RELATED: Cold Calling the CEO – 7 Tips to Get Your Foot in the Founder’s Door

In this article:

1. Cold Calling Tips for Successful Lead Generation
2. Cold Calling Is Dead: Does Cold Calling Work Today?
3. Cold Calling Rules Today
4. Cold Calling Motivation for Sales Teams: What Sales Managers Can Do to Motivate Reps
5. Free eBook: The Art of Cold Calling and the Science of Contact Ratios

Seven Rules of Cold Calling and Responding to Leads

Click here to jump to the infographic.

Cold Calling Tips for Successful Lead Generation

When is the best time to cold call potential clients?

When it comes to cold calling a prospect, there are certain rules that should always be followed. Many of these rules came into existence due to the Lead Response Management Research Study, a breakthrough report that changed the industry.

Cold Calling Definition: The act of calling a potential customer whom you’ve never had contact with before.

The response time, or how quickly you call someone back, should be a no-brainer, but unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. Later on, the same study was repeated, on a much larger scale, and similar results were found.

Below are the seven rules of cold calling and responding to leads.

1. Immediacy

The best thing you can do is contact a lead within five minutes of them submitting a web form to present your product or service. If a sales rep doesn’t respond fast enough within 30 minutes, then the chances of contact and qualifying the lead drop 100 times.

You want to make sure that you are there right when a prospect’s interest in your product or service is still fresh. That way, you will be able to lead them further along the sales funnel faster.

2. Persistency

Another one of the cold calling techniques sales managers and salespeople should follow is this strategy: don’t give up!

Sales reps need to make between six and nine phone calls before they stop. Sadly, the majority of sales reps out there are only making one to two calls per lead before calling it quits.

The contact ratio is between 10% and 11%, and with that in mind, the sales rep who is making only one or two calls is only going to reach 10% to 20% of the leads. A word of advice for cold callers to increase your chance of getting positive results — be patient and persistent!

3. Optimize

Sometimes, calling people back isn’t the best idea.

Depending on your company and your customers, some times are better than others to call at. Try to figure out when it’s a good time to start calling prospects, especially if you’re targeting business owners.

They usually have a very slim window of opportunity for cold calling. Finding out the best time to cold call can really help your sales process.

4. Time of Day

If there’s one thing that can hinder you, it’s calling at the wrong time.

Some of the best times to call are between 8:00 to 9:00 a.m. and 4:00 to 5:00 p.m., assuming you’re calling within your time zone (if not, then adjust for where you’re calling). Try to determine when it’s a bad time for your prospective customer and never call during that time!

This is why it’s important to do your research about a prospect before you even start to call them. That way, you don’t waste your time trying to connect with an unavailable prospect.

5. Day of Week

Want to know when the best day of the week is to call? Guess what, it’s not Tuesday (it’s actually the worst!).

Both Wednesday and Thursday are some of the best days to call people, believe it or not! However, it might be different for your own company, so you’ll just have to run some tests and find out which days of the week are the best and worst for you to be making calls.

You can simply collect data by running a trial yourself and seeing the days when you’re making more contact with prospects. After all, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to cold calling.

RELATED: A Guide To Cold Calling Basics

6. Get Direct Dial Numbers

The best way to reach someone is if you have the phone number that is best to reach them at. By making sure your sales reps have mastered this technique, you’ll find that their ability to contact leads will go up!

Sometimes, the numbers you get aren’t for the decision maker of the organization. If this is the case, it might take a longer time to actually get somewhere with that company.

Knowing who you’re calling and the role they play in the organization is useful information that’ll help you qualify leads.

7. Local Presence

This is a technology tool rather than one of the other cold calling techniques.

Local presence is when you are calling leads from one side of the country to the other, and yet, on the lead’s phone, they see a local phone number. If you want your lead to pick up when you call, an area code that shares their area code will increase the chances of them answering.

XANT‘s tool, Playbooks, offers Global Local Presence to calls placed to the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

Cold Calling Is Dead: Does Cold Calling Work Today?

Some articles these days have headlines such as “Cold Calling is Dead,” or the like. Among the reasons they include to justify this are:

• Some claim the younger generation don’t want to answer unsolicited calls, especially from a number they’re not familiar with. This makes it hard to cold call.
• Another reason cited for the “demise” of cold calling is because the caller doesn’t want to make what they’re scared might be viewed as “nuisance calls.”

If the reps themselves don’t want to do the cold sales calls and no one wants to receive calls unsolicited, then is cold calling really dead? Not quite.

Instead, it’s safer to say that cold calling has changed.

Cold Calling Rules Today

How has cold calling changed? Well, it’s simply moved one step down the sales process.

