and that every lead is called 4-8 times within 2 weeks. Dedicate the resources needed to make this possible.

5 - Build the culture of fast response

Earlier in my career I was lucky enough to have author and sales strategist Andy Paul stop by our company and drop some words of wisdom. One that has always stuck with me was a policy from a former company of his: they always dialed leads as soon as humanly possible, and regardless of their response time, they would begin their conversation with “sorry for the delay.”

Think about the brand experience that set. It’s your first time speaking with this company, and within 4 minutes of clicking submit your phone rings and the voice on the other line apologizes for not reaching you sooner. 

In order to be effective, your team has to have a culture of prioritizing those responses. This means reps ducking out of meetings for a lead alert and stopping conversations mid sentence to respond. It means managers staggering schedules to widen office hours, tracking and coaching reps, and celebrating response-time wins. Any good sales team aligns their customer’s values with their own - prioritizing fast response is a must in that regard.

That said, a well incentivized rep who understands the value of fast response shouldn’t need much coaching at all to call back a lead ASAP.

Solution: Make fast response a priority and tie it back to your cultural values. 

6 - Use sequences, not steps

How many touch points does the average MQL receive before your rep moves on? 

When I ask clients this, I usually get 1 of 2 responses. The first….crickets. They don’t know. More on that later. The second is invariably “not enough.”

Your reps should be armed with a playbook (or several of them); a plan of action from day 1 on how to respond to an inbound lead. Anywhere from 8-14 steps, including a mix of calls, emails, social, and anything else at their disposal. As a sales leader, it’s your responsibility to ensure reps have something they can quickly and effectively execute, and that they’re not spending wasting time deciding if, when, or how to respond. Here’s a sample of an inbound response sequence you can use as a baseline to get started:

Day 1 

• Auto Email 1(<5 mins)
• Call 1(ASAP)
• Voicemail 1
• Call 2

Day 2

• Email 2
• Call 3 
• Social Connect Request

Day 3

• Email 3
• Call 4
• Voicemail 2

Day 5 

• Call 5

Day 6

• Email 4

Day 8 

• Call 6

Day 9

• Email 5

Day 12

• Breakup Email 6
• Add to Nurture Sequence

There are several sales workflow tools and engagement platforms (like Outreach or Hubspot Sales) that allow you to create a sequence or cadence of steps, the best of which apply those steps automatically to your inbound lead. Step 1 includes an automatic 1:1 email directly from your rep, step 2 applies a high priority phone call to their daily task list, Step 3 another call later that day, etc. This queues up all of the sales activities that should be taken over the next 10 or so business days and guarantees they’re actually done. 

Not only does this ensure that your reps are engaging with your lead several times over a variety of channels before moving on, it makes sure no one falls through the cracks, and frees up your rep’s time by automating unnecessary decision making and administrative tasks. 

Think of it this way: If your rep receives 2 MQLs per day, 60 per month, and applies a 15 touch point follow-up sequence like the one above, that’s up to 900 decisions they have to make as far as the next right move. A good chunk of those are emails, so now we’re up to ~1200 motions per month that could have been automated. Is it any wonder most leads don’t get much follow-up?

Solution: Give your reps a sequence of activities to execute on every inbound lead and the right sales tools/engagement platform to do so effectively.

7 - Track everything

You can implement all the tech and processes you like, but unless your followup activities are recorded, you’ll lack the data you need to coach your team effectively and ensure they’re actually following up as needed - critical to building the culture discussed earlier. The data from their sales activities will also be crucial to fine-tuning your followup for maximum conversion. 

There are two ways about this - you can be adamant that your team manually log every followup activity - the old ‘if it isn’t in Salesforce it never happened!’ - but having spoken with hundreds of sales teams I can tell you personally not one of them does an outstanding job of this, and you’ll always be making decisions from incomplete data. 

If you’re using an engagement platform here you have little to worry about - they’ll automatically track and log every activity, and the best ones create detailed reports and metrics around those activities for you. 

Either way, utilize reports to understand where you’re at with every lead, ensure there’s always followup steps in place, and catch anyone slipping through the cracks early. 

Solution: Use activity logging and reports to capture all your team’s followup and ensure they’re sticking to the process.

8 - Measure & Iterate

How does one email convert versus another? What’s the best time to call yesterday’s lead? How many follow-up activities are too many? Does adding social media, or research & personalization to your followup process bring in better results?

Once we’ve got response time and sequences down, it’s time to nail our messaging and approach. Your reps are already doing these activities, and so let’s A/B test and measure everything to determine what converts at the highest rate. The right sales workflow tools can be critical here, as the best ones allow you to A/B test your approach without reps having to do anything, and can measure the efficacy of the entire lead response process, not just individual touch points. Eventually, your team can create playbooks that convert leads to meetings with solid predictability. 

