According to this Harvard Business Review article, the average time it takes for companies to respond to an online submitted inquiry is 42 hours. The article goes on to say that leads that are followed up in less than one hour are seven times more likely to qualify than if they followed up in one to two hours.
The bottom line is that speed matters in sales.
As a Salesforce customer there are numerous specific things that you can do to have your inbound leads responded to in less than 60 minutes.
Connect all online contact forms to Salesforce
Your Salesforce platform will include features that enable any online form to be linked to the CRM. The advantage of this is that as soon as a prospect completes the online form (from a landing page or the ‘Contact Us’ form on your website), that inquiry is routed within seconds into your CRM as a lead. In many companies, the time it takes for leads to be retrieved from emails or spreadsheets can be up to 24 hours. This is the obvious bottleneck that this Salesforce feature overcomes,
Assign the lead quickly to the correct salesperson
If we can capture the leads in seconds, can we notify the most appropriate salesperson just as quickly? The answer is yes, and this can be setup by using the ‘Lead Assignment Rules’. These assignment rules allow us to specify the logic on how a particular lead is to be assigned to a specific person for follow up. The logic that we have typically used for our clients include
‘Round Robin’ - Leads are shared in equal quantities with the sales team. Lead #1 is issued to salesperson #1, Lead #2 is issued to salesperson #2 until the sequence starts again.
By Product - Leads are assigned to the salespeople based on the product expertise or qualification. This method is used where a company has multiple products and a sales team that specialise in a specific product range
By Region - Leads are assigned to the sales team (e.g Dubai, Abu Dhabi or the Northern Emirates) based on the prospects location. This method of lead assignment can also incorporate the round robin and / or the product assignment rules.
Use Lead Queues
A lead queue is a list of leads that is accessible by groups of users, and any salesperson in the group can take the lead and start working on it. Assigning leads to queues rather than to specific salespeople is a good way of managing capacity, as the salespeople are able to ‘pull down’ the leads that they’re able to handle at that time.
Build reports and dashboards to track lead follow up time
Tracking the response time to leads through reports or dashboard gauges is a great way to keep our salespeople focused on their response-time KPI. The dashboard can show the time in minutes or hours to respond to each lead, and also to show the proportion of leads that are responded to within the KPI timeframe (e.g. 0 - 1 hour, 1 - 2 hours etc.).
These reports should be visible to the individual salespeople so that they can track their own response time. For sales managers, they can see the response time at a higher level, viewing each salespersons performance in real-time. Some of our clients monitor the response times and then change the lead assignment ratio so that salespeople that are struggling to respond to their existing lead volumes receive fewer new leads until they get on top of their existing leads.