How to Improve Speed to Lead and Convert More Customers

Timing is everything in a business, especially when it’s a customer-facing one. Even slight delays can make a negative impression.

When you’re striving to reach as many potential customers as possible, these delays become inevitable considering the outreach volume, making it tricky to build trust with your customers.

Responding to leads quickly works in your favor and has a positive impact on conversions. It allows you to meet customer expectations promptly.

The quicker you talk to a lead who has just filled out a contact form, the better your chances of guiding them toward conversion. 78% of businesses purchase products from the vendor that responds to their enquiry the soonest.

This is where speed to lead gives you competitive leverage.

What Is Speed to Lead?

Speed to lead is the time between a lead submitting an inquiry form and the business’ response.

This response can take various forms, such as an interactive voice response (IVR), an automated SMS confirmation, or a live representative contacting the lead within minutes.

Savvy leaders usually have a set goal for lead response time, such as five minutes. They track the average response time to deliver feedback when the goal isn’t met. This is because the speed to lead is tied to the broader customer experience and marketing ROI, which is critical for your business’ success.

If anything staggers speed to lead, it causes a delay, which in turn increases the risk of losing an opportunity. Many things could happen during this delay. For example, the lead might lose interest, or they might choose a competitor’s option because it delivered a faster experience.

A fast speed to lead time ensures you connect with the buyer before their trust wears out. It also means you’ll see better ROI from the money you spend on marketing.

Why Speed to Lead Matters

When impatience is the new norm, near-instant answers are the sweet dopamine hits your customers seek. If you don’t provide this experience, your competitors might. How long will you be chasing leads, constantly rushing to meet and greet them?

Leads come in outside business hours, too, and you’ll find them waiting to give you a cold welcome when you start your day the next morning. This means the CX favors prospects in your timezone, which isn’t a good experience for customers outside of your area. In such situations, tools like chatbots, autoresponders, and 24/7 routing help make introductions before you come in.

Would you let the lead decay?

The longer you wait, the slimmer your chances of success. If you take too long to show up, it leaves your prospect hanging. If they go to a competitor, you still have an opportunity to win them back with unique selling points, offering them more value than they’re currently getting. However, if they simply lose interest, that’s a loss for everyone. You don’t want to risk it.

It’s logical to contact prospects as soon as possible; you get the first-caller advantage. Not responding promptly has several disadvantages, including revenue leakage and lead decay. Reaching out to customers quickly has all the upsides, so what do you have to lose?

Being known as the first responder builds trust and reputation. Ultimately, it translates into more conversations, meetings, and deals. An HBR study shows that businesses that respond to leads in five minutes or less are 100 times more likely to connect and convert opportunities.

Challenges That Slow Down Lead Response

If responding quickly offers nothing but advantages, what’s stopping it?

When organizations grow, delays don’t happen because of laziness; the real culprits are complicated, such as:

Ownership silos

When ownership is abstract, teams will always find someone else to blame. This is common in growing businesses that have yet to create a cohesive team structure.

Sales teams will blame the marketing department for bad leads or ineffective lead generation. Similarly, marketing may hold sales teams accountable for slow follow-ups. And leadership gets every finger pointed at them.

As you address ownership issues, manual sales processes often hinder progress.

Manual processes

Leads sit in inboxes or spreadsheets before being routed. These leads are just idle. The team isn’t working on them, nor are they scheduled in their outreach queue for later.

It’s unnecessary to keep these leads in email inboxes and spreadsheets waiting for someone to process them. To speed things up, automation tools can step in and route leads without human intervention.

As you set up routing mechanics, you may find agents are only picking up hot, qualified leads, leaving the others waiting.

Agent prioritization bias

Hot leads have more conversion potential. With agents being incentivized by the deals they win, they’ll likely go after the ones they have better chances of closing. It’s logical for your agents, but your prospects all deserve the same response, regardless of how hot the lead is.

To make things right, let technology assign leads in real time with intelligent routing capabilities. This feature analyzes which agents are available, the last connected agent, context, and preferred lead routing method to assign leads to reps.

With leads being routed effectively, you need to plan for times when no one is available to respond.

After-hours lag

Running a global business means you get inquiries and support issues around the clock. Even if you can’t address customers’ queries instantly, you can at least let them know what to expect and how soon they can get a callback.

You can configure this in the automation system to notify the lead about the next steps. However, if your system doesn’t work with email marketing tools or communications software, you might find it tricky to send out notifications and perform other necessary actions. To make it work, you need a system that cohesively integrates with other business applications commonly used by your company.

Scalability issues

After tech-enabling your operations, you may find it challenging to maintain a fast response time when the lead volume spikes.

At this stage, you’ll realize that technology plays a supporting role; it’s your people who need to develop a mindset focused on improving speed to lead. Create a setup that optimizes both people and technology to ensure a quick response time.

The next section dives into the essential strategies you need to improve speed to lead.

Strategies to Improve Speed to Lead

These strategies create a setup that responds to leads as soon as possible, giving them the experience they expect.

