We’ve had leaders from Dynamic Sygnal, Conversica and Ivanti give us the scoop on how to respond to leads efficiently. What was really interesting is that all of their replies were unanimously about the technology they use for lowering lead response times. Read it and learn…

Real Time Email Notifications – Nicolette Mullenix, Dynamic Signal

The first step towards timely lead response is an efficient real time notifications system, told us Nicolette Mullenix, from Dynamic Signal, the company which was number two on our list, with a response time of 8.20 minutes with 14 responses total.

“We have real time email notifications for demo request / contact us that go directly the SDR, all SDR management for that segment, and myself as well as the operations team. SDRs and management are on every single one and we set expectations that as soon as they come in we need to contact that person immediately,” said Nicolette, sales development director at Dynamic Signal.

An effective marketing strategy also filters non-target personas, to make sure marketing efforts go only to the segments which are the right fit, added Nicolette.

“We’re also marketing toward the largest end of the market and filter out companies that are too small so we only get a curated list,” she added.

Notification Systems and AI Assistants for Follow-up – Addison Lee, Conversica

Addison Lee, Director of Sales Development at Conversica, told us that they measure lead follow-up using 4P’s – Promptness, Persistence, Personalization, and Performance.

“Promptness is one of the most influential factors to get a positive response yet one of the hardest to achieve,” said Addison Lee, quoting Conversica research that shows only 13% of companies respond within 5 minutes of a lead coming in.

Efficient lead routing and an effective notification system alerting reps about notable activity are a great start, added Addison, but ensuring consistent <5 minute follow-up requires automation– while being mindful of personalization.

“We are using AI assistants (Rachael and Stephanie) that leverage marketing automation and CRM information to provide human-like personalized follow-up consistently within 5 minutes of leads coming inbound. This alleviates the burden of to-the-minute time sensitive follow up off our SDR team and allows them to focus on strategic ABM efforts while cherry-picking hot leads from non-target accounts that have responded positively to the AI assistant,” said Addison.

Lead Response Technology – Steve Eror, Ivanti

Number 9 on our list, Ivanti, had a 25 minutes lead response time with 11 responses total. We spoke to them to ask what’s their secret, and the answer was, once again, related to the technology they use to correctly route leads and alert sales development reps of hot leads.

“Responding to leads quickly and effectively is my teams top priority. Everything we do, the cadences that we’ve put in place and the technology we use is in there to ensure that we respond both quickly and to the depth necessary to penetrate our leads,“ said Steve Eror, Sales Development Manager at Ivanti.

How Fast Should You Respond to Leads?

Bear in mind, the best practices for lead response management say you should respond to leads in under 5 minutes. This is because an incoming lead has a really short shelf life. After 5 minutes of the lead coming in, your chances of engaging in conversation and qualifying a lead drop dramatically.

That’s not to say that a lead response time of 12 minutes on average is a bad time. The companies which were ranked as top 10 in our lead response audit report all responded in under 30 minutes.

We performed 180 response audits on companies members of the AA-ISP (American Association of Inside Sales Professionals), and the average response time for all the participants was 39.79 hours, with a persistency of 2.39 responses (follow-ups).

As always, we advise caution in interpreting the results of these top 10 companies and comparing to your own results. How you respond to leads will always be dependent on business specifics, go-to-market strategy and your sales model.

Some companies get a huge influx of leads every day and will try to select only the best candidates for a lead response. Others get only a handful of high quality leads that they need to treat with priority.

How Fast Are You Responding to Leads? Take the Response Audit!

If you want to know how our company or sales reps are doing at lead response, you can just enter your information and take the Response Audit here. It takes literally no effort on your part and you’ll get your results in about 10 days.

To learn how your inbound/outbound lead strategy should differ, watch my webinar here.

In our latest research this year, we submitted leads to 4,723 companies’ web forms and tracked calls, voicemails and emails. This study gave us valuable insights into the industry’s lead follow-up practices and performance.

