How to ensure your company won’t lose online prospects

Online leads demand an immediate response. Here’s how to ensure you don’t lose prospects.

Photo: ©istock.com/adventtr

If you think your company is receiving a good return on investment (ROI) from your online leads, think again. Research demonstrates that this is probably not the case. In fact, by the time most companies respond to online leads, the potential customer has already given his or her business to someone else. Simply put, the driving factor to closing internet leads is speed.

Small business owners often point the finger at limited staff as their excuse for slow response time, but the truth is, this is where they need to invest.

Back when phone directories were the primary tool to search for pest management companies, everyone knew that if you didn’t respond to inquiries quickly, consumers would move on to the next listing and call your competitor.

Companies work with their sales staff to boost closing ratios by 10 percent to 20 percent. Businesses are scraping for incremental increases in ROI and close ratios, yet they overlook a gaping black hole that exists somewhere among their marketing, customer service and sales teams.

Today, internet leads are the primary source of industry leads, and companies are losing thousands of dollars a year in sales due to their inability to respond in a timely manner.

While emails can be scheduled automatically to respond to everyone who fills out a contact form on your website, and they can confirm for the customer that the message did indeed go through, data shows that it may only buy you an hour, at most, before the customer moves on.

A rapid telephone response then, is the key to closing more sales.

Research supports this idea. Executives at InsideSales.com contacted Dr. James Oldroyd as he was just finishing up his graduate studies at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. They asked him to conduct a large study researching internet lead response times and effectiveness. Here are some partial results from that study:

• The odds of contacting a lead, if called in five minutes, are 100 times higher vs. 30 minutes.
• The odds of calling to contact a lead decrease by more than 10 times after the first hour.
• The odds of qualifying a lead if called in five minutes are 21 times higher vs. 30 minutes.
• The odds of calling to qualify a lead decrease by more than six times after the first hour.

As you can see, the odds of contacting an online lead plummet after just five minutes. That may sound hard to believe, but these results have been verified in follow-up studies. And they have big implications for how you structure your sales department to handle online inquiries.

In a follow-up study, Oldroyd also found that it’s better to have any sales rep respond to a lead immediately than to wait for the right rep to respond later, when it might be too late.

The most important thing is to make that connection within the five-minute window, and get at least some preliminary information about the prospect’s needs. Once that connection is established, the lead can be handed off to the right rep for additional follow-up.

Supportive reasoning for calling back immediately is as follows:

• When we respond immediately, we know where the potential customer is — most likely still by his or her computer, notepad or smartphone.
• We are foremost on the customer’s mind.
• The customer is impressed by our rapid response time.

After the initial results were in, the study was expanded to include the best times to contact potential customers. Here are those results:

• Wednesdays and Thursdays are the best days to call if you want to contact somebody (by 49.7 percent over the worst day, Friday).
• 4 to 6 p.m. is the best timeframe to call to contact a lead (114 percent over the worst time: right after lunch).
• 8 to 9 a.m. and 4 to 5 p.m. are the best times to call to qualify a lead or set an appointment with a lead (164 percent better than the worst time, 1 to 2 p.m.).

How to increase response times

• Make speedy follow-up the rule, not the exception.
• Build a culture of responsiveness and accountability.
• Share this column with your sales team.
• Educate your team on the importance of speed to lead.
• Invest in staff and technology that will result in significantly faster response times.
• Track response times carefully. Timestamp incoming internet leads and return calls/contacts.
• Rotate staff to be on-call to pick up internet leads during evenings and on weekends.
• Receive automatic notifications of new leads via text messages and email alerts.
• Respond to leads from your smartphone if your customer relationship management (CRM) system supports it.
• Use a fully mobile-enabled CRM system that allows you to view complete lead details, send emails and log phone calls.

You can reach Goldglantz, president of Pest Control Marketing Co. and author of Marketing Matters, at hgpcmcinc@aol.com.