Believe it or not, 61% of B2B marketers send all leads directly to Sales. Sales then process all unfiltered leads, eventually qualifying just 27% of the total volume. The pressure on sales is real.
You know what else is real? Elapsed time in responding to all the leads in the database. As little as five minutes wasted in following-up with leads cause an 80% decrease in chances of qualifying them. That’s a hard-hit on your marketing investments.
Detrimental lead response practices
Not responding quickly
A Harvard Business Review study revealed that only 37% of businesses responded to leads within the first hour, with a staggering 24% taking longer than 24 hours. Leads lose their power as the minutes tick by, so a timely response is key.
Not nurturing leads
79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. A common cause is ‘lack of lead nurturing’ and it contributes to a 20% drop in sales opportunities.
Not persevering in following-up
Similar to the impact of not nurturing leads, 44% of salespeople give up after one follow-up call. Whereas on average, 80% of prospects say “no” four times before they say “yes”.
Not parting with junk leads early
Only 33% of a sales rep’s time is spent actively selling. To save time and resources, you must create a good sales pipeline, with lead filtering coming into play at an early stage.
Not making room for improvement
Forrester research shows the importance of mature lead management processes. Without these processes in place, only 10% of marketers report a one day follow-up, potentially resulting in a significant impact on lead conversion.
Impact on your business
There are two crucial factors that harm your sales pipeline; bad lead management and poor response timeliness. Over time, these can cause gaping holes in your profit-growing capacity.
For instance, when you have a team that can contact a lead within 5 minutes of submission of a web form, hope is already created. Incredibly, you are more than 100x likely to get your lead on the phone versus waiting 30 minutes.
Once you have the prospects’ attention, you can begin to engage, filter, and ultimately qualify leads. Following that, your sales team can focus on doing what they do best – making sales.
Conversely, if you continue with poor lead response management practices, your resources will become torn between heavy marketing investments and unsatisfactory returns. A worked-up sales team and a cycle of inferior sales are all you’re left with.
No more pitfalls in responding to leads
A good lead response team can change the game for you, forwarding qualified leads directly to your sales team.
With an answering service, your sales team can focus on responding to pre-qualified leads in a timely manner. In turn, this will reduce wasting of resources and will enable you to have meaningful engagement with qualified prospects.
Your sales team can spend time focusing on driving your bottom-line. See how AnswerConnect can help you today with our Lead Capture tools – for a fraction of the cost of hiring professionals on your own.
Source: AnswerConnect
Quick takeaways.
- Believe it or not, 61% of B2B marketers send all leads directly to Sales.
- The pressure on the sales team is heavy and a lot of time is wasted on bad leads.
- As little as five minutes wasted in following-up with leads cause an 80% decrease in chances of qualifying them.
- With AnswerConnect, your sales team can focus on responding to pre-qualified leads in a timely manner.
Any questions? Call 800-700-8888 or send an email to sales@answerconnect.com.