Here are a few of the highlights:

On average, companies took 38.35 hours to respond to leads

A day and a half is not an immediate response, but 38.35 hours was the average response time for the 4,723 companies we audited. The average from a similar set of audits last year was 36.26 hours, so the average response time has gotten slower by 5.77%.

The best practice is to respond to leads within 5 minutes and only 7.7% of leads received a response in this time frame.

It’s important for companies to make lead response time a priority. Aligning systems, processes and people to ensure your inbound leads are contacted within five minutes is key.

28.4% of first email responses were automated

This year, we dug deeper into the email responses to see the effect of automated emails. 28.4% of first email responses were automated. Once we removed those automated emails, we saw that 55.0% of leads received no personalized email, and, of the leads that did receive an email, over half of them (53.9%) only received one.

Personalization trumps automation. It’s tempting to have marketing create templates so sales doesn’t have to worry about responding to leads, but customers can smell an automated email from a mile away. Send personalized emails and watch your results improve.

Half of companies never attempted to contact leads, 77% never called

Of the 4,723 leads submitted, 50.0% never received any personalized response of any kind, and 77.17% of leads were never called.

Inbound leads convert 8x better than cold lists. Don’t ignore your inbound leads. Reps often subjectively determine lead quality, leads get lost in the abyss of a CRM, or marketing never turns leads over to sales.

These are all real problems that are negatively affecting lead follow-up. Make lead follow-up a priority and you’ll experience better contact and conversion rates.

Bringing it all together

By calling leads within five minutes, making personalized emails a priority, and not ignoring your leads, you’ll contact more prospects and convert more sales.

If you’re not doing these things, the good news is that lots of other companies aren’t either, so you can get ahead by aligning your systems, processes and people to put these best practices in action.

See the full report and get more lead response best practices. 

This year’s results revealed improvements in lead response times and persistency, although most companies are still falling well short of established best practices.

What is a ResponseAudit?

The XANT ResponseAudit determines how well an organization follows up on inbound web leads.

The ResponseAudit records an organization’s average response time and how many times reps call a lead before giving up.

Organizational performance in these areas can make or break a business.

Lead response best practices

In 2007, Dr. James Oldroyd published the Lead Response Management Study, which showed how little time sales reps have to respond before leads turn “cold.”

The study revealed that if a lead is called within five minutes versus 30 minutes after it’s submitted, that lead is 100 times more likely to be contacted and 21 times more likely to enter the sales cycle.

Furthermore, the study demonstrated that reps have a 90 percent chance of contacting a prospect if they call between 6 and 12 times.

Dreamforce 2015

Among Dreamforce 2015 participants, the average response time was 37 hours and 25 minutes. In terms of persistency, the average number of call attempts was 2.8. 

While both of these results are far from ideal, they represent an improvement over previous years.

At Dreamforce 2014, the average response time was much longer at 61 hours and 1 minute. There were also fewer contact attempts with an average of 2.2.

The Top 100

It’s time to reveal this year’s winners: the 100 fastest-responding organizations. 

Want to know if you made the cut or see how you compare to the best?

Check out the results below:

*Dreamforce 2015 sponsor

To request a ResponseAudit for your organization, sign up today.

Get a Free Lead ResponseAudit

How well are your sales teams responding to leads? Participate in a free Lead ResponseAudit and see how efficient your sales team actually is.

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Every year, in conjunction with Dreamforce, XANT releases its Annual Lead Response Report, based on ResponseAudits of companies attending the show. This report shows companies how they measure up to lead response best practices — and the rest of the industry.

Let’s take a look at a few of the key lessons we’ve learned from past studies ahead of this year’s Annual Lead Response Report.

1. Respond to web leads within 5 minutes

In the Lead Response Management Study in 2007, several factors within the sales process were found to be crucial to boosting your sales output.