• Unwanted telemarketing calls are no longer your best bet for connecting with prospects. Sales professionals need to learn that sales prospecting won’t go any better for them if they continue going for cold calls as the first step in their sales process.
• Instead of an outright cold call, you should “warm” things up a bit first. So, the more modern take of a cold call is a warm call.
• Before you connect with a prospect through a call, you should establish an initial connection with them first. You can do this either through a cold email or even through a message on social media.

Cold Calling Motivation for Sales Teams: What Sales Managers Can Do to Motivate Reps

Aside from changing how you normally do your cold calling campaign by moving it a little further down the sales process, sales leaders should also motivate your sales team to make more of these calls.

Since a lot of newer sales reps might be more hesitant of making calls, you can encourage them to do so in many ways.

• You can do it yourself, then show them how to do it. Demonstrate how you’d do it, which will give them an idea of what they should be doing when it’s them on the line. Some reps just need a little bit of guidance to give their confidence a boost.
• Another way to motivate sales reps is to make more cold calls is by showing them the statistics that cold calling still works. Once you’ve provided them with evidence that cold calling still works, they’ll feel more inclined to do it, too.
• Sharing the value of research to them. Reps may feel demotivated to do cold calling since they’re scared of rejection or bad conversations. However, if they do their research on the lead or company first, it’ll be easier for them to develop a rapport with the person on the other end of the line.

Don’t forget to download, save, or share this handy infographic for reference:

Check out the video below to learn more about 5 rules of cold calling and responding to leads:

So when is the best time to cold call? I’m sure there are other ways out there to increase the success with cold calling leads and prospects, and what I have shared with you are just some of them.

I hope this guide to cold calling helps you understand how to make the most of your cold calling efforts so that you can successfully generate leads and get more conversions.

Free eBook: The Art of Cold Calling and the Science of Contact Ratios

Gain access to cold calling best practices from industry experts Ken Krogue and Kraig Kleeman.

Get Cold Calling eBook Now

What are some of the ways you have found that have increased your own success? Share your own cold calling tips with us in the comments section below!

Up Next:

• Cold Calling is NOT Dead: How We Built 1.1M in Pipeline Using the Phone
• What Is Cold Calling? | Everything You Need To Know
• Salesperson Skills Of Top Performers [INFOGRAPHIC]

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on March 22, 2013, and has been updated for quality and relevancy.

RELATED: How to Transform Customer Service into a Sales Machine

In this article:

1. What Is Customer Loyalty and Why Should You Invest in It?
2. Establishing Excellent Customer Service to Build and Maintain Brand Loyalty
   1. Capture, Case, and Fix Issues
   2. Get NPS Score with Comments
   3. Case and Fix Comments
   4. Call and Dig for More Issues
   5. Commit to Earn Loyalty (Comments / Referrals)
   6. Fix All Issues to Earn Consumer Loyalty
   7. Get New NPS Score
   8. Ask for Comments/Referrals
3. Additional Customer Retention Tips You Can Apply
   1. Communicate with Your Customers in a Personalized Way
   2. Use Social Selling to Engage with Your Customers
   3. Create Customer Loyalty Programs
   4. Make Customer Experience Easier
4. Why Is Customer Retention Important? | The Benefits of Customer Loyalty

Tips for Building and Maintaining Customer Loyalty to Boost Your Image

What Is Customer Loyalty and Why Should You Invest in It?

Customer Loyalty Definition: This refers to the customer’s willingness to make repeat purchases or work with a business again. This comes from satisfactory customer experience and the value the customer gets from a business’s products and services.

A loyal customer will buy from you even if you’re not on sale. They’re the ones you can depend on to recommend you to their family and friends.

For these reasons, it’s important to build and maintain a large pool of loyal customers to keep you afloat even during slump seasons.

If you didn’t know it already, your most valuable customers are repeat buyers. They may not always make big purchases, but over time, their continuous purchase may even top those of your one-time, big-time buyers.

If your customers are happy, they tend to spend more on you more often. You should aim to establish reciprocal customer loyalty, a kind of relationship that benefits both the customer and the brand.

Establishing Excellent Customer Service to Build and Maintain Brand Loyalty

You know you’re doing something right if you can develop loyal customers. Perhaps the more difficult challenge is maintaining loyal customers.

Once your customers’ experience exceeds their expectations, they’re bound to become your business’ unofficial brand ambassadors. Not only will your existing customers keep patronizing your business, but they’ll also be sharing their experience with their acquaintances.

This builds up your company’s image even without spending more on marketing.

So what’s the key? The first principle of customer loyalty is following the Golden Rule — treat others as you want them to treat you.

