Is Your Lead Management Leaking? We Tested 433 Companies

Lead management is the process of tracking and managing potential customers throughout the buying journey up until the point a purchase is made. The process usually involves three stages:

1) Lead generation and prospect inquiry

This the stage during which a demand generation activity prompts a prospect to visit your website. Traditionally, this is when a lead is met with an old school form of some type on a landing page.

2) Lead grading and routing

Once a prospect has signaled interest in a product via a landing page form, a company evaluates the information submitted to determine the identity of a prospect and determine how good of a fit they are for the product or service. From there, a prospect is routed to the right sales rep or point of contact.

3) Sales contact, nurturing and close

After the lead is routed to the right person, it's the responsibility of the company to follow up via phone, email, or a combination of both. The way they are contacted is usually determined by the type of action that prospect originally took.

Sounds simple enough, right?

In theory, it is. But unfortunately, the way most companies execute on this process leaves customers annoyed and unserved.

Don't believe us? Here's an experience we recently had as a customer.

Story of a broken lead management system

A team started running monthly webinars. As the number of attendees grew from 50 to 500, it became clear that an upgrade to the webinar software was necessary.

Heading to the product’s website to add more seats, there was no live chat option for a quick message. After searching around for a "contact sales" form and finding nothing, the only choice left was to call sales. Typically, getting on the phone is avoided unless it's something urgent, but the need to upgrade was immediate.

After dialing the 800 number and battling through a phone tree, a robotic voice asked for a name and phone number, with the promise of a callback. It felt outdated, and with a webinar scheduled for the next day, there was no time to wait. A quick search led to another vendor offering the same features at the same price. The difference? The response time. The second company responded instantly, and the purchase was made within minutes. Meanwhile, the original company’s sales rep didn’t return the call for two days. That experience sparked some deeper reflection within the team.

What is the common lead management process?

If that experience was so bad and we were existing customers, how do businesses treat people who aren’t customers yet? How do leads get treated in a world where buyers expect responses in real-time? Do most businesses act like the second company from the story? Or the first?

So using a secret shopper, we set out to fill out lead forms, demo requests, and sales inquiry forms for 433 B2B SaaS companies to see just how fast they are responding to their sales leads today.

Here’s what we found.

The 2017 Drift lead response survey:

Highlights

• Want to talk to sales? Get ready to fill out a form and wait. Only 7% of the 433 companies responded within the first five minutes.
• Hope you weren't expecting to hear back any time soon. More than half (55%) of the companies did not even respond over the course of five business days.
• The fast responders had a secret. Of the companies with the 10 fastest response times, all of them used live chat on their websites.
• And yet most sales teams still aren't using chat. Overall, just 14% of the 433 companies surveyed were using live chat.

Takeaway: Your lead management is probably leaking

In a world where we all using messaging apps every day, and 9 out of 10 people expect to be able to use messaging apps to communicate with businesses, only 14% of the B2B SaaS companies were using live chat -- and that was reflected in the time it took them to respond. Only 32 of the 433 companies responded within the first five minutes.

We used five minutes as a benchmark because that's the magic window for connecting with a new sales lead: after just five minutes, the odds of qualifying a new lead decrease by 10x. And in today's world, that can be the difference between a potential buyer going with your business -- or bouncing from your site and searching for a competitor. In other words, your lead management is leaking.

But we know that it's unrealistic to expect your team to respond within five minutes with the tools that they're currently using.

And that's exactly why a shift needs to happen in the way B2B companies do sales and marketing.

How to plug the lead management leak

Instead of relying on helpful content creation, lead forms, and email nurturing campaigns, the best-in-class companies today are turning to messaging to match the real-time nature of buyers today.

Following up with someone a few days after they've filled out a form is like ignoring someone that walked into your store — and then mailing them a postcard hoping that they'll come back and talk to you when you're ready.

The best time to talk to someone isn’t after they’ve filled out a form. It’s when they are live in your store, on your website.

And with messaging, companies today have the ability to qualify leads in real-time. So while your team might not be able to work 24/7, chatbots can help qualify leads in that precious five-minute window and find the ideal customers for your business simply by asking the same questions a BDR might ask via email or over the phone.

As the numbers show in this lead response survey, despite the fact that we all use messaging in our personal lives every single day, we're still in the very early innings of the shift to messaging for sales.

But that just means there's a huge opportunity for the companies that are willing to move first. And the best part? It doesn't require a fundamental change to your business -- it all starts with adding a second net to your current website.