For example, the research revealed that responding to a web-generated lead within 5 minutes compared to 10 minutes can increase contact rates up to 900%.

Calling your leads 6 to 12 times turns out to be the magic number in order to contact and qualify your leads with maximum success.

These findings, along with many others, have been established as the best practices for contacting leads and are seen as the standard for the industry.

For further best practices, go here to see recent reports.

2. Past results

The Lead Response Report’s sample is taken from a list of Dreamforce attendees.

Here are the sample sizes for the past three years:

2012: 3,068

2013: 5,257

2014: 14,061

General findings

Of the intended sample, 32.5% of companies could not be audited due to the absence or malfunction of a working web form.

As the sample group has expanded, a higher percentage of companies have not responded to leads. This troubling statistic has jumped from 30% (’12) to 47% (’14).

Immediacy

Of all of the companies we audited in 2012, only 15 companies employed best practices and responded within 5 minutes, which is equivalent to .4%. In 2013 and 2014, the percentages climbed to 1.29% and .8%, respectively.

The median first call times for 2012, 2013 and 2014 have dropped from 4 hours (2012 and 2013) to 3 hours (2014). For our purposes, the median first call times represent the most accurate form of measurement because they are not influenced by outliers.

Persistency

Of the companies that had a lead generated through a web form, 44%, (’12), 40% (’13) and 47% (’14) did not respond. The median number of calls for each successfully generated lead is 1 call, regardless of the year of the selected studies.

Response types

For the companies that did respond to a lead in 2012, email accounted for 67% of contact attempts. In 2013 and 2014, the numbers were similar (65%, 70%).

Other contact with web-generated leads included phone calls. Of the phone calls that were made, 34.2% (’12), 65% (’13), and 53.3% (’14) left voicemails.

Analysis

XANT research has consistently shown that the industry as a whole has struggled with immediacy. The average percentage of companies that actually contact a lead by phone call within 5 minutes over these three years is less than 1%. While this is disappointing, the median call time has improved. During the past three years, an hour has been shaved off the time it takes to contact a lead.

Persistency has remained fairly constant over the past three years. On the average, 43% of companies do not respond to leads. This translates into millions of dollars in missed selling opportunities. The median number of call attempts is only 1, which is far from the optimal range of 6 to 12 calls.

The response type has remained fairly constant over the past few years, with improvement seen in the number of phone calls accompanied by voicemails. While emails are a useful way to respond to leads, XANT research has found that phone responses lead to greater success.

3. Check your own results

Do you know what your company’s average response times are? Comparing yourself to the industry and to best practices is critical to knowing where you need to improve. If you requested your company’s individual ResponseAudit Report for 2014, review it and look for places to improve.

If you would like to sign up for a ResponseAudit Report, go here.

Are you going to Dreamforce 2015? We hope to see you there.

Free Inside Sales Industry Research

Gain access to additional inside sales industry research, including the original Lead Response Management study.

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It’s OK if you’re not sure. Many sales leaders lack this kind of visibility.

And it drives them nuts.

Would it surprise you to hear that only 27% of Internet leads ever get contacted? That’s what our in-house research shows.

The problem is two-fold:

1. Most sales organizations fail to respond quickly to web leads.

2. Most sales reps give up on leads way too soon.

In 2007, Dr. James Oldroyd exposed these issues in the original Lead Response Management Study. We continue to update his groundbreaking research, and here are some key findings:

• The average response time for an Internet lead is 39 hours 22 minutes.
• Speed is crucial. A web lead is 100 times more likely to be contacted and 21 times more likely to enter the sales cycle if you call back within five minutes.
• Sales reps make only 1.3 call attempts, on average, to a new lead before giving up.
• Persistence pays off. Sales reps can contact up to 90% of leads, if they make at least six call attempts.

Maybe you’ve seen these statistics before. But if you want to find out how your sales team stacks up against these crucial benchmarks, you’ve come to the right place.

