Inside Sales Blog

It’s a matter of history now–the denizens of academia and punditry have deemed the late ’90s technology boom the official “Dot Com” era. You remember, it was only yesterday. The Web was going to be the savior of business, the end-all and be-all of sales and marketing. No more hunting for leads, they could now come to you, pre-qualified and ready to buy. Cold calling was going to be a thing of the past, every company would now be saddled with a Utopia of organic growth from its own personal Eden–the company website. Sales organizations could just sit back and watch the revenue roll in. If cash was ever going to grow on trees, the World Wide Web was the acorn, all a business had to do was water it occasionally and just get out of the way.

As it turned out, the situation proved to be just the opposite. Over the past ten years sales have become more difficult, buyers more resistant to traditional sales techniques. It turns out that potential buyers who pre-qualify themselves have just as much chance of passing you by as choosing you to begin with. We now have to pay search engines to get advertised on their sites; letting potential customers find us organically is just too risky. Why should they have to click through three pages of results to get to your company’s website when the guy who paid to have his show up first is probably going to get the first click?

As we all know, search engine optimization is its own industry now; it’s not uncommon for a business to spend thousands of dollars a month in Web marketing. Being the first result on a Google search is bankable revenue; like traditional TV advertising, no one would do it if SEO didn’t get results.

With all of this in mind you’d think sales organizations in today’s environment would treat their precious few Web leads like solid gold. Think about it–when your company gets a Web lead it means that somebody

A. Took the time to look up your company, likely sifting through a list of search engine results to get there;

B. Is at the very least open to the idea of purchasing your product or surface;

C. Actually typed their personal information into a web form, hoping against hope that their information was not going to be sold off to the highest bidder; and most importantly,

D. If you contact that lead within minutes of receiving it, he or she is likely still sitting at their computer surfing the Web, practically begging you to interrupt their moment of Internet reverie with a well-designed, targeted presentation.

Does your organization think like this? Do you think like this? If you don’t, you are killing, literally, killing your sales organization’s chances of taking their performance to the next level. Does your company treat your best leads—leads that come directly from the company Web site—the same way they would a run-of-the-mill business card casually palmed at a business convention?

Ask yourself, “What’s our company’s average response time to new leads coming off of the Web?” If you’re like most organizations, it’s probably anywhere from 24 to 72 hours. It probably gets sent in some form (email, spreadsheet) to a sales manager, who may or may not let it sit for several hours before he passes it on to a sales rep, who may or may not let it sit for several more hours (or days) before finally pulling it out and making a phone call.

Now suppose the sales rep doesn’t make contact immediately. How many times do they call back? Three? Four? Five? Industry wisdom says if your sales reps don’t hit a new lead a minimum of seven times that they’re likely not even going to make one initial contact. If they don’t make that contact after five attempts, do they have a planned, consistent way of recycling the lead? Every tossed-out lead is literally money in the trash, especially if they come from the Web.

Let me be up front–I work for a company who provides hosted CRM services. I also happen to work for the only hosted CRM product in the world that integrates automated power dialing directly into the system. My point is not to get you to visit InsideSales.com, although we’d certainly appreciate the opportunity to do business with you. The point is, if you’re not hitting your new Web leads within minutes after the request arrives you are costing your business money. Period.

It’s a proven fact that when used properly even a basic CRM product–I’m talking bare-bones, no frills, run of the mill CRM–can increase sales from 10 to 15 percent. Now imagine coupling that with a product that could automatically connect an available agent by phone to a new lead, send a targeted marketing email, and add the lead to an automated marketing campaign that would continue to hit the lead daily for the next two weeks? What if you could double or triple the number of leads you qualify each week or each month simply by taking advantage of technology programmed to act the instant a new lead arrives off the Web?

This is not an advertising piece, though I can say with pride that InsideSales.com is the only product I know of that combines all of these options. The real point is that organizations who don’t take advantage of these opportunities are losing money. If you spend more than $1,000 a month in Web marketing, are you getting the most from your dollars spent? If your new Web leads are sitting longer than an hour, it might be time to reevaluate your process.