Why Lead Response Time Is Important For Growth In B2B Sales
SalesOps
In the world of sales, your lead response time can be the secret weapon between soaring success and missed opportunities.
Picture this. You are hungry and drop in at a restaurant. You express your interest to know about the specials tonight before deciding on your order. The waiter promises to be back soon with the details but he keeps you waiting. There’s no sign of him returning anytime soon. You get annoyed and leave.
Sounds quite possible, right? The same happens with your B2B business inbound leads, when you delay responding to their query. It is time enough for them to lose interest in doing business with you. Or worse, your prospect’s needs are fulfilled by a competitor who swooped in while you were prioritizing other things.
If you’re getting good leads but having a hard time converting them to customers, you might want to take another look at your lead response time. Time is money when it comes to B2B sales and a shorter speed to lead is important for success. In fact, a recent survey by Toister and SuperOffice reveals that 88% of your leads expect a response within 60 minutes, while 30% prefer a response in less than 15 minutes.
What is Lead Response Time?
Lead response time (aka speed to lead) is the time taken by a company to follow up with interested prospects. These could be via inbound or outbound channels. In other words, it is the average time you take to respond to someone interested in doing business with you. Lead response time stats help you estimate the responsiveness of your sales team.
Why Your Lead Response Time Is Critical
The world of B2B marketing and sales is extremely competitive. At $780 Bn, the global B2B market is almost double the size of the B2C market. Moreover, the average B2B sale is at a much higher value point than a sale in say, apparel or home decor business.
In such a scenario, businesses with the fastest initial contact with potential leads are up to 50% more likely to close the deal.
Your B2B clients are not just buying from you. They are in a way partnering their business with yours to maximize profits. A quick lead response time is a benchmark of professionalism and reliability. Responsiveness is the key to building trust, which in turn helps you build lasting relations in the industry. And in any B2B selling, we all know building relations is key. You don’t just sell a $500K ACV contract unless you are perceived trustworthy and credible.
Seconds To Success: Key Statistics on Lead Response Time In 2023
To figure out the speed to lead best suited for your business in 2023, take a look at some of the latest lead response time stats.
The ‘golden window’ of lead response time is estimated to be 5 minutes or lesser. Responding after 5 minutes brings down the odds of qualifying the lead by 80%. This is why sales experts recommend having a series of automated responses (which feel personal) on your inbound form submissions.
Harvard Business Review also reveals that responding within 60 minutes makes the lead 7 times more likely to qualify.
Responding after 30 minutes reduces the chances of conversion by more than 21 times. In fact, lead response time study shows that a slow response increases customer churn rate by over 15%.
391%. Yes, that’s the spike in conversion rate you can enjoy if you manage to bring down your lead response time to 1-minute!
Identifying the most suitable time to call your lead will help boost your conversion rates by 49%.
Here are some unhappy lead response time stats though. The average B2B lead response time at present is as slow as 42 hours. Moreover, only about 27% of leads ever get contacted. This is in spite of the increased annual expenditure on lead generation. In other words, nearly 73% of potential business is lost due to poor inbound lead response time.
How To Calculate Your Lead Response Time
Average Lead Response Time = Total Time Taken To Respond To All Leads / Number of Leads
To find the ‘Time Taken To Respond To A Lead’, you need to subtract your ‘Lead Follow-Up Time’ from the ‘Time Of Lead Creation’. It is basically the amount of time from when a contact becomes a lead and when you first respond to them.
Keeping A Track of Your Sales Metrics with HubSpot
CRM platforms like HubSpot provide Sales Analytics reports for your business out of the box. This means if you’ve set up your HubSpot account correctly, you can access automated in-built reports tracking your sales efforts. Here’s how you can start using the same to streamline your business:
1. In HubSpot Sales Hub (For Professional & Enterprise), navigate to the Reports section of your account and select Analytics Tools.
2. Click on Sales Analytics and choose ‘Coach Reps & Teams’ from the left sidebar menu.
3. Select the option for ‘Lead Response Time’ once the list of reports appears.
4. You can find out the lead response time for a particular sales rep, or say, for a particular time period. This can be done by filtering the data according to date range, groups or reps.
