Originally presented by:

Dave Elkington
CEO
InsideSales.com

James Oldroyd, PhD
Professor
Sloan School of Management, MIT

MarketingSherpa’s
Business-to-Business
Demand Generation
4th Annual Summit 2007

October 16th, 2007

FranklinCovey is the leading time management and Day Planner company, located in Salt Lake City, Utah.

FranklinCovey has used the InsideSales.com CRM with integrated dialers for years.  They wanted to identify the best time to call back a person who abandoned a shopping somewhere in the purchase process. 

Working together, we found that the worst time to call back was within the first 24 hours. 

People often opted out because they didn’t have their credit card handy or they decided against the purchase for some reason.  If reps called back too quickly they would often get a negative emotional response.  But if they called back immediately after 24 hours, they had very high success ratios in getting the person to purchase.

We found that 3:30 in the afternoon was best to call to make contact to get success, but interestingly enough, as it got later in the afternoon and evening the contact ratios continued to go up but the qualify or success ratios went DOWN.  In fact by 5:17pm in the evening the qualify ratio went to 0%, but the qualify ratio was still very high.

Another interesting thing, this data was examined again three months later ant the optimal call time to make contact had shifted from 3:30pm to 3:50pm. 

Far more important, after analyzing almost two years of data we found that even though they had people working until 6pm, they hadn’t qualified ANYONE during that last hour for two years!

Imagine the labor cost spent in two years of their entire call center calling an hour every day without the results they wanted.

What did they do? 

They shifted schedules to optimize qualification ratios and have already seen a change in their results.  This may cause call centers to realize their shift schedules can actually be optimized for contact, qualification, and sales results, not just call coverage, convenience, or time zone coverage, as is typically the case.

What are the results? 

They have noticed increases in productivity and sales because of this slight change in schedule strategy.

Summary

The Kellogg Survey revealed the following:

1-      The ways leads are captured and distributed seem to have a great impact on results.  Moreover, the methods used for demand generation, as well as the offer type, all impact lead qualification and close ratios.

2-      Delayed responses and unproductive call back attempts are correlated to lower lead qualification and close ratios.

3-      If a company displays both issues they demonstrate a negative synergistic effect that suggests the problem gets worse than if either problem exists on its own.

4-      Companies who don’t know or don’t measure these kinds of statistics may correlate with even lower qualification or close rates.

5-      Larger companies, whether measured by employees, representatives, or revenue, may need to be more aware of these issues than smaller companies.

6-      Companies who break up their sales process into specialties correspond with higher ratios.

7-      Companies have no idea what is the best time or timeliness to call leads back. 

The MIT Study revealed the following:

1-      Time of day and day of week each have significant impact, with time of day being the greater of the two.

2-      Immediacy of response far overshadows both time of day and day of week in its effect on contact and qualification ratios.

Dr. Oldroyd emphasizes that he finds these clear patterns in the data only when data from several companies is combined together.  Patterns vary significantly from company to company as emphasized with the FranklinCovey example.

We found huge variance in the kinds of offers on a company website.  We learned that a request for a price quote needs to be handled different than a whitepaper. We learned that the kinds of products sold require different approaches. 

We don’t know how much yet.  That is the subject of future studies.

And finally, WHY is response time so important?   Though we don’t exactly know for sure, we have a few educated guesses:

Guess 1 - You Know Where They Are

When a person submits a lead in a web form, you know where they are at that exact moment: they are at their computer desk, probably right near their phone.  We call this “presence”.  If you call them immediately, they answer.  If you wait, they move on to something else, often away from their phone.

Salespeople know that simply being able to contact somebody can make the difference between a sale or not.  Marketers may not be as aware of this.

Guess 2 - Highest Interest or Need

People search the Internet because they want things now. Interest and need wane quickly.  A few days later they often don’t even remember they submitted a lead.  Immediacy of response hits the respondent at their highest point of interest or need.

Guess 3 - The “Wow” Effect

Our sales representatives often experience the “wow effect” when our web-form call back technology contacts a person who submitted a lead in less than 3 seconds. 

The respondent quite often reacts with, “wow, that was fast!  You are impressive.”  We have been told that they feel that the sales representative must be really on top of things, and that is the kind of person and company they want servicing their account.

We are reminded of the early days of caller id when people answered a call and said the name of the caller.  What surprised initially is now commonplace.  First impressions continue to have a strong influence on trust and relationships.

About InsideSales.com

InsideSales.com is the expert in Lead Management and the pioneer of Lead Response Management solutions.  This study caused a significant shift in our corporate positioning.  Our patent-pending web-form callback dialer telephony opens new frontiers in web-marketing, lead generation and sales.

Google drives clicks, Omniture drives conversion, and Salesforce.com drives closure. 

InsideSales.com integrates with all three market leaders to drive qualification of prospects.  We sit between a company website and their CRM, and optimize the handoff of leads from marketing to sales.

 We increase lead qualification rates to lower company’s cost per prospect.  Companies typically see a 2-4x increase in contact ratios and lead qualification rates using the InsideSales.com technology.