Then follow this 8-step cycle to build and maintain customer loyalty:

1. Capture, Case, and Fix Issues

This is a no-brainer. If you want to keep your customers and build loyalty, you need to find what their pain points with your company are.

Capture what is wrong, get someone working on it, and fix the customer issues. Remember, returning to this throughout the process is vital.

It’s important to identify the problems consumers face and address them as soon as possible to earn loyalty points. This way, even if they encounter some difficulties, these customers will still become your business’ advocates.

2. Get NPS Score with Comments

Make sure to check your Net Promoter Score (NPS) to find where you stand with your clients. Get their comments and insights on how your company is doing and how satisfied they are.

You’ll want to keep track of this score and react to any significant changes, whether positive or negative.

Net Promoter Score Definition: This management tool determines customer loyalty by measuring a consumer’s willingness to recommend the business’ great service to other people.

3. Case and Fix Comments

Identifying customer complaints is one thing, but earning loyalty depends on how fast the company fixes and corrects their mistakes. This creates a positive experience despite the initial bump in the road.

Go through the NPS comments and try to fix the problems your customers mentioned. Create a case in your system for development and have your team start working on it as soon as possible.

Additionally, address the issues the customers expressed, whether it’s about a sales rep’s performance on the phone, customer service, or the product itself. Your client will be appreciative you’re taking their feedback seriously and proactively making their experience better.

4. Call and Dig for More Issues

Connecting with customers to improve their experience

Now that your team is trying to fix the problems your customers mentioned, go back and dig a little deeper. Ask and see if there’s anything else you can do to make your customers’ experience with your company more enjoyable.

Don’t just focus on recent problems — also ask about issues your customers experienced in the past. Sometimes, people encounter difficulties but they choose to not report them, or simply forget to do so.

5. Commit to Earn Loyalty (Comments / Referrals)

Commit to earning the loyalty of your customers. Once you’ve fixed the problems they complained about, get back in touch with them and check if they’ve seen an improvement.

With the ones who are happy with you, ask for referrals and comments you can put out on your web page.

Again, ask about issues the customers might have that you weren’t able to address efficiently, as they might go unreported and unresolved. This will show you’re consistent, keeping true to your word, and genuinely care about your customers’ satisfaction.

RELATED: The 6 Principles of Customer Service

6. Fix All Issues to Earn Consumer Loyalty

If an issue has been brought to your attention, get them fixed! Are you seeing a pattern yet?

You need to always be trying to fix problems your customers might have.

7. Get New NPS Score

Once you’ve fixed everything your customers requested and a little time has passed since your last NPS survey, measure your new NPS score to see where your company stands.

This way, you will be able to determine if you achieved customer satisfaction with the solutions you implemented.

8. Ask for Comments/Referrals

While you’re measuring your NPS score, you might as well ask for your customers’ comments and referrals.

The most important thing in this 8-step process is that it’s a continuous cycle. In order to retain customer loyalty, you need to keep this process active.

Put your customers first and the results will surely be worth it.

A little bit of effort goes a long way in improving your relationship with customers and encouraging them to advocate for your brand. When you go the extra mile for your clientele, you encourage them to stay with you while attracting new customers along the way.

Additional Customer Retention Tips You Can Apply

Aside from the 8-step process we discussed, there are also other ways you can add value to your customers and turn them into brand advocates:

1. Communicate with Your Customers in a Personalized Way

Personalizing emails for better customer retention

The fact of the matter is, there are instances when sales reps don’t spend time in selling as much as they should. Yet, that shouldn’t stop them from communicating with your customers in a personalized way.

Instead of sending out generic and template messages every time, encourage your reps to know the customer prior to reaching out to them. This way, they can craft a message that hits the right points and that’s persuasive enough for customers to book a meeting.

Your sales reps can also leverage email marketing to reach out to customers for announcements and on special occasions. This will reinforce your sales reps’ intention to build a solid relationship with your clientele.

2. Use Social Selling to Engage with Your Customers

Social selling is one platform where you can build customer loyalty. Here, you can leverage your social networks to prospect and build a solid relationship with your market.

You can respond to customer queries and concerns real-time and address them efficiently through good community management. You can also guide them along the buying process by providing relevant and targeted content.

With consistent engagement, you can develop customer loyalty through social selling.

3. Create Customer Loyalty Programs

This is a common practice in the retail and B2C industries. If you’re a B2B company, there are also ways for you to design your own customer loyalty program.

You can offer loyalty points or purchase discounts for mailing list signups. This is an easy way for your customers to earn a discount and for you to expand your email marketing reach.

You can also start a referral program. Your clients can earn incentives by recommending your products and services to their network.