Major Factors Influencing Your Speed To Lead
HubSpot lead response time study shows that your speed to lead is directly dependent on quite a few important factors.
1. Efficiency of lead management process and workflow
How you and your team manage and process the inflow of leads is probably the most important factor. Your lead response time is directly influenced by your sales follow up processes and tools, as well as the importance you place on lead follow-ups in your overall sales workflow.
2. Lead prioritization
When it comes to following up on leads, your sales reps should have a clear understanding of how to prioritize leads based on their quality. Following methods like lead scoring and qualification can ensure that the most promising leads receive immediate attention.
3. Communication channels
Though immediately responding to a lead is highly recommended, the lead response time can slightly differ depending on the communication channel with the lead.
For example, a live chat might need a response within a few seconds. But, a follow-up phone call is better scheduled strategically as per your lead’s availability.
4. Workload distribution
Uneven distribution of workload on your sales team can negatively impact your speed to lead. Especially, during peak seasons or periods of increased workload, it is crucial to maintain a flexible schedule and implement efficient work processes to avoid unnecessary delays.
Tips & Strategies To Boost Your Lead Response Time
So far, we’ve been trying to emphasize why lead response time matters and why your business should focus on it more. But how do you work towards improving this particular sales metric? Well, there are quite a few ways to explore.
First and most importantly, invest in specialist technology to capture, organize and assign your leads. This way, you can effectively streamline all your marketing efforts aimed at driving inbound interest. With various channels and touchpoints potentially generating valuable leads for your business, relying on generic tools like emails and spreadsheets would only result in inefficiency.
This is where using a CRM like HubSpot comes in handy, helping to bring order to your marketing and sales efforts. A CRM also has features like lead routing, so that any new lead is automatically assigned to the right SDR based on your pre-defined criteria. You can also automate your initial sales follow-up responses to keep a prospect engaged, till an SDR is available to take over the conversation.
A basic CRM setup that has a database for all your leads along with basic automation for follow ups will serve you well, but only up to a point. As your count of inbound leads start increasing, you might need to incorporate a few more processes to keep the speed to lead from dropping.
That said, every new process does not need its own tool. Rather, we recommend running as lean as possible. The more tools you start using, the more lag gets added to your outcomes.
A useful workaround to this situation would be to incorporate automation by intelligently connecting your CRM to your business communication tools. Slack and Microsoft Teams are two of the most popular ones in this respect. Connecting your CRM, such as HubSpot, to a communication tool like Slack will drastically increase visibility. For example, as soon as a new lead comes in, HubSpot will alert the concerned people directly on Slack. You can further customize this alert message with possible next steps including Call to Action buttons. Integrating HubSpot with Slack will help your SDRs act upon new leads almost immediately.
Thirdly, start incentivising faster lead responses. Usually, sales incentives are limited to successful lead conversions or qualified meetings booked. But, introducing some at the lead follow-up stage can also boost your conversion rates in the long run. Incentivising fast follow-ups will encourage your sales reps to minimize the delay in responses. They will also feel motivated to reach out to a higher number of leads than usual.
Fourthly, it is important to send regular reminders to your team to close every lead assigned to them. Oftentimes, despite spending a bomb on generating high-quality leads, the delay in follow-ups causes nearly 70% leads to get cold. This can be avoided with such periodic reminders. This is exactly where an integration between HubSpot CRM and Slack could be helpful. Imagine sending an automated weekly reminder with a list of Open Contacts to each of your SDRs, along with action buttons.
While you build in processes to improve your sales outcomes, it is important to keep your goals realistic. Bringing about meaningful changes will take time. But the right input metrics, testing sales cadences, mentorship of SDRs and keeping a light, non-stressful environment will go a long way in improving your company’s sales metrics and thereby your sales revenue.
Summary
To sum it all up, a slow lead response time can adversely impact your B2B sales conversion rate. In turn, that reflects on your business revenue. Speed to lead is a highly crucial parameter for your sales as businesses with faster initial contact time have higher chances of bagging a star client.
In 2023, it is high time to end the debate on ‘Does lead response time matter?’, especially as far as B2B sales is concerned. It is essential for any business owner to understand the deeper impact of this particular parameter and use it as a key tool to maximize sales.
