For many organizations the “cold call” is a necessary evil dreaded by sales and blamed on marketing. Leads pursued at the right time, in the right way, with the right offers promise higher contact, qualification, and close rates. This may not be news to many, but a recent study conducted by the Kellog School of Management produced some surprising results.
Not surprising was something we’ve been telling our customers for years. If you contact your prospects within one hour of them hitting the web your contact rates, lead qualification and ability to close all increase. Conversely, there is a huge drop off in all of these categories if you wait more than an hour. Huge!
Speed
When asked how much time it takes before a first call is attempted, the study found that 71% of companies take more than one hour to respond to inbound web traffic. This results in a 34% decline in your ability to further qualify the prospect and a 16% decrease in close rates.
We’ve been preaching for years about the need to contact prospects as soon as possible. The study found a 28% increase in your ability to qualify and 8% increase in close rates when a lead is contacted within an hour of web identification. When it comes to lead response time, it’s better to be the hare than the tortoise.
Tortoise photo by Aaron Logan and Hare photo by Malene Thyssen.
Time
The study concludes that the best time to get a prospect on the phone is between 8-9 am or 2-4 pm. However, that’s tough when your calls are driven by inbound web traffic and you’d like to respond within an hour. The best day to call is a Thursday. So, Thursday between eight and nine, or two and four. No problem. Let me get right on that. Call the sales team and let them know they need to block out those hours.
This actually creates a great second touch opportunity. You next email campaign should be sent out in waves on Thursday to maximize impact, but only if the leads are routed fast enough to beat the one-hour buzzer. That’s why we are such strong proponents of personalized URL campaigns that take a prospect from microsite to phone. Real-time lead deliver during these peak hours are a major hurdle to reaching your contact rate goals.
Offering
We know how fast and when to call, but how do we convince a prospect to take that first step toward lead qualification on the web. There needs to be a payoff on the web, a reason why prospects just spent five to fifteen minutes of their time getting to know your company a little better.
The dreaded white paper. In B2B campaigns we see it time and time again. Product sheets, case studies, and market surveys like this one aren’t very good at increasing your contact, qualification, or close rates. In fact, they might have a negative affect in some cases. The best offerings might surprise you, but they shouldn’t.
When talking to the right people at the right time in the right way you should offer them an eBook, price quote or proposal request. It seems prospects just want to cut to the chase. No beating around the bush, just tell them how smart you are, how much it’ll cost to leverage your smarts and a document that can be shopped around for internal buy-in.
Conclusion
A well-coordinated marketing and sales effort has a positive affect on revenue. I don’t think we needed a study to draw that conclusion.
If you work at a large company be forewarned, increases in the number of employees decreases close rates. The bigger you are the harder to close.
Don’t measure your cold calling efforts? If you don’t think you can answer questions like how long it takes sales to follow-up with a web lead, or what offer is used most often to lure web leads, you’re in a world of hurt. Companies that don’t measure don’t know what to change. Companies that don’t measure have lower contact, qualification and close rates.
We’ve been saying this for years, but it doesn’t mean we don’t walk a little taller knowing the good folks over at Kellog have endorsed a measured response to lead qual and close. (Read more…If you’d like to read the 24-page, statistic laden report follow this link to Dr. James Oldroyd, PhD and professor at M.I.T)
