How Does Response Time Increase Your Lead to Close Ratio?
- You are 100x less likely to be able to make contact with a potential client, if the first call is made 30 minutes after a website submission.
- The odds of making contact drop by 3000x if the first call is made 5 hours after lead submission.
- Most businesses take an average of 46 hours and 53 minutes to pick up the phone and respond to a lead.
- The average response rate to website submissions is 27%.
- Increasing response rates from 27% to 92% causes a 314% lift in results. That’s a huge lift! All you have to do is respond immediately and persistently to prospective clients. (Forbes, 2012)
Harvard Business Review’s article and study, “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads,” discusses the incredible amounts of resources being devoted to lead generation as lead capturing methods fall behind. 2,241 U.S. companies data showed that:
- 37% responded within an hour
- 16% responded within 1-24 hours
- 24% took more than 24 hours
- 23% never responded at all
HBR crystallizes its point by referencing a previous report which analyzed 1.25 million sales leads received by 29 B2C and 13 B2B companies:
“Firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead … as those that tried to contact the customer even an hour later—and more than 60 times as likely as companies that wait 24 hours or longer.”
The best practices for Lead Response Management are illustrated here in an infograph from Insidesales.com.
