25 Oct Increasing Your Speed When Dealing With Leads
Leads today are constantly bombarded with marketing messages. Any business that fails to interact with a prospect immediately they reach out to risks losing them to competitors. This risk also applies to contacting leads as they enter your sales funnel.
Many companies also fail to establish communication as soon as they’ve identified a prospect. It’s essential to open a line of contact as quickly as possible. You can do this by sending a welcome email or placing a call to introduce your business.
The need to connect with leads, especially in B2B lead generation, can determine whether or not you convert them into paying customers. Your quickness to respond once a lead interacts with you and follows your call to action optimizes conversion and prevents you from losing their business. In the client retention game, a quick response rate is vital and is also referred to as your “speed to lead.”
What is speed to lead?
Simply put, speed to lead refers to the average time it takes a business to respond to an inbound lead who has shown interest in its product or service. A lead may qualify for response by requesting a quote, signing up for a newsletter, or any other call to action.
Your preferred communication method doesn’t matter, whether it’s responding to a comment, sending a welcome email or a phone call. Research shows that the ideal speed to lead time is between ten to sixty minutes, with the sweet spot being thirty minutes.
Why does lead speed matter?
There are many reasons why having good lead speed is important. Consumers are impatient and have many options, so they’re not likely to wait for long hours to receive a response after following your call to action. Velocify records that businesses with a one-minute response rate have a 391 percent increase in conversion rate, which is incredible for revenue.
In addition to how profitable a quick response rate is, it shows expertise and credibility as you share valuable information on your offer, further convincing them to convert. It also proves you value prospects’ time and will remain prompt in the future should they choose to do business with you.
Leads usually have more than one vendor option, especially in the B2B environment, and will likely go with whoever responds first. It’s also your chance to stand out from the competition and establish your business value proposition as the brand they should choose.
Tips for keeping your lead funnel moving
Ensure proper lead scoring and prioritizing
Ranking leads helps filter out the top priorities prospects with a higher chance of converting to be responded to immediately. Rank leads based on your target personas criteria and determine which leads go to the top of the list and get the highest priority. You can then reach them with advanced targeting tools to locate the social channels they’re active in or by using information from their online forms.
Implement a smooth lead routing process geographically
This method is effective for larger businesses operating in multiple locations and time zones. Routing leads to reps in the same time zone helps prevent overlaps that could make the prospect receive a late response because the representative who received their message is in a different time zone. Another method to combat the geographical challenge is by implementing automated responses that engage with a lead immediately they engage regardless of time zone.
Train sales reps
Training your team is essential regardless of how long your sales team has been working with you, and how many leads they’ve converted. They must always be up to speed on current trends and techniques to close deals as they’re in constant contact with leads, guiding them through the sales funnel. New hires should also be scouted based on the criteria that suit your company’s needs and trained to acquire the soft and hard skills needed to succeed in their role.
Optimize your landing pages
It’s easy to captivate leads and move them to convert with a well-optimized landing page. An excellent landing page doesn’t contain too much information and has clearly defined goals, such as signing up for a newsletter.
It’s also peppered with exciting offers that tempt leads to complete your call to action. Design the landing page for optimal user experience with captivating visuals, and compelling headlines, and it should also be easy to navigate.
A technically optimized landing page with good functionality also improves the performance of your lead funnel. Ensure your forms are easy to complete, your call to action stands out, and the page loads fast.
Go for a faster-automated lead response system.
Manually checking for messages on all your brand’s marketing channels can be mundane and exhausting. It also uses up your sales team’s valuable time that you can put toward closing deals.
Automation tools greatly increase the speed of your responses as they trigger a contextual message once a lead engages with you. This can be using chatbots on your website, setting up automation tools that respond to users on social media platforms, or automated emails sent immediately to a client who signs up for something.
Contact us today if you’re interested in learning more about increasing your lead speed.