Because we’re going to show you exactly how to do it.

Audit your team’s lead response

XANT has performed more than 82,000 ResponseAudit assessments, testing sales lead follow-up for companies across North America and Europe.

With a little elbow grease, you can test your own lead response practices. The process resembles the “secret shopper” method.

Here’s how:

Create imaginary prospects: Make up a name you can use as an alias. Bob Smith, Liz Shapiro, Reggie Klosterman, you get the idea. Assign this prospect a real job title, company name, phone number and email address.

Build mock company websites: For every imaginary prospect, build a simple company website. This will improve credibility if one of your sales reps researches the company before calling.

Submit web forms: Find a web form on your own company’s website that sends leads to your sales team. Fill it out as if you were a real prospect seeking information.

Monitor calls and emails: Put a system in place for tracking all phone calls and emails your sales reps make to this prospect. Record the time and day of each contact attempt. XANT has technology that allows us to do this in a scientific, professional way. But you can build your own system, with a little creativity and effort.

Once you figure out how quickly your reps respond to web leads and how persistent they are in following up, you can compare your numbers against industry benchmarks and best practices and make adjustments as needed.

It’s a great way to test your team and to find out how you stack up against competitors.

If you’d like XANT to test your sales lead follow-up for you, we’d be happy to do that. Using data to improve sales performance is in our DNA.

Request your ResponseAudit now.

Image credit: David Stanley

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Ken Krogue Reveals Why Inside Sales Is All About the Leads

Cold Calling and Sales Prospecting: A Day in the Life

I’m a marketer at www.insidesales.com and I’m hijacking the sales blog today. I’m writing on behalf of marketers everywhere, and I’m calling out sales professionals.

The Goal of Inbound Marketers

First, let me say that I like my job and I take it seriously. I strongly feel the need to produce more leads for sales. Here at XANT, we call that “feeding the beast.”

My specific role is to boost the website conversion rate — the percent of website visitors that submit a form and convert into a lead. I work hard to improve website conversion rate by even just a fraction of a percent.

Here’s why small changes in conversion rate are so important, using some quick numbers.

30,000 website visitors x 5% conversion rate = 1,500 leads
30,000 website visitors x 5.5% conversion rate = 1,650 leads

A small change in conversion rate equals MANY more leads. (150 in this scenario)

I am not the only marketer working to generate leads. Other marketers on my team specialize in other areas: email, ppc advertising, webinars, social, etc. As marketers, we each have the same goal: generate fresh leads for the sales team.

How Marketers Contribute to Revenue

If the company’s value per lead (revenue / # leads) is $20, my marketing efforts alone just boosted company revenue $3000. For a SaaS company that experiences monthly recurring revenue, that’s $36,000 of additional annual revenue each month!

Not bad.

Other marketers provide similar contributions in their roles. However, a problem occurs once a lead is generated.

The Problem

Value per lead drops every minute that passes after the lead is generated.

Why? As time passes, it’s harder to catch the lead at an available time. As time passes, that individual finds other solutions and it is harder to qualify the lead.

• Contact rates drop over time
• Lead qualification rates drop over time

The result is that the number of leads that close drops, as does sales revenue.

How Sales Reps Are Failing

Marketers appreciate sales reps. Sales reps grow the business and cover everyone’s paychecks. However, on the average sales team, sales reps are not responding to leads while the leads are hot.

ResponseAudit lead response research by XANT recently put the average lead response time for a sample of 3,068 sales teams at 38 hours 30 minutes. The same study showed that the average number of contact attempts was just 1.36.

There is a reason why this level of response is inadequate.

Lead response research done by Dr. James Oldroyd while a visiting research fellow at MIT, shows that the odds of reaching a new sales lead drop over 10x if you wait longer than the first hour of shown interest, and the odds of qualifying that lead decrease 6x.

In the Marketo / XANT joint eBook, “The Ultimate Revenue Engine,” XANT shows that at 1.36 contact attempts, a business only contacts just over 40% of leads.

