When it comes to responding to leads, a lot of businesses are missing out on potential sales because they’re too slow. One study of over 2,000 U.S. companies, for example, showed that 47 percent of businesses either took longer than 24 hours to respond or never responded at all.
Do you need to speed up your business’s lead response times? Read on to learn more about why this matters and how you can decrease the amount of time it takes to respond to potential customers.
Why Do Fast Lead Response Times Matter?
Speeding up lead response times is one of the best steps you can take to improve your conversion rate and keep your business afloat. The following are some of the most well-known reasons why improving your lead response rates matters: Quality of Leads Degrades with Time First of all, it’s important to understand that the quality of a lead degrades with time. The longer it takes for you to respond, the less likely someone is to actually follow through and become a paying customer.
When you’re slow to respond, customers have time to consider other options and reach out to your competitors. If your competitors respond before you do, someone might choose to work with them instead, not because their product is better, but because they were quicker to get back to them. Internet Has Changed Buying Behavior The internet has had a huge impact on buying behavior as a whole. Now, you can access information and make purchases in seconds with just a couple of clicks. As a result, people have shorter attention spans than ever before, and they want results right away.
If you are slow to get back to people who express an interest in working with you and your business, they’re going to be less impressed with what you have to offer. They want to hear from you as soon as possible. If they don’t, they’ll go elsewhere. Faster Lead Response Improves Reputation Having fast lead response times is good for your business’s reputation, too. Don’t you want to be known as a company that is on top of things and responds to people in an efficient way?
These days, most business pages on social media or online directories include information about lead response times. When you look up businesses online and think about reaching out to them, which one are you more likely to message: The one that responds within a few minutes or the one that responds within a few days (if at all)?
How to Achieve Faster Lead Response Times
Clearly, you need to make faster lead response times a priority if you want your business to succeed. Here are five ways you can make this happen:
- Invest in Automated Lead Response
If there’s one thing you do to achieve faster lead response times, it ought to by investing in automated lead response technology. Automated lead response works to, you guessed it, automate your business’s approach to responding to the people who reach out and express an interest in what you’re selling.
The right automation tools can connect leads with consultants within seconds. You can also use them to schedule call-backs and recurring messages in the event that someone doesn’t answer on the first try.
Automating helps to simplify the whole process and makes it much more efficient. It reduces the potential for human error, too.
- Control Lead Sources
Between their general phone number, email, Facebook page, and website contact form, most businesses have dozens of different methods that people can use to reach them. When you have leads coming in from tons of channels, especially if they’re not well-organized, it can be easy for people to fall through the cracks.
To prevent this from happening, it’s important that businesses have systems in place for controlling lead sources. This ensures that all different platforms are checked regularly and everyone gets a response as soon as possible.
- Improve Lead Qualifying Processes
It also helps to streamline your business’s lead qualifying process. If workers have a clear approach to use when they’re figuring out which leads to respond to first, it helps to ensure that the highest priority leads don’t go ignored.
Consider working with your sales and marketing team to set up a lead sorting funnel that takes customer profiles into account and determines the most qualified ones based on behavior and demographics.
- Minimize the Need to Engage with Consultants
By directing people to other resources, you can minimize their need to engage with consultants while still ensuring that they get their questions answered. This also helps you to free up your consultants so they have more time to spend responding to potential customers and working with the most qualified leads.
Creating a Frequently Asked Questions page, for example, is a great tool for making sure people have access to the information they need. Be sure to put it in a prominent place on your website so that everyone can find it and get their questions answered easily.
- Provide Lead Response Coaching
It’s important for workers who are in charge of responding to leads to have coaching on how to handle it in the most efficient and effective manner possible. With proper coaching, you can ensure that they are classifying leads appropriately. This also helps you to ensure they understand the importance of fast lead response and are making it a priority moving forward.
Get Faster Response Times Today with Automated Lead Response
As you can see, there are lots of steps you can take to speed up your business’s lead response times. Of all the methods listed above, though, one of the most effective is an automated lead response system.
By using automation, you can streamline your response process and ensure that people hear back from your right away. You get to experience all the benefits of faster lead response times without you or your employees having to dedicate a lot of extra bandwidth.
If you need help automating your lead response, we’re here to help at Callingly. Callingly can ensure any new lead contact information for your business is immediately sent to available sales agents so they can call them back. We have over 1,000+ integrations so that you can set up any popular lead capture tool with Callingly.
Contact us today to learn more about our services or sign up for our free 14-day trial.