Infographic: How to Respond to Your Most Valuable Leads

Lead response times and persistency are more important now than ever. At a time when every other day someone proclaims the death of the cold call, sales professionals need to master the art of lead response– and this is for both inbound and outbound leads. But how do know what’s the best response time, when to follow up and how, in each situation? We’ve done the research and the result is an infographic detailing lead response best practices for your most valuable leads.

This guide approaches both inbound and outbound leads response management, as well as business-specific factors like transactional or relational sales models, lead response time and persistency best practices.

I truly believe that this resource will be vital for all sales reps (and sales development reps, for that matter) in the following years, and here’s why.

Only 64% of companies report that sales reps reach quota attainment. With ever-rising quotas and an increasingly fierce competition, sales leaders have an average tenure in their positions of only 18 months.

That’s an awfully short time for someone to be able to truly make an impact and produce growth.

Lead Response Times: Early Bird Gets the Lead

Our recent Response Audit report on how companies respond to leads showed that on average, a client will receive a response in 39 hours, and have at least two follow-up contact attempts. During the study, we introduced fictitious leads into company’s online forms, and had our AI systems measure their response immediacy and persistency. 

But is this right?

Best practices show you need to respond to inbound leads within 5 minutes of them contacting you. After the first five minutes, the chances of contacting and qualifying leads drop significantly.

And while sales reps are trying hard and some companies truly have their lead response strategy together, we still have a long way to go when it comes to responding to leads. Sometimes, it’s the sheer quantity of administrative tasks that bogs down activity in sales teams: introducing call notes to the CRM, recording voicemails, writing emails or sorting and filtering client lists to find the highest value leads are all huge time-sucks for sales reps.

If you want to know what your lead response time is, you can enter our Response Audit study here.

The Inbound and Outbound Lead Response Guide

The market demographics are quickly changing, and pretty soon all your buyers will consist of millenials, who are used to the convenience and instant gratification of the online environment. Sales reps need to think fast on their feet to reach this audience. There’s also a difference between how you manage your inbound lead response vs. outbound, and this will translate into: 

• How many times you should follow-up on inbound vs. outbound leads
• What methods of communication work best for each type of lead
• How your sales model (transactional vs. relational sales) changes your lead response strategy

Sales reps need to aadapt technologies and move to sales systems and practices which allow them to incorporate this type of complexity into their lead response activities. Both immediacy and persistency are key to closing the deal.

Download the “Inbound and Outbound Lead Response Guide” infographic to see exactly how you should be responding today to your most valuable leads.