This is a good way to leverage the credible testimonies of your satisfied customers through word of mouth advertising.

A good loyalty program with easy-to-reach rewards attracts individual customers and businesses alike. The rewards don’t even have to be extravagant — they just have to bring good value to your target market.

4. Make Customer Experience Easier

You can make the customer experience easier by leveraging your CRM and other automation systems. Make sure your sales reps are encoding accurate and detailed information about your customers into the system.

This way, anyone from your team can interact with any customer and know what they need and how to address it. Take advantage of automated systems to give your customers a seamless and convenient customer experience.

Why Is Customer Retention Important? | The Benefits of Customer Loyalty

To enjoy the benefits of customer loyalty, you must first give to your customers. There are several ways on how you can drive customer loyalty, but the most basic principles you should apply are the following:

• Produce products and services that have good value to your clients.
• Ensure positive customer experience for each person in every single transaction.
• Never leave your customers unsatisfied with your product or service.
• Always uphold your brand values and ethics.

As you increase your loyal customer base, here are the benefits you can enjoy:

• Incur a lesser cost in maintaining your customer base
• Converted customers and repeat buyers
• Compounding revenue from consistent purchases made
• Increased sales from product suggestions and upsells
• Free advertising by way of word of mouth from loyal customers
• Positive reviews on your business, products, and services
• Gain customers who have an emotional connection with your brand

Investing in customer retention won’t only benefit your customers, but it’ll also bring value to your brand.

When you purposefully practice excellent business values and ethics, you’ll build a strong brand with a good reputation. That is something money can’t buy, and what customers will always appreciate and recognize.

Measuring customer loyalty is an important practice to improve your business. With a customer retention system in place, you’ll be able to increase your loyal customers.

In turn, they will help spread the word on your excellent customer service and attract new customers.

We hope this guide gave you new insights on how you can build and maintain customer loyalty in your business.

What measures do you put in place to gain and maintain loyal customers? Share them with us in the comments section below!

• The Secret to Repeat Business: 5 Tips to Building a Great Customer Experience
• How to Sell to Highly Informed Customers with Ease
• No More Sci-Fi Talk: 5 Things AI Can Do For Your Business Right Now

RELATED: The Inbound vs. Outbound Process For Lead Response — What You Need To Know

In this article:

1. An Introduction to Inbound Leads
   1. Respond to High Priority Inbound Leads in Under 5 Minutes
   2. Find the Balance Between Speed and Score
   3. Don’t Ever Reach out and Start a Conversation with This Line: “May I Help You”?
   4. People Who Download Your Content Will Most Likely Never Read It
   5. Prospects Rarely Want to Talk to a Salesperson
   6. Prospects Are Impressed with Hustle
   7. If You’re Going to Reach Out, Do It Immediately and Don’t Wait for a Couple of Days
   8. Account-Based Sales Don’t Have to Equal a Slow Response

Sales Lead Management | Tips to Get Your Prospects

Sales Lead Management Definition: Sales lead management is a set of practices, systems, and methodologies that help generate prospective customers in businesses. This practice, system, or methodology operates through different types of sales programs and campaigns.

An Introduction to Inbound Leads

Discussing inbound leads with coworkers

Responding to inbound leads shouldn’t be rocket science; however, in some cases, the sales lead management process is difficult to implement. I was mind-blown a few months ago when I saw there was actually a debate online on whether you should respond to inbound leads immediately or give them a few days.

Now, I know that a prospect needs time to get familiar with your company and your content before jumping into a sales conversation. However, all the data we have gathered from analyzing lead responses from over 4,000 companies prove otherwise.

You can download the “Response Audit” study if you don’t believe me – or check out this bite-sized infographic to summarize lead response management practices – and how companies are performing today.

I’ll give you a hint – it’s not pretty.

1. Respond to High Priority Inbound Leads in Under 5 Minutes

If someone comes to your website and fills out a form or asks for a demo, you need to answer them immediately. There is good data to back up this information: if you respond in under 5 minutes to your sales lead, you’re 100 times more likely to contact them and 21 times more likely to get them into your pipeline.

2. Find the Balance Between Speed and Score

I was consulting with a company in New York at one point. They received about 10 leads per person per month, and they were struggling for a pipeline.

They took every lead seriously by responding quickly to them. When it comes to another company in Los Angeles, they had 35,000 inbound free trials a month.

They could not possibly respond to all of them, so they only responded to leads with a predictive score of A or B. The big question is – what does your data say?

3. Don’t Ever Reach out and Start a Conversation with This Line: “May I Help You”?

Responding to leads creatively

You need to be different than anyone else in getting your sales leads. Go to a challenging model of teaching, tailor, and take control.