Why Lead Response Time Is Important For Growth In B2B Sales
SalesOps
In the world of sales, your lead response time can be the secret weapon between soaring success and missed opportunities.
Picture this. You are hungry and drop in at a restaurant. You express your interest to know about the specials tonight before deciding on your order. The waiter promises to be back soon with the details but he keeps you waiting. There’s no sign of him returning anytime soon. You get annoyed and leave.
Sounds quite possible, right? The same happens with your B2B business inbound leads, when you delay responding to their query. It is time enough for them to lose interest in doing business with you. Or worse, your prospect’s needs are fulfilled by a competitor who swooped in while you were prioritizing other things.
If you’re getting good leads but having a hard time converting them to customers, you might want to take another look at your lead response time. Time is money when it comes to B2B sales and a shorter speed to lead is important for success. In fact, a recent survey by Toister and SuperOffice reveals that 88% of your leads expect a response within 60 minutes, while 30% prefer a response in less than 15 minutes.
What is Lead Response Time?
Lead response time (aka speed to lead) is the time taken by a company to follow up with interested prospects. These could be via inbound or outbound channels. In other words, it is the average time you take to respond to someone interested in doing business with you. Lead response time stats help you estimate the responsiveness of your sales team.
Why Your Lead Response Time Is Critical
The world of B2B marketing and sales is extremely competitive. At $780 Bn, the global B2B market is almost double the size of the B2C market. Moreover, the average B2B sale is at a much higher value point than a sale in say, apparel or home decor business.
In such a scenario, businesses with the fastest initial contact with potential leads are up to 50% more likely to close the deal.
Your B2B clients are not just buying from you. They are in a way partnering their business with yours to maximize profits. A quick lead response time is a benchmark of professionalism and reliability. Responsiveness is the key to building trust, which in turn helps you build lasting relations in the industry. And in any B2B selling, we all know building relations is key. You don’t just sell a $500K ACV contract unless you are perceived trustworthy and credible.
Seconds To Success: Key Statistics on Lead Response Time In 2023
To figure out the speed to lead best suited for your business in 2023, take a look at some of the latest lead response time stats.
The ‘golden window’ of lead response time is estimated to be 5 minutes or lesser. Responding after 5 minutes brings down the odds of qualifying the lead by 80%. This is why sales experts recommend having a series of automated responses (which feel personal) on your inbound form submissions.
Harvard Business Review also reveals that responding within 60 minutes makes the lead 7 times more likely to qualify.
Responding after 30 minutes reduces the chances of conversion by more than 21 times. In fact, lead response time study shows that a slow response increases customer churn rate by over 15%.
391%. Yes, that’s the spike in conversion rate you can enjoy if you manage to bring down your lead response time to 1-minute!
Identifying the most suitable time to call your lead will help boost your conversion rates by 49%.
Here are some unhappy lead response time stats though. The average B2B lead response time at present is as slow as 42 hours. Moreover, only about 27% of leads ever get contacted. This is in spite of the increased annual expenditure on lead generation. In other words, nearly 73% of potential business is lost due to poor inbound lead response time.
How To Calculate Your Lead Response Time
Average Lead Response Time = Total Time Taken To Respond To All Leads / Number of Leads
To find the ‘Time Taken To Respond To A Lead’, you need to subtract your ‘Lead Follow-Up Time’ from the ‘Time Of Lead Creation’. It is basically the amount of time from when a contact becomes a lead and when you first respond to them.
Keeping A Track of Your Sales Metrics with HubSpot
CRM platforms like HubSpot provide Sales Analytics reports for your business out of the box. This means if you’ve set up your HubSpot account correctly, you can access automated in-built reports tracking your sales efforts. Here’s how you can start using the same to streamline your business:
1. In HubSpot Sales Hub (For Professional & Enterprise), navigate to the Reports section of your account and select Analytics Tools.
2. Click on Sales Analytics and choose ‘Coach Reps & Teams’ from the left sidebar menu.
3. Select the option for ‘Lead Response Time’ once the list of reports appears.
4. You can find out the lead response time for a particular sales rep, or say, for a particular time period. This can be done by filtering the data according to date range, groups or reps.
