Fatal Flaw #3 Response to Web Leads

Number three in this series addresses your response to web leads. More and more, companies are driving prospects to their website with the promise of a free trial, demo, webinar, whitepaper or other in order to capture contact information from the visitor. This is where productive marketing gives way to poor follow up. In a recent study, Insidesales.com visited five hundred of Alexa’s highest rated websites and filled out web forms. Eighty two percent of those companies failed to ever call us and forty eight percent failed to send a simple email. Of those that did call, the average first call came almost 24 hours after we visited their website.

What can happen in 24 hours? Think about what you do when looking for a new service provider. Do you look at one website then wait to be contacted or do you look at multiple sites, compare features and pricing then call the one that you think will be the right fit for you.

One of our clients works in an industry where there are several lead vendors that supply hot, real-time leads to their clients. A person fills out a webform and that information is immediately sent to four or five competitors. When asked about the importance of a timely response, he told me that 80 percent of sales in his industry went to the company that contacted the prospect first. I then asked, “If you were always the first to contact the lead, how much of the market would you own?”

As demonstrated in our study mentioned earlier, emails are used 250 percent more often than a phone call for a first contact. This does little more than suggest you have an email auto-responder. You get a few points if it contains valuable information (valuable to them, not you). But emails are used because they can be automated. A phone call takes work capturing the lead, routing it to the appropriate person checking to see if there is a duplicate in the database and then making sure your rep makes the call. One client of ours used to give a rep a seven day window to contact a web lead before it would be reassigned to someone else.

Why do you want to contact your leads first?
If the example mentioned earlier doesn’t persuade you, we recently conducted a study with the help of MIT and Northwestern Universities to see the effect early attempt has on the contact and qualification percentages of a web lead. The study suggests that the odds of converting a web lead are twenty-one times greater if you attempt to contact that lead within 5 minutes compared to 30 minutes. Without increasing your ability to close, your marketing budget or your product offering, if you could contact 210% more of your leads, what affect would that have on your bottom line?

How can you improve your time to contact?
There are three steps that you should follow:
1. Create a lead response strategy. Set the goals of when you should contact a lead by, who should contact them, how often should they try and what methods should be used.
2. Hold your sales reps accountable to meet these goals.
3. Automate the entire response strategy, including the lead capture, routing, email, fax, calling and rerouting (if lead is neglected).

To sum this up, most companies do not focus on early response to web leads but the studies indicate they should. A car salesperson does not allow the prospect off the car lot to go to the competitors before they attempt the initial contact. In order to decrease your time to contact you should create a lead response strategy, hold your sales reps accountable and automate the entire process. That company mentioned earlier with the leads going to four competitors at the same time they get them. Well, they tripled their contacts and qualifications within the first 45 days of following these steps. Can you business handle that kind of growth?