The reason I personally download online content is that I have a problem. If you’re an expert, solving the problem with that content, I want you to tell me what I’m supposed to do.

I love the consultative approach to selling because it shows you care about your prospect and solve their problems – not just talk about your product.

4. People Who Download Your Content Will Most Likely Never Read It

People sometimes act like it’s a big deal if you contact them and they didn’t have the chance to read your content yet. News flash: people don’t read your content anyway.

Even if you give them a couple of days, they generally won’t read it, and they won’t wait for you with detailed questions about it.

RELATED: 5 Prospecting Myths Debunked

5. Prospects Rarely Want to Talk to a Salesperson

When someone downloads an eBook or white paper, they don’t want to talk to anyone yet – that’s a common misbelief.

Are prospects ever dying to talk to a salesperson? Are you suggesting they will want to talk to you “later”?

I don’t believe that.

Prospects want to talk to a salesperson when they call in or when they request to be contacted. Besides that, they are not anxiously waiting for salespeople to bother them.

Sales is about helping people – making them understand that they need you when they don’t think they do.

6. Prospects Are Impressed with Hustle

I’ve been in the research game for sales management for a while now. One thing that stands out to me as the most common qualitative answer to people responding quickly to leads is “Wow.”

Sure, there will be people who will be bothered – but they are in the loud minority. Sales is not about making every single person happy; it’s about doing what brings results in the long term.

7. If You’re Going to Reach Out, Do It Immediately and Don’t Wait for a Couple of Days

Some advocates are waiting multiple days to contact their qualified leads, without really accounting for a prospect’s short attention span. All the data we have say the longer you wait, the less chance you have to get in touch with a person – and the lower the chance to get them into your pipeline.

I know it feels nicer to wait until the prospect is ready, but data on lead management solution say it’s the wrong approach.

8. Account-Based Sales Don’t Have to Equal a Slow Response

A lot of people believe that with account-based sales (ABS), you should send leads to account executives and then let them follow up when they can as part of their overall strategy. But, that doesn’t apply to any situation in a sales lead management system.

You need to know what your data say and act accordingly. I’ve now seen multiple companies get rid of their inbound response teams just to replace them in 6-12 months when the numbers went south.

Last but not least, you should know that the average market responds to inbound leads in about 38 hours.

If you thought you’re being different by responding quickly – you’re not.

Marketing teams should do what’s best for your customers and respond quickly to your leads.

To learn more about responding to inbound leads, watch this video from our VP, Gabe Larsen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTz_oCzE79I

With these tips for sales lead management, generating your leads will be more effective. Just remember to always respond in less than five minutes to increase the chances of successfully getting them. Apply these lead generation tips now and see results in no time.

What other sales lead management tips can you add to the ones mentioned above? Share them in the comments section.

Up Next: 

• Prospecting At Scale To Grow Sales
• 10 Secrets For Responding To Inbound Leads
• Do You Know What Your Sales Team Is Doing With Inbound Leads?

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on February 1, 2018, and has been updated for quality and relevancy.

This guide approaches both inbound and outbound leads response management, as well as business-specific factors like transactional or relational sales models, lead response time and persistency best practices.

I truly believe that this resource will be vital for all sales reps (and sales development reps, for that matter) in the following years, and here’s why.

Only 64% of companies report that sales reps reach quota attainment. With ever-rising quotas and an increasingly fierce competition, sales leaders have an average tenure in their positions of only 18 months.

That’s an awfully short time for someone to be able to truly make an impact and produce growth.

Lead Response Times: Early Bird Gets the Lead

Our recent Response Audit report on how companies respond to leads showed that on average, a client will receive a response in 39 hours, and have at least two follow-up contact attempts. During the study, we introduced fictitious leads into company’s online forms, and had our AI systems measure their response immediacy and persistency. 

But is this right?

Best practices show you need to respond to inbound leads within 5 minutes of them contacting you. After the first five minutes, the chances of contacting and qualifying leads drop significantly.

And while sales reps are trying hard and some companies truly have their lead response strategy together, we still have a long way to go when it comes to responding to leads. Sometimes, it’s the sheer quantity of administrative tasks that bogs down activity in sales teams: introducing call notes to the CRM, recording voicemails, writing emails or sorting and filtering client lists to find the highest value leads are all huge time-sucks for sales reps.

If you want to know what your lead response time is, you can enter our Response Audit study here.

