B2B marketing: Timely Lead Response
So, you have just spent thousands of dollars in your marketing campaign targeting new audiences to gain awareness and hopefully leads eventually. You may have used a combo of display ads, email, SEM, social media and then some. Immediate objectives are to optimised clicks throughs and conversions through your inside or telesales.
As leads start pouring in and initial excitement wears off you are then left with the task of trying to decipher efficiency in leads funneling; which channel should each lead be funneled to – inside sales, account sales, channel sales? Too much build up and you may suffer push backs, or worst backlash that your leads are of poor quality.
The above scenario is a typical struggle in B2B marketing for most marketing managers in an MNC. Not to add salt to wounds but the fight externally is where the real focus should be. This left flank will likely catch most marketing and sales team uncovered if not addressed appropriately – Your average response time to your newly found leads.
A few years ago, Harvard Business Review researchers, James B. Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington, discovered that “most companies are not responding nearly fast enough.”
“37% responded to their lead within an hour, and 16% responded within one to 24 hours, 24% took more than 24 hours—and 23% of the companies never responded at all.”
In short, their findings indicated that “37% responded to their lead within an hour, and 16% responded within one to 24 hours, 24% took more than 24 hours—and 23% of the companies never responded at all.”
Although response time of 24 hours may be acceptable in B2B, however survey also indicated that a good a sizable number of online leads never received a response. If you are in a leadership position in marketing or sales the process of your leads qualification and funneling should be in your purview. Knowing to what extend your leads fall through cracks should at least be a box in your leads progress dashboard. Delays in your process will most certainly appear the question is what are you going to do about it? Find out from your audiences what is the acceptable level of response time before they turn cold. Remember this: when your leads turn cold on you it may also mean that they will turn to your competitors for answers. So, all those thousands of dollars you spent nurturing your lead has gone to your competition. Let that sink in for a while.
B2B audiences may be changing in a disruptive sort of way. Perhaps you are a software company operating in a complex environment and maybe immune to any major shift. But consider a smaller player going to market with their cloud solution that maybe be platform agnostic. Add to that could be an AI algos that simplify tasks and suddenly their free download trials start to gain shares.
Disruption in marketing will also start to gain traction using chatbots to narrow gaps in response time.
Ultimately human factor still comes into play in a major way. Sales resources who are helpful and friendly will usually turn leads into sales more rapidly. The right mix of personalities will strengthen your leads pipeline enabling.
If you are on a look out for good resources to help you with leads management then consider Intercall.
With over 10 years experiences in B2B, Intercall Marketing helps client to craft qualified leads and pipeline for mainly Tech Companies in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines and Australia.
Our Outbound special team works hard to accelerate marketing sales leads pipeline in countries in Asia such as Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines and Australia.
Furthermore, we team up successfully with marketing groups as well as sales to narrow gaps and increase opportunities across numerous Tech brand such as Avaya, HP and Microsoft just to name a few.