Using AppExchange Apps to Improve Your Speed-to-Lead

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When it comes to inbound leads and the race to win a customer, your ‘speed-to-lead’ — also known as your lead response time — is the single most important factor in winning or losing.

Yes, you need quality engagement with your prospect, and you must have a value-added product, service, and/or solution. However, those are antes into the game that is today’s modern global marketplace.

This blog post will explore how ‘speed to lead’ can be one of your company’s most impactful competitive advantages, and how AppExchange apps can help your company reach inbound leads faster.

The need for speed

It’s speed that will win your race for customers. Don’t believe us? Consider the following speed-to-lead statistics:

• 78% of customers buy from the company that responds to their inquiry first (Lead Connect)
• Leads are 9x more likely to convert when businesses follow-up within 5 minutes (Ziff Davis)
• Sales reps are 21x more effective when calling within five minutes of prospect first contact as opposed to calling after 30 minutes (LeadSimple)
• Companies experience a 391% increase in lead conversions when responding within one minute (Velocify)
• Your odds of qualifying a lead decrease 80% after five minutes has elapsed (Vendasta)
• You are 10x less likely to have leads respond if your outreach takes more than five minutes (LeadResponseManagement.org)

The hard truth is there are no second-place consolation prizes for your revenue team. Your company won’t reach its objectives and your representatives won’t hit quota by finishing second.

Determining speed to lead

Speed to lead is your lead response time, and it reflects the time elapsed between leads expressing interest in your business and their receipt of a response from one of your sales representatives. Generally, your lead response time is an equation with two variables:

Lead Response Time = Lead Processing Time + Representative Response Time

As a revenue team leader, you have two tactical levers to push and pull upon to affect your speed to lead. The first lever impacts the operations and systems that process leads and assign them to representatives for follow up engagement. The second lever involves enabling and managing the performance of representatives responsible for follow-up accountabilities with leads.

Photo by Matthias Speicher on Unsplash

Identifying challenges to a quick speed to lead

In developing a timely, first-in-market lead response, companies often prove to be their own worst enemies as their speed-to-lead times lengthen. Common challenges usually fit into one or more of the following four classifications:

1. Leads sit — stalled, unattended and unacted upon — before they’re initially routed to a sales rep for follow up
2. Leads lack sufficient contextual information attached to their records, resulting in costly delays as reps research and triage for missing data
3. Leads are initially misrouted within the organization, with subsequent time delays incurred as they’re rerouted
4. After leads are correctly routed, reps delay their follow-up activities for reasons ranging from workload capacity to performance issues

Minimizing lead response time

To minimize your lead response time, you first must determine your current lead response time. Start with a reliable measurement process.

Survey your revenue team’s actual results, by lead type and by channel. Go beyond average times. While your mean lead response time is important, so is your median, high, low, and variance.

Once you’ve accurately measured and assessed your current speed to lead, it’s time to get to problem-solving and continuously improving:

1. Determine root causes of poor response time by lead source, channel, and outlier highs
2. Develop realistic step goals to land where you need lead response time to be
3. Develop your corrective action plan(s)
4. Execute, measure, analyze and learn
5. Repeat!

Remember, your lead response time consists of two variables — processing time and rep response time. To optimize your speed to lead, you need to optimize for both variables.

Optimizing lead processing time

To ultimately be fast, lead processing must first be accurate. For organizations with any meaningful volume of leads, automation is the most efficient and cost-effective method to process leads, and a variety of solutions are available via AppExchange.

Automated lead-to-account matching solutions, available on Salesforce AppExchange, match inbound leads to any existing accounts in your Salesforce CRM. Additionally, contextual account data can be further added with data enrichment solutions, also easily integrated into your tech stack.

Holistic views of leads and accounts eliminate any need for reps to fill in data gaps, allowing them to immediately engage with new prospects. Instead of researching and data entry, your sales professionals get to doing what they do best — service and sell.

Next, automated lead routing ensures your leads get to the right reps at the right time, every time. Automating manual lead routing processes eliminates human errors and operational bottlenecks, and it ensures no leads are left behind, either lost or completely forgotten. Within your automation tools, build routing flows to prioritize the routing of time-sensitive leads first. For example, demo requests need immediate routing, while less urgent trade show booth visitors can be slotted in behind.

Optimizing rep response time

Once leads are routed, your sales reps become accountable for following up and closing the lead response cycle. In addition to all those difficult leadership and managerial “soft” skills, your automated lead management solutions help here as well.

Automated lead routing solutions allow round-robin assignment of leads, complete with a variety of useful filters. For example, experienced reps typically have higher ability and capacity, and therefore can effectively handle a larger lead load than new, inexperienced reps. Other filters might include expertise, be it product, language, industry, or other; work and vacation schedules, territories, time zones, and more. Round robin assignments maximize your team’s effective capacity by optimizing distribution.

Furthermore, in some AppExchange solutions, routing workflows can be built where leads are held until a defined time limit expires or another specified condition is met. Once a record meets the conditions; for example, the Lead Status field is changed or the time limit expires, the record is automatically directed to its next spot in the lead flow. In the case of a time limit expiration, for instance, the lead is routed to a different rep, triggering notifications to both the rep and managers.

Lastly, AppExchange apps with time-tracking functionality automate reporting on lead response time, making reports directly accessible from within Salesforce and empowering reps and their managers to learn and improve upon both process and performance.

Summary

A quick speed to lead provides a better customer experience for your prospects. They’re hand-raisers, requesting your follow-up, and when you respond promptly it’s good for your customers. And, of course, what’s good for your customers is good for your business.

The marketplace is competitive, and speed wins more often than not. Use proven processes, systems, and tools to improve speed to lead and maximize your Sales and Marketing strategies.

About the writer: Ray Hartjen is the Head of Content Strategy at LeanData, a SaaS provider of native Salesforce applications and an industry leader in the lead-to-account matching and routing space. Connect with Ray on Twitter, LinkedIn and Trailblazer.