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New Sales = Fast Lead Follow-up

Posted by Upright Team

The number one New Years Resolution for many business-to-business companies is to generate more qualified leads for their sales teams. Id like to add a second part to that resolution: follow-up fast with the leads that you receive.

There was a great post recently on Bryan Eisenbergs blog, GrokDotCom, which detailed the poor state of lead follow-up that marketers have. In fact, in a survey conducted by Omniture and InsideSales.com they set up aliases, such as John@xyzcompany.com, and completed the lead or request information form of 700 different companies, several different times. Then kept track of their lead response and nurturing strategies and found:

  • Average email response time: 19 hours, 31 minutes
    *Optimum response time should be within the first hour
  • Average phone response time: 36 hours, 57 minutes
    *Optimum phone response time should be within the first five minutes
  • How many companies even responded?
    *Only 47.3 percent responded via email, and just 7.5 percent responded via phone!

Web-generated leads decrease effectiveness by over 6x in the first hour according to InsideSales.com.

Fast lead follow-up equals more sales. Make a resolution to respond to web inquiries (phone and e-mail) right away. Here is a link to Bryan’s complete blog post for additional lead generation tips and strategies:

http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/12/03/increasing-qualified-leads-from-your-website/