You might think of this as just fine tuning for a few extra email opens, but small differences in approach can lead to wildly different results. In one seemingly innocuous example from the book “Sales Engagement” by Manny Medina, Max Altschuler, and Mark Kosoglow, a simple addition of three words - “just checking in” - to an email resulted in an 86% increase in reply rate. The kicker? Most sales reps are taught never to use this phrase, and even the authors assumed it would have a negative effect. 

That’s just one example of tweaking one variable; one part of an equation with many multipliers. It goes to show the importance of A/B testing even your most basic assumptions, and the tremendous rewards that come from becoming a data-driven sales team. 

Here’s a few key variables worth focusing on:

Solution: A/B test the efficacy of different sequences & touch points; continuously refine your approach.

9 - Get Personal 

You called and emailed right away but this one eluded you. And the company this lead works at would make a perfect customer - this one deserves extra attention. 

Set the template emails aside and do your research. Are there connections to the lead within your team’s network? Are they active on social media? Share the same interests or alma mater? At the very least, do your research on their organization and send them something that shows you’ve done your homework before your next follow-up: congratulate them on a recent funding announcement or company award, new product launch, or mention any relevant triggers that might lead them on a buying journey to you. 

Nothing to go on? Roll out the red carpet and invite an executive who adds value to the call you’re trying to setup. In a world where almost half of leads receive no followup at all, you’ve just set yourself apart from everyone. Literally, everyone.  

Solution: Design a personalized activity sequence for high priority leads that includes research, manually written email follow-up, and/or social engagement for priority accounts/leads. 

10 - Make it about them

Let’s say you’ve converted your MQL and set the next meeting - congratulations!

Now what? 

Add value. What’s important to your prospective customer? What brought them here? In a few minutes and with a few open-ended, thoughtful questions great reps can get the kind of information that allows for personalized demonstrations and quality first meetings. This can be the difference between a tuned-out, generic demo/meeting and the kind of interaction that flips leads into champions and eventual customers. 

Solution: Add value through light discovery; ask thoughtful questions.

11 - Follow up to follow through

About 85-90% of the meetings you set should eventually come to fruition. If you’re setting appointments and less than that are showing, chances are your follow-through is lacking. Most teams set and forget - don’t aim to be most teams. 

Make sure whoever is responsible for the meeting being held has a follow-through sequence that ensures the lead shows - sending personalized content and polite reminders leading up to the meeting. An unfortunate chunk of your meetings will have to reschedule, catching those early and rescheduling before your lead flakes out is critical. 

If you have a business development rep handing off to an account exec, this is where the account exec is introduced and takes the opportunity to connect with the lead and set expectations for their first meeting. 

It might not seem like much, but these additional value-adds are often the difference between a 60% and 90% meeting held rate.  

Solution: Design and use follow through sequences to add value and ensure your meeting is held.

12 - Nurture & re-engage

You’re not going to convert every lead into a meeting. Though it’s important to recognize the significance of something as seemingly simple as a demo request. Someone recognized a problem enough to start researching it and felt it was important enough to commit time to speaking with you. That’s pretty far along a buying journey. For whatever reason, they didn’t ultimately take the call. That’s ok - over time, you’ll have a list of thousands of MQL’s that didn’t convert, and that’s still very valuable. Often times the timing wasn’t right, and putting together a good nurture campaign can bring back in a trickle of leads when the time is.

Solution: Utilize a nurture campaign to re-engage cold leads. 

Putting it all together

A lead lands in your CRM, and it kicks off a predesigned sequence of activities:

In 2 minutes your lead receives a personal email from your rep to setup a meeting time. 

A rep on break notices the lead alert and jogs back to her desk to make the call. At the 5 minute mark the phone rings, and a series of other followup activities are already queued regardless of whether she reaches the lead. Every lead will be contacted the amount of times you want them to, every time. 

Everything is tracked in your CRM automatically by integrated sales tools, allowing complete visibility into your rep’s activities. You’re constantly iterating your follow-up engagement, honing in on the most effective process to turn leads into meetings. The goodwill created by professional follow-up allows your reps to ask thoughtful questions, and your future customers are in turn rewarded with personalized content, customized demonstrations, and better engagement. Pipelines are fuller, customers are happier, and the brand shines. 

Are you potentially leaving money on the table, or dissatisfied with your lead conversion rates? Schedule time with Anderson Sales Consulting at calendly.com/salesconsulting for a discussion on how your team can be more effective. We promise to be right with you ;)