Commentary

Lost Leads: B2B Firms Fail To Speedily Reply To Queries In Test

Harvard Business Review reports that B2B brands have a 10X less chance of contacting a lead if they wait more than five minutes to shoot out an email or call to people who show intent. 

B2B marketers must have skipped that article. Fewer than 1% sent out a personalized email in five minutes, an experiment conducted by Workato finds.

Of 114 companies asked for a demo by the Workato team, only one sent an email in the five-minute time frame. 

Worse, it took firms an average of 11 hours and 54 seconds to respond to leads with a personalized email, and around a fifth never replied at all. 

Talk about leaving money on the table. These companies need a triggered email system.

In addition, only 31.2% of the firms tested used the phone to call leads. And not a single one called within five minutes.

In fact, only 41.7% called within the hour, and the average time it took for a call was 14 hours and 28 minutes. Almost half of the companies took at least four hours to make the call.

advertisement

advertisement

The fastest response came from high-growth companies — those with over 10,000 employees. Second were firms with 5001 to 10,000 employees. The slowest response came from companies with 51-200 employees. Strangely, they took longer than businesses with only 11-50 staff members. 

Not surprisingly, firms selling sales-related products were the speediest, but that may not be saying much.  

While still the fastest, purveyors of sales tools averaged out at two hours and 16 minutes. Those peddling products took four hours, 52 minutes. 

Oddly, companies offering marketing products were the slowest, at 12 hours, 26 minutes. IT purveyors were second-slowest, taking 10 hours and 47 minutes.

In another way of looking at it, Workato found that companies using chatbots had a faster time average (eight hours and 36 minutes) and a higher response rate. 

In contrast, those without live chat took 10 hours, 40 minutes. Of those, 22.6% never followed up, versus 14.8% of those that do have chabots. 

Unfortunately, almost half of the enterprises studied lack chatbots.  

As with many things, it all seems to come down to technology. 

Firms using Salesforce, HubSpot, Outreach, and Leandata had a faster response time compared with those using other tools, Workato reports. 

Marketo users took 10 hours, 47 minutes and firms with Pardot came in at 12 hours, 35 minutes. 

Among companies deploying CRM tools, those with Salesforce beat everyone else, but it took them 11 hours. 

Something is wrong here, if you accept the HBR findings. 

The problem is tied to lead routing. The subjects using lead-routing tools had an average response time of six hours. Those without these tools took 10 hours, 26 minutes.  

Here’s the most unfortunate part. Salespeople burdened with such track records at their firms have 400% less chance of ever contacting with that lead, Workato says. 

Next story loading loading..