Sales Reps, you can do better.

How Sales Reps Can Be Heroes

Dr. Oldroyd’s research is even more astounding when considering minutes, rather than hours. He discovered that the odds of contacting a lead if called within five minutes versus even 30 minutes are 100x greater. The odds of entering the Lead into your sales cycle (qualifying the lead) increase 21x if called within five minutes compared to 30 minutes.

The Marketo / XANT eBook states that with 6-9 contact attempts, sales reps could bump contact rates to 90+%.

Lets see how such an improvement in contact rate impacts number of qualified leads. (We’ll keep the % of contacted leads that become qualified constant at 20%.)

1500 leads x .4 contact rate x .2 qualification rate = 120 qualified leads
1500 leads x .9 contact rate x .2 qualification rate = 270 qualified leads

. . . more than 2X the number of qualified leads!

Sales reps can be heros by following these best practices identified in Dr. Oldroyd’s research:

• Respond to leads within 5 minutes
• Make 6 – 9 contact attempts

Do this and boost lead contact rates. Do this and boost lead qualification rates. Do this and boost customers and sales revenue.

Take Action Now

Marketers, Sales Reps, lets all work together to help the company increase sales revenue. First of all, you can learn how quickly and how often your sales team responds to hot leads. Grade your sales team with a ResponseAudit lead response evaluation from XANT.

The ResponseAudit takes a secret shopper approach to submitting a web lead on your site, then collects response data for about 2 weeks. You can get 1 free ResponseAudit per company per year.

Next, start to plan how to improve lead response efforts. See how the XANT dialer with Intelligent Outbound technology can boost sales, or see a live demo of the dialer. You’ll learn how the sales automation platform enables you to improve lead response time, increase contact and qualification rates, and boost sales.

What else can sales reps do to maintain a high value per lead? Leave your comments in the box below!

Get a Free Lead ResponseAudit

How well are your sales teams responding to leads? Participate in a free Lead ResponseAudit and see how efficient your sales team actually is.

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Download the eBook now!

Sales and Marketing are required to work together more than ever before. With the advent of the internet, prospects expect immediate results. That’s why it’s so important that marketing understand how they can get the right leads to sales allowing sales to contact those leads immediately – made possible through marketing and sales automation software.

In this new eBook, readers will learn best practices of sales and marketing from two industry leaders: Ken Krogue, President and co-Founder of XANT, and Jon Miller, VP of Marketing and co-Founder of Marketo.

Download the eBook now:

The Ultimate Revenue Engine: Maximizing Results through Inside Sales & Marketing Automation

Originally a webinar, this high-value content has been created into an eBook. Those who download the content will learn:

• The Changing Nature of the Buyer;
• How to Manage Leads;
• 7 Rules to Increase Contact Ratios; and
• Best Practices for Responding

Throughout the eBook are numerous supplemental content offers including research, white papers, webinars, and exclusive offers.

Download the free eBook and share it with other sales and marketing professionals who will find the content valuable. Be sure to also watch the original webinar featuring Ken Krogue and Jon Miller.

Follow XANT on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn for the latest inside sales industry news and best practices.

Free eBook: The Ultimate Revenue Engine

Learn how to dramatically increase revenue by combining sales and marketing automation.

Get eBook Now

Request a ResponseAudit. This lead response assessment enables a company to view real response times from the eyes of a hot lead.

ResponseAudit was introduced by XANT as an unbiased assessment tool for the curious or frustrated sales manager. The audit enables a company to benchmark their lead response times (through both email and telephone) and rep persistency in contacting leads against industry norms based on our  2007 published research findings*.

The fact is ResponseAudit has the ability to reveal what is really going on in the day-to-day activities of your sales team. For example, XANT recently audited a leading business outsourcing solutions company (their name is being withheld per request). This company, while extremely successful in their industry, honestly didn’t perform very well when it came to lead management. The exciting part of the story was what they did with the results of their ResponseAudit. They were able to turn their inside sales department around yielding significantly better response times.

