We want everything as quickly as possible. Your Lead reaction time, or speed to lead, is frequently the single most crucial aspect in winning or losing the go-to-market race for your customer. In a word, speed wins.

What is Speed to Lead?

Speed to lead is the amount of time it takes your business, on average, to reply to a lead after they become interested or qualified. The journey starts as soon as a prospect submits a request on an organization’s website, although it can happen at any time. Lead Response time is composed of two main elements:

Lead Response Time = Lead Processing Time + Representative Response Time

Why Use Speed to Lead:

Your prospective customers indicate their interest in your and your business by either filling a form to request a quote, free trial, your newsletter or to sign up for a demo. And they do this with multiple businesses while they do their research. As you can only imagine, your reaction time is a competitive advantage you can earn easily. Doing so is crucial because, according to market research, only 7% of businesses reply to leads within five minutes, while 55% do so after five or more days.

Actions that affects your lead reaction time:

• Leads are not immediately routed to a relevant sales representative for follow-up
• Leads often have incomplete records, which makes it difficult to conduct more investigation to find the missing information.
• Leads are mis-routed inside the company, necessitating rerouting and adding time to the process.
• Postponing follow-up actions (by sales or customer care team) once leads are properly routed for a variety of reasons, including workload capacity.
• Sales and customer care team have inadequate access to the right tools and data

Calculate the lead response time:

It is necessary to first establish the current lead response time before measuring lead response time. Once this has been completed, consider a more realistic process.

• Filter leads depending on location
• Discuss with relevant teams to understand the lag time for response, or why a particular lead was ignored
• Make plans for remedial action; and assign leads to sales representatives based on their areas of expertise
• Pay close attention to the lead routing procedure to ensure intelligent lead routing. 

Source: https://www.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/7kpJqPSl9i0FnS5gywKZUBTLLPPSPtPIj YwTV9WAqJ_W3qnKsFEnrJwJZEUPQcfkmHWRB3f_QJUZwsKVH3wTpD37HbW-s7E1SZJuMECbr7jTzRrZb5ngeJk-b1P4byQkMViJ8ifI-6.png

Accelerate processing speed:

• Without wasting time, begin the process when the lead enters the CRM
• Create an efficient lead routing procedure to make things go more quickly.
• By integrating third-party solutions on the market with your CRM, you can automate the lead-reaching process.
• Tag various teams according to their expertise levels and time zones.
• Write programming to handle lead routing automatically. The most effective technique is to introduce lead assignment by round robin.
• When the lead joins the CRM, notify the prospect with brand message about your business, and a time window within which they can expect contact and/or resolution.
• Pay close attention to the lead reach time
• Implement lead score to make it simpler for sales and customer care teams to comprehend lead generation.

Source: https://www.leandata.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Optimizing-your-speed-to-lead-image-1024×783.png

Advantages of faster lead response times:

• Improved brand recognition and competitive advantage
• Greater traffic and conversions
• Better monitoring and efficiency
• Overall increase in sales

Conclusion:

First impressions are crucial. A CRM software can help you with that. CRM software allows you to specify criteria that automatically matches fresh leads with qualified sales representatives. In this approach, a wide range of CRM settings and methods enable you to communicate with leads more clearly and precisely, resulting in increased sales.

A lead conversion process can be efficiently set in place with the help of a well-implemented CRM like Microsoft Dynamics or Salesforce. Connect with Suyati to find out how.

About the Author:

Paramita Bose is an Associate Lead Engineer at Suyati Technologies. She is part of the MS Dynamics team. She is very skilled at making presentations for clients and has outstanding knowledge of the MS Dynamics CRM and ASP.NET platforms. She enjoys spending time with animals, works as a rescuer, and hopes to one day construct her own shelter for the voiceless. She is interested in staying updated on emerging technologies.

The post Why your lead response time can make or break your business? appeared first on Suyati Technologies.