Major Factors Influencing Your Speed To Lead
HubSpot lead response time study shows that your speed to lead is directly dependent on quite a few important factors.
1. Efficiency of lead management process and workflow
How you and your team manage and process the inflow of leads is probably the most important factor. Your lead response time is directly influenced by your sales follow up processes and tools, as well as the importance you place on lead follow-ups in your overall sales workflow.
2. Lead prioritization
When it comes to following up on leads, your sales reps should have a clear understanding of how to prioritize leads based on their quality. Following methods like lead scoring and qualification can ensure that the most promising leads receive immediate attention.
3. Communication channels
Though immediately responding to a lead is highly recommended, the lead response time can slightly differ depending on the communication channel with the lead.
For example, a live chat might need a response within a few seconds. But, a follow-up phone call is better scheduled strategically as per your lead’s availability.
4. Workload distribution
Uneven distribution of workload on your sales team can negatively impact your speed to lead. Especially, during peak seasons or periods of increased workload, it is crucial to maintain a flexible schedule and implement efficient work processes to avoid unnecessary delays.
Tips & Strategies To Boost Your Lead Response Time
So far, we’ve been trying to emphasize why lead response time matters and why your business should focus on it more. But how do you work towards improving this particular sales metric? Well, there are quite a few ways to explore.
First and most importantly, invest in specialist technology to capture, organize and assign your leads. This way, you can effectively streamline all your marketing efforts aimed at driving inbound interest. With various channels and touchpoints potentially generating valuable leads for your business, relying on generic tools like emails and spreadsheets would only result in inefficiency.
This is where using a CRM like HubSpot comes in handy, helping to bring order to your marketing and sales efforts. A CRM also has features like lead routing, so that any new lead is automatically assigned to the right SDR based on your pre-defined criteria. You can also automate your initial sales follow-up responses to keep a prospect engaged, till an SDR is available to take over the conversation.
A basic CRM setup that has a database for all your leads along with basic automation for follow ups will serve you well, but only up to a point. As your count of inbound leads start increasing, you might need to incorporate a few more processes to keep the speed to lead from dropping.
That said, every new process does not need its own tool. Rather, we recommend running as lean as possible. The more tools you start using, the more lag gets added to your outcomes.
A useful workaround to this situation would be to incorporate automation by intelligently connecting your CRM to your business communication tools. Slack and Microsoft Teams are two of the most popular ones in this respect. Connecting your CRM, such as HubSpot, to a communication tool like Slack will drastically increase visibility. For example, as soon as a new lead comes in, HubSpot will alert the concerned people directly on Slack. You can further customize this alert message with possible next steps including Call to Action buttons. Integrating HubSpot with Slack will help your SDRs act upon new leads almost immediately.
Thirdly, start incentivising faster lead responses. Usually, sales incentives are limited to successful lead conversions or qualified meetings booked. But, introducing some at the lead follow-up stage can also boost your conversion rates in the long run. Incentivising fast follow-ups will encourage your sales reps to minimize the delay in responses. They will also feel motivated to reach out to a higher number of leads than usual.
Fourthly, it is important to send regular reminders to your team to close every lead assigned to them. Oftentimes, despite spending a bomb on generating high-quality leads, the delay in follow-ups causes nearly 70% leads to get cold. This can be avoided with such periodic reminders. This is exactly where an integration between HubSpot CRM and Slack could be helpful. Imagine sending an automated weekly reminder with a list of Open Contacts to each of your SDRs, along with action buttons.
While you build in processes to improve your sales outcomes, it is important to keep your goals realistic. Bringing about meaningful changes will take time. But the right input metrics, testing sales cadences, mentorship of SDRs and keeping a light, non-stressful environment will go a long way in improving your company’s sales metrics and thereby your sales revenue.
Summary
To sum it all up, a slow lead response time can adversely impact your B2B sales conversion rate. In turn, that reflects on your business revenue. Speed to lead is a highly crucial parameter for your sales as businesses with faster initial contact time have higher chances of bagging a star client.
In 2023, it is high time to end the debate on ‘Does lead response time matter?’, especially as far as B2B sales is concerned. It is essential for any business owner to understand the deeper impact of this particular parameter and use it as a key tool to maximize sales.