The Inbound and Outbound Lead Response Guide

The market demographics are quickly changing, and pretty soon all your buyers will consist of millenials, who are used to the convenience and instant gratification of the online environment. Sales reps need to think fast on their feet to reach this audience. There’s also a difference between how you manage your inbound lead response vs. outbound, and this will translate into: 

• How many times you should follow-up on inbound vs. outbound leads
• What methods of communication work best for each type of lead
• How your sales model (transactional vs. relational sales) changes your lead response strategy

Sales reps need to aadapt technologies and move to sales systems and practices which allow them to incorporate this type of complexity into their lead response activities. Both immediacy and persistency are key to closing the deal.

Download the “Inbound and Outbound Lead Response Guide” infographic to see exactly how you should be responding today to your most valuable leads.

But responding to inside sales leads (or marketing generated leads) and if necessary following up with prospects is both an art and a science. Inbound leads are closer to a sale in the buyer’s journey, thus are very valuable to a company.

Inbound Selling

Inbound sellers is when a rep reaches out to someone who knows your company with a certain sequence of sales activities.

Outbound Selling

An outbound cadence, is when a rep reaches out to someone who doesn’t know your company via email, phone or other methods of communication.

Both inbound and outbound reps will have to follow a certain lead response process which is specific to their position and to the business model they are in. We call this sequence of activities a ‘sales cadence.’

When sales cadences are executed correctly, they can nearly double contact rates for sales professionals. But what is the correct sequence for inbound and outbound reps?

XANT has the data to show the right way to respond to inbound leads. We’ve studied over 14,000+ cadences, made up of 144,000+ total activities, across nearly 9,000 companies, to show the best sales activity sequences that work with both sales models.

How Many Times Should You Call?

Sales reps are naturally optimistic– and so they should be, as their profession entails dealing with rejection on a daily basis. But when it comes to self-reporting activities, this can backfire. When asked how many times they attempt to contact a lead, sales reps say they do about 15.04 contact attempts (TOPO research).

Looking at XANT data, the reality paints a different picture– this number is  only 4.05. There is clearly a disconnect between what people say they do, versus what they actually do.

So, what is the optimal amount of touches?

Data shows that for inbound cadences you can do up to ten total attempts with the sweet spot at six attempts and for an outbound cadence you should do up to six total attempts with the sweet spot being at three attempts. Going past these numbers is not necessary bad, it’s is just less effective.

Sales Communication Media

Should you call, or should you email? Sales communication media is the channel you are choosing for contacting your prospect. There are certain media patterns that you can use, by combining communication channels, which yield amazing results.

You can get very creative with media, as there are six communication channels you can use: email, phone calls, voicemail, texting, social media and direct mail.

Most sales professionals these days are in love with email, because it’s more convenient. But the truth is, while picking up the phone is awkward, it’s also more productive.

When we looked at most optimal cadences, for inbound the most successful cadence was Call – Voicemail – Email repeated between 6-10 touches. Unfortunately this combination was only used 4.7% of the time.

Also, using multiple communication methods is always more effective than using just one.

How Long Should You Persist?

There’s something to be said about sales reps that know when to quit– and when to do so gracefully. This reminds me of a quip I heard about salespeople recently, where a young door-to-door salesman was selling, off all things– burial plots. Upon the prospect responding that he already has a plot in another cemetery, the salesman decides to cut his losses and responds: “I hope you’ll be very happy there…”

And while there is no one-size fits all for every industry and product, research shows there is a certain number of attempts which is ideal to maximize chances of contacting a prospect– without annoying them to death.

For inbound leads, reps should have cadences that last up to ten days while outbound target accounts should last up to twelve days. Like attempts, it is not necessarily bad to go past these date ranges, it is just less effective.

Should I Give Prospects a Breather Between Attempts?

And while research shows you need to make at least six attempts to make sure you get a chance to talk to a prospect, you can’t call them every single day. That’s a sure-fire way to get on somebody’s ignore list.

Reps should space their contact attempts up to two days, to make sure their prospects get to breathe in between conversations– but don’t forget who they are talking to.

Content – What Do I Say In My Sales Messages?

Content is the messaging used with your sales activities– for the purpose of our research, we considered only emails, voicemails, texts, videos, and direct mailers to initiate contact or educate the buyer.

The typical prospecting email is 362 words and nearly half of voicemails were over 30 seconds.

This is really interesting, because when analyzing best practices across both inbound and outbound, emails with less than 300 words did perform better than emails with over 300 words and voicemails under 30 seconds is more optimal than over 30 seconds.

If you’re looking for more tips on how to perfect your strategy on responding to inbound leads, we’ve got you covered. Watch the webinar “10 Secrets For Responding to Inbound Leads”– it’s free and you can register online!

Most Companies Are Slow to Respond to Leads and Not Persistent

XANT data from a study of 4,732 leads shows sales teams are slow to respond to leads and are not persistent in the follow-up.