Curious? Here’s a breakdown of how this company changed their lead management results in just three months:

• The average email first response time decreased by 2.5 hours.
• The total amount of emails sent increased from 18 at the beginning of the effort to 27 by the third month.
• The total number of attempts to contact went from 71 to 77 at the end of the study. This is an average of 4.53 attempts per lead versus 4.2 at the beginning.

Having ResponseAudit results is like going from managing blindly to managing with insight. A detailed analysis report highlights exactly how long it took your team to respond to a web lead based on when the submit button was hit, and how many leads were contacted.

Why wait? Submit your request for a lead response assessment now. Who knows what surprises you’ll have – could be great, or it could require some tweaking to your sales processes. Either way, you could be a sales hero! Don’t work harder, work smarter. Audit your lead response rates and rep persistence and improve your overall sales results.

*From research conducted by XANT and Dr. James Oldroyd of MIT and the Kellogg School of Management, it was determined that the odds of contacting a lead increase by 100 times if attempted within five minutes versus 30 minutes. More importantly, the odds of qualifying a lead increase by 21 times if attempted within five minutes versus 30 minutes.

Free Lead Resonse Management Study

Answer the question, “When should companies call Web-generated leads for optimal contact and qualification ratios?”

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Step 1: The Opening – This is where you introduce yourself, where you’re calling from, and why you’re calling. Reinforce what the lead expressed interest in.

Step 2: The Trust Ladder – In this step, you start as high up as you can on the trust ladder. (For an in-depth discussion, visit this previous blog.)

Step 3: Positioning – Where do you stand in the race? What does your company offer, and how is it different from competitors in your industry?

Step 4: Cool Feature and Key Benefit – What can you do and, more importantly, what can you do for me? It’s great if you can state a quantitative benefit.

Step 5: Proof Story – Why do you have credibility? What proof do you have that what you’re telling me is accurate? This is where you tell the success story of another customer.

Step 6: C2C (Commit to Continue) – Do you have time right now for me to show you how we can make your business more successful? Set the appointment as early as possible in order to maximize the percent of appointments held.

Here’s an example of a conversation you might hear from one of our reps held when calling new leads:

Hi! My name is Alex from XANT. I noticed that you requested we perform a ResponseAudit on your company. Ken Krogue asked me to contact you and share your results. As I’m sure you’re aware, we offer the leading software for immediate response for B2B companies. Our software allows you to call leads back in 9 to 15 seconds which increases your contact rates by 100 times across all your leads. I remember Dun & Bradstreet filled out a web form on our site and we called back within 9 second. They responded with, “Whatever you just did, I want to buy it!” As you can see this is a huge sales tool. Do you have time right now to go over your results with an available consultant and discuss how to improvement your response times?

Check out this cool infographic that shows the best practices for Lead Response Management.

Free Lead Resonse Management Study

Answer the question, “When should companies call Web-generated leads for optimal contact and qualification ratios?”

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I had the chance to personally deliver the Audit results to Symantec right on the Dreamforce show floor on the second to last day of the show.

This ResponseAudit broke the record for the most companies audited originally set at Dreamforce 2009 with 2875 companies audited. We also had 16 companies recognized as having responded in less that 5 minutes, which is the best practice, this is the same number of companies as in 2009. The average response time slipped from 41 hours 7 minutes in 2009 to 42 hours 18 minutes in 2011.

This is my favorite thing to do at a trade show because I get to meet everyone and I find that they are looking for me now when I come to share their audit results.

Author: Ken Krogue | Google+
Summary of Ken Krogue’s Forbes articles

Get a Free Lead ResponseAudit

How well are your sales teams responding to leads? Participate in a free Lead ResponseAudit and see how efficient your sales team actually is.

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