Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Dreamforce 2013 Lead Management Research Calls Out Internet Marketers Who Still Miss The Boat

For the sixth straight year my company, InsideSales.com, announced it’s annual research study on how fast companies respond to their leads at Dreamforce 2013, the cloud computing mecca put on by salesforce.com each year in San Francisco. The show is bigger and better than ever with over 120,000 attendees.
And though some companies are doing better than ever, it is at the expense of their much slower competitors.
Slow? Is speed that important?
Yes.
We are reminded by bestselling authors Jason Jennings and Laurence Haughton that “It’s Not the Big that Eat the Small… it’s the Fast that Eat the Slow.
In a world of mobile and internet, companies aren’t responding anywhere near fast enough to internet-based inquiries on their websites.
Research originally done in 2007 by Dr. James Oldroyd shows that if a company attempts phone contact within 5 minutes after somebody submits an internet inquiry on their website, the odds that the lead is contacted are 100 times greater than it if is contacted 30 minutes after submission.
Similar research was again done in 2011 in conjunction with Kristina McElheran of the Harvard Business School as published in Harvard Business Review.
Once again, it’s appalling how few companies understand the importance of responding immediately and persistently to web-based internet inquiries.
Why have a website if you don’t respond to people who visit it?
What would the average CEO think if they knew only 27% of leads their marketing department generates are actually spoken to by salespeople?
This year broke all records with 5257 Dreamforce 2013 attendee companies included in the analysis.
Every year we “secret shopper” thousands of companies by creating an alias name, phone number, email and a company website. Then we visit these companies and locate the main Web form on their site, fill out the alias information, and submit it.
Then we wait and see how fast the company responds. And how many times they try and follow up. And whether they call, send emails, or leave voicemails. Then we summarize the individual company information and compare it to all of the other company information we research.
Her

SOURCE-TIMES OF INDIA.
PRAVEEN SHARMA
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