In fact, if you want to get in touch with a company right now, they will respond in about 44 hours, on average. Meanwhile, best practices from MIT research show optimal phone response times should be around 5 minutes.

Moreover, if they want to call you back, sales reps will follow up for about 4.47 times. Meanwhile, the recommended persistency is around 12 touches.

I was suprised to see these results, because I thought by now lead response time should be a major sales KPI (key performance indicator) or any team. How fast you respond to leads is major predictor of sales success.

The Internet has made us all impatient and fickle. Clients are getting more and more digitally savvy and they are odering from stores like Amazon all the time. They expect immediacy in all of their interaction with vendors, and this isn’t going to change anytime soon.

Sales teams, including those in the B2B sales environment, need to start reacting at lightning speed. Or, they need to get closer to the urgency that exists in a B2C support team. Sales done the old way just isn’t going to work anymore.

Is Your Sales Team Sitting on Valuable Inbound Leads?

At XANT, we regularly test out companies to try and find out how they respond to leads. XANT Labs is the research arm of the company, and we’re well equipped to test the immediacy and persistence of your inbound lead response.

You can take the Response Audit here from XANT to see how your team is doing on lead response. Think of it as ‘secret shopping’ for inbound sales teams. Just enter the information for your company and in about 10 business days you’ll find out:

• How fast your team responds to leads
• What are the channels of communications they use for lead follow-up
• How persistent your team is in following up on inbound leads

Recent research has shown that more often than not, sales reps give up too soon on trying to contact leads. The most common sales follow-up sequence used is one single email (used by 30 percent of sales reps), with the second most popular strategy as one single call and a voicemail.

Best Practices for Sales Follow-up

This contradicts best practices which show sales reps must make at least six attempts to maximize their chances of making contact.

Or, should they?

These practices for lead response management were established by a study created by Dr. James B. Oldroyd, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2007.

And while there is still value in Dr. Oldroyd’s research (immediacy in response and persistence are key to sales performance), modern sales reps need more than this to be successful. We are in an era of customer empowerment, where the customer does his own research, is able to compare vendors and other customer reviews. Moreover, we are in an era where the customer decides where he spends his time and a 15-minute conversation is hard to achieve.

Personalization of your sales approach, as well as that of the messaging and follow-up strategy are going to be pivotal to a sales team’s success.

You can’t choose this randomly. You need to carefully plan it out and account for factors like:

• The sales model used (transactional vs. relational)
• Whether the team is doing lots of outbound calls or taking inbound leads
• How and when does the customer prefer to be contacted?

Once you figure out these key elements of your business, you can create a custom sales follow-up strategy to rule them all.

Create A Customized Sales Follow-up Strategy

The “Definitive Guide to Sales Cadence” by Gabe Larsen has all you need to create this strategy. This is an in-depth, powerful guide to structuring a sales cadence. To save you some time, we’ve created a mini-version of the most important facts you need to know before working on your follow-up strategy, summarized from the book.

This will answer five of the most important questions sales professionals have before contacting leads:

Contact Attempts: How many times should you try to contact a lead?

Communication Media: How many communication channels should you use?

Duration of a Cadence: How long should you keep contacting a prospect?

Spacing Between Attempts: How long should you wait between contact attempts?

Sales Content: What kind of content should you use?

All these answers will be customized based on your sales model and type of transaction. You can see the infographic below for the answers, or get the full eBook here.

  Get the eBook.

There are two key points to follow with inbound leads:

1. Immediacy in Handling Inbound Leads

When handling inbound leads, it’s all about immediacy. You have leads coming in, you need to get to them fast. There are two important deadlines: 5 minutes, and 24 hours since they reached out.

Ideally you should answer a lead in under 5 minutes. You really don’t want to be in the 24 hour range with your reply.

In the first two days after a lead contacts you, you should get to as many people as you can.

2. Put Them Back in the Funnel

If your initial contact with a lead is not successful, make sure you have a blitz campaign set up. The blitz campaign should tell them a bit more about you and how you can help them.

After 10 to 15 days where you hit them with your blitz campaign, where you explain your intent and what you do. After the blitz campaign, you enter them into a drip campaign.

Here’s the secret: with the drip campaign, if they interact with your content, put them back in the funnel for the blitz campaign. This way, they get a chance to learn about your offer again.

Hope this helps you the next time you get another inbound lead. At XANT, we are aces of lead management – and the AI-powered technology really makes a difference for the immediacy of your response rates.

Think you have a good cadence? Use the link below to assess it . . .

The G Show is Gabe Larsen’s weekly show about the sales industry. We post short videos weekly to give you the scoop on what’s happening in the sales industry, and what strategies sales reps are using to reach their numbers.

