Background

Anne Holland, founder of MarketingSherpa, invited us to the Business-to-Business 4th annual Demand Generation Summit to share the answers we have found to the following question:

“How Much Time Do You Have Before Web-Generated Leads Go Cold?”

Due to the lack of existing research on this topic, we had previously contacted Professor James B. Oldroyd, who was completing his PhD dissertation at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and Organizations Department, to help us design and carry out a new Lead Response Management survey that would provide answers to this question.

Not feeling the survey adequately answered the question, we sought out Dr. Oldroyd again after he had left Kellogg and had taken a position as a Faculty Fellow at the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and asked him to study this question more intently.

During this same time frame we worked closely with FranklinCovey on a case study designed to answer a similar question. (See the brief recently published on this by Sean Donahue of MarketingSherpa.)

This paper seeks to summarize key results from the survey, study, and case study:

• Dr. Oldroyd’s Lead Response Management Survey performed under the auspices of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
• Professor Oldroyd’s and InsideSales.com’s collaborative Lead Response Management Study performed while Dr. Oldroyd was at MIT.
• InsideSales.com and FranklinCovey Case Study designed to determine the optimal time to call back individuals who abandon an eCommerce transaction in the middle of a shopping cart process.