Sales Lead Follow-Up: One Simple Test to Grow Your Pipeline 21x

Follow-Up How fast does your team follow up with sales leads? How many times do they follow up with each lead before giving up?

It’s OK if you’re not sure. Many sales leaders lack this kind of visibility.

And it drives them nuts.

Would it surprise you to hear that only 27% of Internet leads ever get contacted? That’s what our in-house research shows.

The problem is two-fold:

1. Most sales organizations fail to respond quickly to web leads.

2. Most sales reps give up on leads way too soon.

In 2007, Dr. James Oldroyd exposed these issues in the original Lead Response Management Study. We continue to update his groundbreaking research, and here are some key findings:

The average response time for an Internet lead is 39 hours 22 minutes.
Speed is crucial. A web lead is 100 times more likely to be contacted and 21 times more likely to enter the sales cycle if you call back within five minutes.
Sales reps make only 1.3 call attempts, on average, to a new lead before giving up.
Persistence pays off. Sales reps can contact up to 90% of leads, if they make at least six call attempts.

Maybe you’ve seen these statistics before. But if you want to find out how your sales team stacks up against these crucial benchmarks, you’ve come to the right place.

Because we’re going to show you exactly how to do it.

Audit your team’s lead response

XANT has performed more than 82,000 ResponseAudit assessments, testing sales lead follow-up for companies across North America and Europe.

With a little elbow grease, you can test your own lead response practices. The process resembles the “secret shopper” method.

Here’s how:

Create imaginary prospects: Make up a name you can use as an alias. Bob Smith, Liz Shapiro, Reggie Klosterman, you get the idea. Assign this prospect a real job title, company name, phone number and email address.

Build mock company websites: For every imaginary prospect, build a simple company website. This will improve credibility if one of your sales reps researches the company before calling.

Submit web forms: Find a web form on your own company’s website that sends leads to your sales team. Fill it out as if you were a real prospect seeking information.

Monitor calls and emails: Put a system in place for tracking all phone calls and emails your sales reps make to this prospect. Record the time and day of each contact attempt. XANT has technology that allows us to do this in a scientific, professional way. But you can build your own system, with a little creativity and effort.

Once you figure out how quickly your reps respond to web leads and how persistent they are in following up, you can compare your numbers against industry benchmarks and best practices and make adjustments as needed.

It’s a great way to test your team and to find out how you stack up against competitors.

If you’d like XANT to test your sales lead follow-up for you, we’d be happy to do that. Using data to improve sales performance is in our DNA.

Request your ResponseAudit now.