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In a world where clients and customers seek instant gratification, immediate response became a northstar for all businesses, especially those who operate digitally. The fast paced world makes customers eager to team up with providers and companies that respond to them timely, and show them that they care about their inquiries on the spot. Businesses should not lose sight of working on fast lead response, because now one metric that could help you close or lose a deal.
Here’s our guide on accelerating your lead response rate, and why you need it:
Lead Response Rate & Why You Need to Accelerate It
The lead response time metric is the average time it takes a sales team member to follow up with a contact after identifying themselves as a lead, such as filling out a form, or answering a call.This metric is the fine line between winning and losing the deal now.
In a sea of operational processes and worrying about future growth, the importance of lead response rate may be overlooked. The truth is you are much more likely to send the new customers down your sales funnel the faster you reply to them.
The Golden Window: Every Minute Counts
Here are some statistical facts that showcase the importance of the speed of response to leads.
78% of B2B customers purchase from the vendor that responds first.
Responding within the first minute increases lead conversions by 391%
Responding within five minutes is 21x more effective than responding after 30 minutes.
After five minutes, the odds of qualifying a lead drop by 80%.
The Golden Opportunity
While most of your competitors miss a lot of opportunities, here are some numbers that show you where they are missing and where you should focus to get a competitive advantage.
The average B2B business’s speed to lead is 42 hours.
Only about 27% of leads ever get contacted.
Less than 25% of companies call their web leads.
Top Tips from UNLOCK: Speed to Lead
As Egypt's business services marketplace, UNLOCK matches top agencies with clients who are actively searching for business services and we save both sides hours of research by matching them in almost no time. Clients fill in an online form here to share what they are looking for and UNLOCK directly matches them with top-rated providers who fulfill their criteria.
We understand the B2B funnel well, and we use this knowledge to help both clients & providers close the deal fast and efficiently.
So, here are our tips on how to boost your conversion rate through a faster response rate:
If you are a service provider, list your company on UNLOCK to get qualified matches and connect with them as soon as your match is made.
Optimize your sales process and utilize CRMs & other lead management tools to help you send & receive notifications to your leads timely.
UNLOCK has created its unique management system UNLOCK MMS, to give service providers like you viability & the ability to manage your matches at every stage of the B2B sales process all the way through to closing successful deals.
Monitor your speed to lead to identify drop-off points and lag time:
1- Understand your leads and their needs during first touchpoints through a standard qualification or briefing process
2- Measure your current response time & put an ambitious target for your organization to work towards reducing it
3- Review the response rate periodically with your team and continuously optimize your internal processes to reduce your response team