When it comes to business development, nothing is more important than how you treat your leads. You’ve spent time and likely marketing dollars to drive demand for your product or service, and a prospect has reached out to your firm for more information about what you offer. What you do next, and more importantly, how quickly you do it, have a significant impact on whether that lead becomes a client.
Lead response time is directly related to your likelihood of closing the deal. Some companies take hours or even days to respond to the fresh leads that enter their sales pipeline. Studies show that if you aren’t responding to leads within 5 minutes*, the risk of losing the sale increases exponentially each minute thereafter.
There are three reasons why you need to respond to leads as soon as possible:
- Your response time is a reflection of your responsiveness. If you wait for two days before replying to your prospect’s query, it signals a lackluster attitude when it comes to addressing time-sensitive needs.
- Prospects are likely to reach out to multiple competitors in a relatively short period of time. The longer you wait to respond to a lead, the more likely they are to be contacted by another company that may end up making the sale.
- The faster you respond, the fewer competitors your prospect will contact and the more likely you will be to win the client.
Numbers Don’t Lie
If your outbound sales team isn’t responding to leads quickly enough and breaking the 5-minute rule, you are risking an 80% decrease in lead qualifications. By reducing your average lead response time to less than 5 minutes you instantly pull ahead of 93% of the competition (given that average response times range from 10 minutes to several days). Lead response has a profound impact when you consider its implications on opportunity capture and the growth of your firm.
Getting Specific Insights To Your Business
Faster response times are just one of the many ways you can optimize your sales funnel and accelerate business development. Many businesses have countless inefficiencies in their processes that impede their ability to achieve their goals. Our advanced AI tools for business can help uncover smart insights specific to your pipeline that otherwise go unnoticed.
*Source: The Lead Response Management Study, LeadResponseManagement.org
