Partner Article

UK businesses ignoring sales opportunities

InsideSales.com, the leading cloud-based sales acceleration company, has identified that UK businesses are ignoring vital, valuable sales leads. The company conducted a number of ResponseAudits™ for companies at Salesforce’s recent World Tour Event in London. The companies audited spanned a number of vertical markets including financial services, consumer goods and B2B technology.

Research showed that response times have actually slowed considerably in the past 12 months:

The average response time in 2016 was 31 hours and 37 minutes, up from 24 hours and 13 minutes in 2015 In fact, 85 per cent of businesses had not made any attempted telephone contact at all within the timeframe The average number of contact attempts by businesses was 1.9, down from 2.39 in 2015

“With the current economic uncertainty surrounding Britain’s position in the European Union, and consistent problems with lagging productivity in the UK, it’s certainly worrying that businesses aren’t responding to inbound leads. Online sales leads have a very short shelf life – and businesses are spending more and more money on online marketing, but they don’t have the sales processes or technologies in place to convert those leads. By taking too long to attempt initial contact or by never attempting to contact a new lead, much of this investment is lost,” said Martin Moran, EMEA VP and GM of InsideSales.com.

Research shows that companies have very little time to respond to a sales lead before it goes “cold”. The odds of making a successful contact with a lead are a 100 times greater when a contact attempt happens in the first five minutes, compared to 30 minutes after the lead was submitted.

Moran continued, “speed is of the essence when it comes to following up leads, in every single industry, and telephone is the most successful form of contact. It’s vital that businesses look to communicate with the right prospects at the right time, in order to maximise sales.”

ResponseAudit™ uses a “secret shopper” methodology to benchmark a company’s response to web leads and compare that with the rest of the industry.

*ResponseAudit™ submits web leads via online forms and tracks response times, response frequency and other key metrics. The report uncovers blind spots in an organisation’s sales processes and provides actionable steps for immediate improvement.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by InsideSales.com .