Imagine walking into a department store on a Wednesday morning and spotting a pair of shoes you feel that you must acquire, or life will have no meaning. You excitedly ask the sales rep if you can try on a pair in your size and she says, “Sure, why don’t you come back on Friday?”
That deflating experience occurs all the time on the Web, Ken Krogue, president of InsideSales.com, told CRM Buyer.
InsideSales.com’s star ascended in the online marketing industry in 2007 when it unveiled research it conducted with MIT at an industry conference. That research, which the company updated in 2011 with the Harvard Business Review, found that it took the average company 46.5 hours to respond to a lead. The industry best practice, Krogue drily noted, is five minutes.
“If you are able to respond to a lead within five minutes, the odds of making contact are 100 times higher,” he said. “After that, the value of the lead decays very quickly.”
A New Service
The research prompted companies to seek out InsideSales.com for consulting on how to improve their own lead management and sales processes. InsideSales.com obliged on an informal, ad hoc basis.
It formalized its consulting services in March with the launch of Predictive Analytics Consulting, which assists companies in establishing standards for their lead and sales data. Then it guides those clients in establishing the optimal timing of the first contact and the proper follow-up sequencing.
Other analysis capabilities it offers include determining what is the best time of day, day of week, and time zone to make contact with a customer; lead source grading; offer type analysis; evaluating the impact of the sales rep’s personality on the sales process; and pricing and discounting strategies.
The Tech Piece
InsideSales.com uses its own technology and existing services to augment Predictive Analytics Consulting, Krogue said. For example, the process of measuring how a company handles its leads is done via its existing service, ResponseAudit.
Also, InsideSales.com developed a system that can capture a prospect’s telephone number and route it to an available sales rep within eight to nine seconds of the prospect filling out the lead.
This is how it works: The prospect types information into the lead form and hits submit. That data is parsed out and inserted in the company’s CRM system. From there the phone number is extracted and placed into a call distributor to send to the next available rep.
One added bonus of the system, Krogue said, is that the system calls the rep first and then calls the customer, so there is no dead air for the customer to hear.
“It can be much more granular if a company wants,” he noted. “For example, it can look up the demographics of a lead and of the sales reps and align them so the best possible match is made.”
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Companies run the Internet race to spin up a great web site and then bounce off the tape at the finish line. Even companies that deploy marketing automation are found lacking in meeting customer expectations if they fail to implement sales automation. #FailSales