Sales Engagement

What Contact Time Means to Your Bottomline

The faster you can speak with someone interested in your product or service, the better off you are at closing the business.

Written by Gabriel Buck

January 19, 2010

I am going to make this really simple. The faster you can speak with someone interested in your product or service, the better off you are at closing the business. In some industries this varies. If you’re an electrician, plumber, or hazardous waste removal service you can bet if you don’t talk to a lead quickly they will get someone else that can help them instantly. When we designed our pull based method of lead delivery we thought of these types of fields where it is crucial that the consumer speak with the service provider instantly or very quickly. In most cases we have been able to help our customers reduce the time between a lead applying on their site or being received by a lead source and contact.

How do we do it?
1. We setup real time delivery even with a ton of lead verification
2. We track open rates
3. We utilize our own lead management systems that use pull based delivery methods

How much can we improve your overall response time?
I can’t give specifics, but I can tell you some of our customers were as bad as 8 hours on open rates and 24 hours on contact rates before we started working with them.
I can tell you that some of our customers have median response times around 6-8 minutes on average across the entire company. These times will vary based on a couple of factors.
1. How many leads are coming in over an hour
2. How many agents you have working that hour, day, week
3. How good the agents are at responding to the leads
#3 will get better as you are able to use our reporting to see who is working the leads in an acceptable time and who isn’t. The whole goal is to adopt the system and then work with the data to staff up or down as necessary. You will also need to train employees that are not performing as well as you would like.
Bottom Line:
You will close more business more consistently by adopting a lead management system that has a focus on contact times. You will be able to work more leads, work the best leads, and make better use of the 8 hours in a day that you can call leads.