Do You Know What Your Sales Team Is Doing With Inbound Leads?

Inbound lead response should be one of sales teams’ top priorities. After all, inbound leads are closer to the purchase in the buyer’s journey and are already familiar with the companies’ product and services. It’s a no-brainer to get to these as soon as possible…or is it?

Most Companies Are Slow to Respond to Leads and Not Persistent

XANT data from a study of 4,732 leads shows sales teams are slow to respond to leads and are not persistent in the follow-up.

In fact, if you want to get in touch with a company right now, they will respond in about 44 hours, on average. Meanwhile, best practices from MIT research show optimal phone response times should be around 5 minutes.

Moreover, if they want to call you back, sales reps will follow up for about 4.47 times. Meanwhile, the recommended persistency is around 12 touches.

I was suprised to see these results, because I thought by now lead response time should be a major sales KPI (key performance indicator) or any team. How fast you respond to leads is major predictor of sales success.

The Internet has made us all impatient and fickle. Clients are getting more and more digitally savvy and they are odering from stores like Amazon all the time. They expect immediacy in all of their interaction with vendors, and this isn’t going to change anytime soon.

Sales teams, including those in the B2B sales environment, need to start reacting at lightning speed. Or, they need to get closer to the urgency that exists in a B2C support team. Sales done the old way just isn’t going to work anymore.

Is Your Sales Team Sitting on Valuable Inbound Leads?

At XANT, we regularly test out companies to try and find out how they respond to leads. XANT Labs is the research arm of the company, and we’re well equipped to test the immediacy and persistence of your inbound lead response.

You can take the Response Audit here from XANT to see how your team is doing on lead response. Think of it as ‘secret shopping’ for inbound sales teams. Just enter the information for your company and in about 10 business days you’ll find out:

• How fast your team responds to leads
• What are the channels of communications they use for lead follow-up
• How persistent your team is in following up on inbound leads