Subscribe to the DailyG below:

Sales teams are clearly still struggling to respond quickly to website leads. XANT Labs’ latest research shows sales leaders are trying to address this problem by relying on automated emails.

While autoresponder emails go out much more quickly — they were sent 6,165% faster on average than personalized emails in our latest ResponseAudit study — they are much less effective than personalized emails and telephone follow-up.

The groundbreaking research we conducted several years ago in conjunction with Dr. James Oldroyd — published in the Harvard Business Review — revealed that you are 100 times more likely to contact a lead and 21 times more likely to qualify it if you call within 5 minutes than if you wait 30 minutes.

Immediate response remains elusive

Our newest study makes it clear that many sales organizations see the need for immediate response but can’t figure out how to execute on it with existing staff and resources.

They’re hoping auto-generated emails will create an illusion of immediacy that will buy their sales reps more time to respond.

It’s an interesting theory. The problem is, it’s producing awful follow-up emails like this:

Thank you for the inquiry you submitted to Company ABC. This is an automated response to confirm that we have received your message.

Whilst we do our best to answer as soon as possible, depending on the nature of your inquiry, it could take a number of days for a Company ABC expert to respond to your message.

Seriously? If immediate response is the goal, emails like that are completely useless.

It basically tells the customer that this company does not make it a priority to follow up quickly. Their experts are too busy to respond right away — when the customer wants to talk.

A common sales challenge

Many sales teams struggle to respond quickly to leads. In 2016, InsideSales Labs conducted a ResponseAudit study of 4,723 companies and the results were fascinating.

A ResponseAudit is like a secret shopper program for website leads. We enter a lead on your website and track how fast your sales reps respond and how persistent they are.

The average response time for autoresponse emails was 46 minutes and 11 seconds while the average response time for personalized emails was 48 hours and 2 minutes, making personalized emails 6,165% slower than autoresponders.  

Can you really afford to wait two full days before a rep follows up on your sales leads?

The research indicates that’s a costly mistake.

See the full ResponseAudit Report.

Inbound marketing has become such an important part of any B2B growth strategy that there have been countless articles, such as Harvard Business Review’s piece, that cover the importance of effective lead management.  The topic has even led to scientific research about the optimal time to contact web-generated leads.

What does this research say?

While Lead Response Management (LRM) isn’t a new concept and every business fundamentally understands that they need to reach out quickly and professionally to new prospects, how effectively are they doing this? Research shows that both speed and persistency matter when responding to leads. Not only are the odds of contacting leads within five minutes 100 times greater than calling them after 30 minutes, but the chances of a lead entering the sales cycle increase by a significant 21 times.  In addition, making six to nine contact attempts and using a mix of email, voicemail and phone calls can increase contact rates to more than 90%.

The media sector is missing the opportunity

The millions invested by the media sector into inbound marketing strategies, content and technology show that the value of generating incoming leads is well understood. Indeed, these new approaches to demand generation are business critical for many of the media industry’s giants. Despite all of this, the average media company is still struggling to respond effectively to their marketing-generated inquiries.

How do we know this?

Over the course of February and March 2016, XANT surveyed more than 50 media and business information organizations to ascertain how quickly and persistently they responded to web-based leads.

What did we find?

• The overall response rate (62%) was better than the UK 2015 average (46%)
• Only 17% of those surveyed phoned inbound leads
• The speed of response is slow, taking an average of 11 hours by phone and 36 hours through email
• The response persistence (1.8 attempts) is far below the 2015 UK average of 2.39 attempts and well below best practice standards

So, in short, media businesses are generally not calling leads back, taking too long to respond (when they are trying at all) and giving up too easily on contact follow-ups.

Why does this matter?

Every time a prospect slips through the cracks, you’re wasting the time, money and effort it took to produce that lead in the first place. With the average lead costing somewhere around €40, this is significant waste.

Industry data suggests that 45% of inbound inquirers end up buying and 78% buy from the first vendor to respond to their web inquiry. No business can afford these missed opportunities, especially the typical media business trying to rejuvenate its revenues.

Given the disruption and challenging business climate within the media sector, it is surprising that more are not capitalizing on the “low-hanging fruit” of hot inbound leads. There remains an opportunity for media firms to create a competitive advantage by adopting best practices in lead response.

This is great news for any media business. You don’t need a 12-month sales transformation project to develop a competitive advantage. Just get sales and marketing to make some simple process changes and ensure the sales teams work them.

The bottom line: Response times to new sales leads should be measured in minutes and seconds, not hours or days.

Want to know more?

Download this free eBook and learn how to tightly align your sales and marketing processes.