Here’s what you need to do:

Build a culture of responsiveness

Your team won’t work toward improved responsiveness if it’s not a company’s priority. They’re likely already swamped with work. However, if you make lead response a priority metric, it might change their perspective.

When the team has established SLAs (enforced through tracking), it gradually becomes ingrained in their processes. If it’s still a challenge, start tracking it in the public dashboard, and use gamified leaderboards to motivate reps to be more responsive.

Use data-driven lead prioritization

Create a setup where the lead score is measured based on real-time data. Automated lead scoring models allow you to do that. Configure it in a way that routes high-intent leads instantly while still ensuring all other leads receive timely follow-up.

It’s advisable to coach your team to move beyond gut-feel decision-making. Instead, trust the data to make faster decisions and improve speed to lead.

Embrace automation

There are several ways to make responses instantaneous. For example, a form-to-call automation will connect a rep to the lead instantly when the form is submitted.

The response need not always come from a rep. Instead, you can set up SMS and email triggers to send an immediate “we got your request” message, reassuring leads that their message has been recorded.

Alternatively, AI chatbots can respond to simple questions and route complex queries to a live agent, ensuring the lead always gets the best possible support and assistance.

Develop an omnichannel response strategy

You’re likely receiving inquiries from different age groups based in various locations, making their preferences incredibly diverse. You need to respect their choices to make a good first impression.

When planning your strategy, set it up to support an omnichannel experience. It will help you meet leads where they are, whether that’s via phone, SMS, email, live chat, or social media. You can also set configurations to make follow-ups based on the lead’s preferences. For example, a young buyer is likely to be more responsive to text; set up a text-first strategy for them.

It’s advisable to set up a cross-channel strategy with call, SMS, and email to maximize reach.

Use intelligent routing

Carefully set up an intelligent routing system, where your route leads to the right rep the first time, preventing wasted calls.

Emphasize skill-based routing to connect reps appropriately; for example, Spanish-speaking leads will get connected to Spanish-speaking sales reps.

Make sure you configure the system for speed and personalization.

Monitor and optimize continuously

After setting it all up, it’s essential to keep watch. Continuously monitor key KPIs, such as average speed to lead, percentage of outbound leads and inbound leads contacted within the first five minutes, and lead conversion rate by response time.

You may not get the most suitable response cadence the first time. A/B test different cadences to find what works for your business. Additionally, ensure you’re consistently refining scripts, adjusting call times, and optimizing staffing to ensure the most efficient and high-performance setup.

The Tech Behind Faster Speed to Lead

The technology that powers faster speed to lead comes in some of these forms:

Predictive and power dialers

When calling is your primary way to reach out, predictive and power dialers automate the dialing process, ensuring your reps engage only when someone answers. It saves them from wasting time and effort on dialing only to reach an answering machine.

Auto-dialer software is fine-tuned to help users achieve different results. For example:

• Predictive dialers forecast agent availability and connect reps to more leads in less amount of time.
• Power dialers enable click-to-dial functionality directly from the CRM, eliminating the need for manual data entry.

Workflow automation

Automation works in all parts of the process. It prioritizes hot new leads at the top of the call queue while triggering instant callbacks, acknowledgment emails, and confirmation texts.

It ensures you don’t have to deal with manual lag, empowering the team to contact high-intent leads immediately. It also prevents human error, which is common when your team is handling high-scale lead management.

CRM integration

Technology that offers dialing and workflow automation should connect seamlessly with your CRM. This integration keeps the context alive, regardless of the number of systems and channels you’re working with. It streamlines the process while converting leads into opportunities.

When needed, the system gets all information related to the contact, including their previous interactions. It supplies this context to the agent, empowering them to sound confident in the first call.

AI-powered tools

Intelligent call routing connects leads to the rep most qualified to offer an instantaneous solution. AI dialers often suggest the next best action to reps in real time for lead qualification and other stages, seamlessly navigating a buyer to the deal-won stage and later for upsells and cross-sells.

These days, such tools come equipped with sentiment analysis features, helping agents to adjust their tone and messaging during conversation. It improves the speed and quality of their responses.

Real-time dashboards

Above all, you get visibility into metrics that show the impact you’re making on speed to lead. Managers can track this, making it easy to highlight where the team is lagging or performing well.

If there’s a performance issue, managers can implement training or resources to ensure sales success. It also gives cues to motivate reps and reinforce accountability to ensure continuous improvement.

Help Your Sales Team Generate More Revenue With Nextiva

Improving speed to lead allows you to boost growth, and most importantly, give an experience that customers value. Responding quickly gives you a competitive advantage, ensuring you come across as trustworthy and reliable to customers.

Faster is better.

Nexitva combines culture, processes, and technology to equip your people with the tools they need to improve their speed to lead. The platform unifies lead response channels and uses strategic automations to deliver a memorable customer experience.

With Nextiva, you’re fast, confident, and most importantly, well-informed to make the best first impressions.

Submit a free Nextiva demo request. Discover how the platform can help you achieve more conversions and a better overall customer experience.