Speed to Lead – The Importance of Lead Response Time [Video]

So you think your leads are crap. Today we are gonna be talking about the importance of lead response time or as some like to call it speed to lead. You see, it’s not just the quality of the lead that is affecting your conversions right now, but it’s actually how you’re handling them. If you find this video helpful, consider subscribing below for more helpful tips on business marketing and building your brand. Let’s dive right in.
So speed to lead. The importance of lead response time. So what is speed to lead? Well, lead response time, or as we refer to it, speed to lead is how long it takes your business on average to respond when people reach out, when a qualified prospect becomes an inbound lead. So what are we talking about when we say inbound lead? That could be somebody who reaches out to you on the phone, a new prospect or lead that sends you an email, somebody who submits a form. Um, there are a myriad of different ways they could message you on LinkedIn, Instagram, so many different ways that we communicate with our customers. Nowadays, any one of these outreach platforms could be considered an inbound lead source. So we’re talking about speed to lead. Why is this really so important? Um, so you are going to a restaurant, for example, and you want to, you know, get your food, you’re hungry, it’s dinner time.
So you walk in there and there’s a 45 minute to an hour wait, but you look across the street and there’s a restaurant that’s, you know, maybe not your favorite restaurant, but you can clearly see that they have open tables and seats. Now a lot of us have always been in this choice and many of us choose not to wait to forego the weight and actually walk across the street for the convenience of getting maybe a lesser product or solution, but at speed and convenience that we want it. Now, this is imperative and you can apply this same lens to any business. We think about this in terms of when we’re going out to eat at a restaurant or waiting in a line at the store, but we don’t necessarily always think in terms of how this is happening in our own businesses. So 82% of consumers expect responses within the first 10 minutes.
You know, studies go to show that calling after 30 minutes is 21 times less effective 21 times. You imagine making 21 extra cold calls to get each lead versus just getting one every single time. That’s, that’s an insane statistic. And then if you’re looking for, you know, the authority, Harvard Business Review itself performed a study and showed that businesses that respond within an hour are almost seven times more likely to have meaningful conversations with the actual decision maker. So let that sink in. You’re paying money and advertising to generate leads. Maybe your phone’s ringing and you see that spam number and you’re like, I’m not sure this is a customer or not. I’m busy, let me call them back later. Every single one of us is guilty of doing this as business owners and we are shooting ourselves in the foot. We’re paying for those leads.
We put time, money, and effort into our marketing, into our sales, and we are not meeting our consumers and our customers where they want us to be. So what’s the remedy here? So here’s what we can do. Hire an assistant or a virtual assistant. Making sure that you have a party within your business who is dedicated to responding to customers on all of your inbound platforms is imperative. So if you have Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn and you have Alignable and you’ve built a website and then you’ve enabled people to call you on Google and directly message you on Google, who is manning all of these different channels at any given time? Do you know exactly who that person is within your business? Do they know and have they taken inventory of all the different areas and ways that a customer could respond to you?
The it’s imperative to one, elect that person and two, understand what and where your customers are going to do to contact you and ensure that you have very intentionally aligned your organization to respond to those leads. Secondly, even if you have that assistant or that virtual assistant, that dedicated person you might not have, that person can’t be on all the time. We’re only human. We take vacations, we have things come up in our personal lives. So using virtual numbers, email addresses that are generic, that can be dynamically forwarded, having multiple people have access to your social media accounts where maybe instead of having one person bear the burn there, you have four or five that could potentially take that notification. Anytime it pops up and you’ve trained and communicated all your people to be able to respond to customers, this is gonna maximize your chances of getting to that customer faster.
So having a phone number that’s not dedicated to a physical cell phone but could ring on 10 cell phones, uh, simultaneously, is gonna allow you to take that call whenever it comes in. You know, having an email address from an inbound lead that forwards to all of your sales reps in boxes and all of your assistants would let somebody respond to that email a lot faster, not when they get back from lunch an hour and a half later and they’ve already had a conversation with two to three of your competitors. Now, I understand that some of us are small business owners with solopreneurs and we busy. So if the first two options are not available to us and we don’t have the time, money, resources, or capital to, to do either of these things, what can we do? Well, we can constrain conversations to your fast platforms.
So maybe you are out in the field all day and you’re not behind a computer. You can’t check Facebook, you can’t check Instagram. You’re not good at checking your phone, but when your phone rings, you always answer. When you look at your marketing mix, you versus another business want to constrain that conversation to the platform where you can respond the quickest. So if you can only take phone calls during the hours of nine to five, make sure that you’re marketing and you’ve set up your website and you’ve configured your social platforms to make that your primary call to action. Constrain the conversation to the platforms where you have an advantage. If it’s phone, if it’s text message, if it’s social media, you know, funnel your customers and your inbound marketing to that one location. Now, bear in mind that this can be a double edged sword.
By doing this, you’re not meeting your customers where they are. You are not making it as easy as possible for them to get in touch with you. So this can be a double edged sword in the sense that the more platforms and opportunities you can give your customer to start those conversations, the more comfortable they’re gonna be with at least one of those channels to communicate with you. By constraining the conversation, we make it more difficult for the customer. However, we don’t wanna waste our time with leads that we can’t get to. So if we have to constrain the conversation to our fast platforms, we can only respond to leads within the first five to 10 minutes. If we take those by cell phone, then do it because it’s more imperative that you can get back in touch with the customer quickly than it is to ensure that they have the option that they’re comfortable with to communicate with.
That’s all we got for today. If you have any questions on speed to lead or lead response time, please drop them below in the comments. Don’t forget to like this video and subscribe for more content like this and let us know what kind of content you wanna see in the comments below. You know, if you have a question that’s been haunting you or this insurmountable problem you haven’t been able to solve with your small business marketing, that’s what we’re here for at Orb Solutions. Thank you for watching. I hope you enjoyed the content, you found value, and we’ll see you in the next video.