So much ink is spilled over driving traffic, generating leads and conversion… one might conclude that that’s all that matters. But equally important… what’s happening to all those leads? More specifically, how long does it take you to respond to them? For B2Bs, lead response is kind of like baggage claim for an airline: it’s their last chance to disappoint a customer (or prospect).
Writing on his Sales Lead Insights blog, Mac McIntosh reviews some research showing:
- for the majority of companies that respond by email, the average response time was 13 hours …which means at best the following business day
- for the remainder who use phone, the average time was 44 hours (that’s a week, folks!)
According to InsideSales.com, Omniture has done survey work showing that – incredibly – 45% never responded at all …to any inquiry. This begs the question: what was the point of all that investment in SEO, PPC and other lead generation, if they’re just going to ignore the leads anyway? Aside from the few prospects that are dead-set on buying from them regardless of how they’re treated, these vendors could forego all that lead-gen expense and achieve basically the same results. As Mac put it:
“In the B2B world, how responsive your company is to its inquiries, or how it handles the follow up of sales leads, has a lot more impact on prospective customers’ perception of your brand than brand advertising ever will.”