Why Lead Response Time Is Important For Growth In B2B Sales
SalesOps
In the world of sales, your lead response time can be the secret weapon between soaring success and missed opportunities.
Picture this. You are hungry and drop in at a restaurant. You express your interest to know about the specials tonight before deciding on your order. The waiter promises to be back soon with the details but he keeps you waiting. There’s no sign of him returning anytime soon. You get annoyed and leave.
Sounds quite possible, right? The same happens with your B2B business inbound leads, when you delay responding to their query. It is time enough for them to lose interest in doing business with you. Or worse, your prospect’s needs are fulfilled by a competitor who swooped in while you were prioritizing other things.
If you’re getting good leads but having a hard time converting them to customers, you might want to take another look at your lead response time. Time is money when it comes to B2B sales and a shorter speed to lead is important for success. In fact, a recent survey by Toister and SuperOffice reveals that 88% of your leads expect a response within 60 minutes, while 30% prefer a response in less than 15 minutes.
What is Lead Response Time?
Lead response time (aka speed to lead) is the time taken by a company to follow up with interested prospects. These could be via inbound or outbound channels. In other words, it is the average time you take to respond to someone interested in doing business with you. Lead response time stats help you estimate the responsiveness of your sales team.
Why Your Lead Response Time Is Critical
The world of B2B marketing and sales is extremely competitive. At $780 Bn, the global B2B market is almost double the size of the B2C market. Moreover, the average B2B sale is at a much higher value point than a sale in say, apparel or home decor business.
In such a scenario, businesses with the fastest initial contact with potential leads are up to 50% more likely to close the deal.
Your B2B clients are not just buying from you. They are in a way partnering their business with yours to maximize profits. A quick lead response time is a benchmark of professionalism and reliability. Responsiveness is the key to building trust, which in turn helps you build lasting relations in the industry. And in any B2B selling, we all know building relations is key. You don’t just sell a $500K ACV contract unless you are perceived trustworthy and credible.
Seconds To Success: Key Statistics on Lead Response Time In 2023
To figure out the speed to lead best suited for your business in 2023, take a look at some of the latest lead response time stats.
The ‘golden window’ of lead response time is estimated to be 5 minutes or lesser. Responding after 5 minutes brings down the odds of qualifying the lead by 80%. This is why sales experts recommend having a series of automated responses (which feel personal) on your inbound form submissions.
Harvard Business Review also reveals that responding within 60 minutes makes the lead 7 times more likely to qualify.
Responding after 30 minutes reduces the chances of conversion by more than 21 times. In fact, lead response time study shows that a slow response increases customer churn rate by over 15%.
391%. Yes, that’s the spike in conversion rate you can enjoy if you manage to bring down your lead response time to 1-minute!
Identifying the most suitable time to call your lead will help boost your conversion rates by 49%.
Here are some unhappy lead response time stats though. The average B2B lead response time at present is as slow as 42 hours. Moreover, only about 27% of leads ever get contacted. This is in spite of the increased annual expenditure on lead generation. In other words, nearly 73% of potential business is lost due to poor inbound lead response time.
How To Calculate Your Lead Response Time
Average Lead Response Time = Total Time Taken To Respond To All Leads / Number of Leads
To find the ‘Time Taken To Respond To A Lead’, you need to subtract your ‘Lead Follow-Up Time’ from the ‘Time Of Lead Creation’. It is basically the amount of time from when a contact becomes a lead and when you first respond to them.
Keeping A Track of Your Sales Metrics with HubSpot
CRM platforms like HubSpot provide Sales Analytics reports for your business out of the box. This means if you’ve set up your HubSpot account correctly, you can access automated in-built reports tracking your sales efforts. Here’s how you can start using the same to streamline your business:
1. In HubSpot Sales Hub (For Professional & Enterprise), navigate to the Reports section of your account and select Analytics Tools.
2. Click on Sales Analytics and choose ‘Coach Reps & Teams’ from the left sidebar menu.
3. Select the option for ‘Lead Response Time’ once the list of reports appears.
4. You can find out the lead response time for a particular sales rep, or say, for a particular time period. This can be done by filtering the data according to date range, groups or reps.
