Configero was named among the top 100 companies with the fastest lead response times after Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce 2012.
via Forbes.com Today we announced the fifth annual results of the largest research study ever done on the response practices of companies to their own internet inquiries. The announcements were initially made to companies at Dreamforce 2012, the industry leading trade show of salesforce.com, and arguably the top sales companies in the world.
Just last year we duplicated that same research again with a study 10 times the size of the original. It was conducted again with Dr. Oldroyd and Dave Elkington leading our own InsideSales.com team, but also with Kristina McElheran, whom I had the pleasure of meeting with last week at the HarvardBusiness School. They found similarly, though less dramatic, the odds of contacting a person were 7 times as likely if a contact attempt was made within the first hour, versus waiting one hour later. In addition the odds of contacting were 60 times as likely in the first hour versus waiting 24 hours to make a call attempt.
In this same 2011 research, a similar audit was performed on 2,241 U.S. companies that measured how long each took to respond to an internet inquiry.
- 37% responded in 1 hour or less
- 16% responded within 1 to 24 hours
- 24% responded after 24 hours
- 23% of the companies never responded
- Average response time of companies responding within 30 days, was 42 hours.
How did we do the research?
Two months prior to the show, the InsideSales.com research team submitted a fictitious web lead that looks real enough to get past lead scoring algorithms of even the very best marketing automation companies (Marketo, Eloqua, and Act-On are all our customers). The leads have a compelling identity, website, phone number, and email address that is a corporate domain (not a Gmail or Hotmail account, for example). There is a big debate about what is more important: lead scoring (which takes some time), or immediate response.
Then the patent-pending technology tracks how fast companies respond by both email and phone call attempts, voice messages left, and emails sent. The system then pulls all of this information into a benchmark report for the individual company. All of these individual reports are available in .pdf format by contacting an InsideSales.com representative.
“The average response time dropped over 18.2% this year for the first time in five years of doing this,” said Dave Elkington, CEO and Founder of InsideSales.com. “Companies are starting to realize that immediacy and persistency in responding to leads make a huge impact on the results that come from those leads. This improvement appears to coincide with the recent wide spread adoption in enterprise companies of inside sales teams and lead response practices. We are excited that our publicity and educational efforts are helping companies wring more value from their marketing spend.”
*We added an additional listing in the Top 100 to replace our own InsideSales.com team; which responded in 17 seconds and made 15 contact attempts.
Of particular note for persistency are M5 solutions, Jitterbit, Informatica, Marketo, SteelBrick, and Pervasive. Way to be “pleasantly persistent,” a value among today’s busy executives!
Think about it, the average contact ratio is 10 to 11%, which means you need to make 9 or 10 calls to ensure you reach that busy decision maker.
Note, though we recommend lots of calls, we only recommend 2-3 emails, and 2-3 voice mails left, so that you don’t become a “pest.”