Reading an interesting research summary in HBR that I wanted to share.
Whether you are a B2B or B2C company, the time taken to respond to prospects stimulus online can significantly change the ROI of your web presence. As this research shows, many firms are too slow to follow up on these leads. As HBR states:
- 37% responded within an hour
- 16% within one to 24 hours
- 24% took more than 24 hours
- and 23% never responded at all!
As companies are investing significantly to get prospects out of the web, they should have a much better turnaround, don't you think?
Reasons not to do so include retrieving leads from CRM daily rather than on the fly, sales forces focusing on their own generated leads and rules for leads dispatching not effective enough ("fairness" can be damageable).
Where are you with this? Better know where your marketing ROI is headed sooner than later.
Happy Easter.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
2 comments:
Hello Emmanuel, this is a interesting study, i just want to share something that i read a few days ago, "HOW LONG BEFORE A HOT LEAD GOES COLD?For most B2B markets, the correct answer is one hour, after which the lead is no longer “hot.” It’s still a lead, but it’s no better than any old lead taken from a list.
Oldroyd’s study revealed that, in B2B selling environments, the best odds of qualifying a lead happen within 20 minutes after interest is shown. However, calling within 5 minutes is 21 times more likely to result in a qualified prospect than if you wait half an hour.
Some industries aren’t quite so time-sensitive. In financial services, for example, as long as you call a hot lead within 24 hours, you still have a chance to qualify the lead and move it into your pipeline.
But that’s the exception rather than the rule, and calling quickly is ALWAYS massively more effective.
"
from other source i read this: "If you’re working from a website feed, the best time to call is within 5 minutes from the time that the potential prospect was viewing your website. Turns out you are 4 times more likely to successfully qualify a lead if you call within 5 minutes than if you call between 5 and 10 minutes. And you are 21 times more likely to qualify a lead if you call within 5 minutes than if you wait for 30 minutes."
The above is based upon the research of Dr. James Oldroyd (from the Korean business school SKK GSB) who recently examined and analyzed the electronic logs of more than a million cold calls, made by thousands of sales professionals inside approximately 50 companies.
So for me now the challenge is how to delivery and integrate in ERP or CRM systems this feeds from websites and social networks and delivery them to sales people in realtime in order to qualify this leads.
What you think about this?
Hi Jorge,
Good feedback. It tends to support the idea that B2B or B2C doesn't really make a big difference when it gets down to answering individuals. We're all impatient, aren't we? ;-)
You are right, we need to accomodate ERP/CRM systems to be able to accomodate properly a mix of incoming sollicitation (btw, I didn't mention twitter which is also a way for customer to interact with the brand).
Now as the proper person in the company might not always be available to turn around to the prospect, we need some collaborative answering to empower field representative to get back quick to prospects.
Then my turn to ask: then what do you think about collaborative filtering? A very good way to rely on collective intelligence to know who one needs to answer to and set priorities.... to be continued
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