Major Factors Influencing Your Speed To Lead
HubSpot lead response time study shows that your speed to lead is directly dependent on quite a few important factors.
1. Efficiency of lead management process and workflow
How you and your team manage and process the inflow of leads is probably the most important factor. Your lead response time is directly influenced by your sales follow up processes and tools, as well as the importance you place on lead follow-ups in your overall sales workflow.
2. Lead prioritization
When it comes to following up on leads, your sales reps should have a clear understanding of how to prioritize leads based on their quality. Following methods like lead scoring and qualification can ensure that the most promising leads receive immediate attention.
3. Communication channels
Though immediately responding to a lead is highly recommended, the lead response time can slightly differ depending on the communication channel with the lead.
For example, a live chat might need a response within a few seconds. But, a follow-up phone call is better scheduled strategically as per your lead’s availability.
4. Workload distribution
Uneven distribution of workload on your sales team can negatively impact your speed to lead. Especially, during peak seasons or periods of increased workload, it is crucial to maintain a flexible schedule and implement efficient work processes to avoid unnecessary delays.
Tips & Strategies To Boost Your Lead Response Time
So far, we’ve been trying to emphasize why lead response time matters and why your business should focus on it more. But how do you work towards improving this particular sales metric? Well, there are quite a few ways to explore.
First and most importantly, invest in specialist technology to capture, organize and assign your leads. This way, you can effectively streamline all your marketing efforts aimed at driving inbound interest. With various channels and touchpoints potentially generating valuable leads for your business, relying on generic tools like emails and spreadsheets would only result in inefficiency.
This is where using a CRM like HubSpot comes in handy, helping to bring order to your marketing and sales efforts. A CRM also has features like lead routing, so that any new lead is automatically assigned to the right SDR based on your pre-defined criteria. You can also automate your initial sales follow-up responses to keep a prospect engaged, till an SDR is available to take over the conversation.
A basic CRM setup that has a database for all your leads along with basic automation for follow ups will serve you well, but only up to a point. As your count of inbound leads start increasing, you might need to incorporate a few more processes to keep the speed to lead from dropping.
That said, every new process does not need its own tool. Rather, we recommend running as lean as possible. The more tools you start using, the more lag gets added to your outcomes.
A useful workaround to this situation would be to incorporate automation by intelligently connecting your CRM to your business communication tools. Slack and Microsoft Teams are two of the most popular ones in this respect. Connecting your CRM, such as HubSpot, to a communication tool like Slack will drastically increase visibility. For example, as soon as a new lead comes in, HubSpot will alert the concerned people directly on Slack. You can further customize this alert message with possible next steps including Call to Action buttons. Integrating HubSpot with Slack will help your SDRs act upon new leads almost immediately.
Thirdly, start incentivising faster lead responses. Usually, sales incentives are limited to successful lead conversions or qualified meetings booked. But, introducing some at the lead follow-up stage can also boost your conversion rates in the long run. Incentivising fast follow-ups will encourage your sales reps to minimize the delay in responses. They will also feel motivated to reach out to a higher number of leads than usual.
Fourthly, it is important to send regular reminders to your team to close every lead assigned to them. Oftentimes, despite spending a bomb on generating high-quality leads, the delay in follow-ups causes nearly 70% leads to get cold. This can be avoided with such periodic reminders. This is exactly where an integration between HubSpot CRM and Slack could be helpful. Imagine sending an automated weekly reminder with a list of Open Contacts to each of your SDRs, along with action buttons.
While you build in processes to improve your sales outcomes, it is important to keep your goals realistic. Bringing about meaningful changes will take time. But the right input metrics, testing sales cadences, mentorship of SDRs and keeping a light, non-stressful environment will go a long way in improving your company’s sales metrics and thereby your sales revenue.
Summary
To sum it all up, a slow lead response time can adversely impact your B2B sales conversion rate. In turn, that reflects on your business revenue. Speed to lead is a highly crucial parameter for your sales as businesses with faster initial contact time have higher chances of bagging a star client.
In 2023, it is high time to end the debate on ‘Does lead response time matter?’, especially as far as B2B sales is concerned. It is essential for any business owner to understand the deeper impact of this particular parameter and use it as a key tool to maximize sales.
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