Speed to Lead: What It Is And Why It Could Hurt Your Sales Conversion

Are you struggling to convert leads into sales? If so, you likely have to review your speed-to-lead, meaning how quickly you respond to warm leads.

According to one highly-regarded study, your chances of qualifying an inbound lead successfully falls 60x if your response time goes from within an hour to 24 hours or longer.

The faster you respond, the higher the likelihood of generating more sales. The longer a sales rep responds to a lead, the colder the lead gets. And eventually, your leads become non-responsive.

If you’re reading this, you likely want to learn what speed-to-lead means and why it matters. And learn different ways to improve your sales team’s speed to lead so that you can convert more prospects into customers.

What is speed to lead?

Speed to lead is the total amount of time it takes between when a lead first fills out a form, provides their information, and expresses interest to the earliest moment a sales rep responds. 

For example, if a lead fills out a demo request and it takes three hours for a sales rep to respond, your lead speed is three hours.

In other words, speed to lead accounts for how quickly an organization responds to a lead, whether by phone, email, or social media.

How do you calculate lead speed?

Speed to lead is calculated by counting the total time it takes for a sales rep to follow up with a lead and then dividing it by the total number of leads contacted. This will give you an average lead response time.

There are several ways organizations track speed to lead metrics.

For example, some will track an overall average across the organization. Other organizations have an average speed to lead per campaign or sales rep. All of this is calculated by adding up each individual lead response time and dividing it by the number of leads that responded.

Here are several ways to track average speed to lead:

• Organizational-wide
• By team
• By individual
• By campaign
• By marketing channel

How fast should you reply to a lead?

Now that you’ve learned what speed to lead is, let’s dive into how fast you should respond.

Think about your everyday life; you instantly get a response when you buy something online. If you have a service issue, you can immediately reach out and get an answer through a support chat. That same speed is now a precedent in B2B sales.

The average prospect will be frustrated quickly by having to wait. Even a small gesture, such as an employee letting you know that it’ll be a short wait, will help relieve any stress and show that they care.

The gold standard in B2B in sales is five minutes. Your odds of a lead responding after five minutes decrease by 80%. According to Harvard, approximately 26 percent will already have received a response from their sales department. Thirty-seven percent of respondents will receive a response within an hour. However, the average response time takes 42 hours, which is plenty of room for improvement.

Why does speed to lead matter?

As you may have learned, speed can make or break your sales conversion.

According to research, companies that respond to leads in five minutes or less are 100x more likely to connect and convert opportunities. Faster speed to lead has countless benefits, such as accelerating a sales process, beating the competition, and increasing conversion.

Here are several roadblocks that slow down your speed to lead:

• Leads are untouched: leads either are stalled or not acted upon, so they sit in the queue.
• Leads lack sufficient data: leads don’t have enough contextual information associated with their records, such as a correct company name, email, or phone number. It takes longer to research and is more costly to enrich with data.
• Leads are misrouted: leads aren’t assigned to the right salesperson based on territory or industry segment. They then need to be re-assigned, which slows down the response time.

Speed to lead statistics

Still don’t believe speed to lead impacts your sales conversion? Or you may be convinced that lead response time is impacting your conversion rates but need to persuade your team.

Here are several speed-to-lead statistics that show you why lead response time is so important:

• 50% of buyers choose the vendor that responds first.
• 48% of salespeople never even make an initial follow-up attempt.
• Responding within the first-minute increases lead conversions by 391%.
• Responding within five minutes is 21x more effective than responding after 30 minutes.
• After five minutes, the odds of qualifying a lead drop by 80%.
• The average B2B business takes 42 hours to respond.
• Only about 27% of leads ever get contacted.
• Less than 25% of companies call their web leads.

If your team is unconvinced that speed to lead is an important metric to catch, share the statistics above with them. Research shows how much speed impacts a buyer’s impression and closed deals.

How to improve the speed to lead?

Now that you’ve learned what speed to lead is and the impact of quickly responding to prospects, let’s dive into how to improve.

First, analyze what your current speed to lead is. Evaluate the average number of leads your sales team works on to determine if a capacity limit is slowing down follow-up. Get a snapshot of the total time it takes for the average sales rep to follow up. And review which channels sales reps use to respond. This analysis will provide you with a benchmark of your current speed to lead and where there are areas for improvement.

As you’re evaluating your sales follow-up metrics, consider these questions:

• How long do you try to respond to a lead that fills out a form?
• What channels do you use to follow up with a lead immediately?
• If your lead doesn’t respond to your initial response, what’s your strategy for a follow-up?

Your answers should give you a good understanding of what to prioritize first. In any case, here are several proven methods to increase your sales follow-up.

1. Establish an SLA between marketing and sales

According to LinkedIn, 60% of respondents believed that misalignment between sales and marketing could damage financial performance. One of the disconnects between the teams is lead response time.

Creating a service level agreement (SLA) is crucial when aligning sales and marketing teams. An SLA establishes a set of responsibilities and deliverables that each team has to agree to provide another. It creates alignment between sales and marketing by setting clear expectations. For example, the definitions of a qualified lead and how long it should take to respond.

2. Route leads to the right sales rep

Automated lead routing can match inbound leads to the right sales rep and ensure each lead gets responded to. Automating the lead routing process can eliminate the back-and-forth disagreements on who owns which lead and human error.

More importantly, automated lead routing ensures that no leads are left untouched or forgotten.

Once leads are routed, your sales reps will know they’re responsible for following up. For example, if a prospect fills out a form, that lead gets automatically routed to the correct sales rep.

3. Build a sales follow-up cadence

Once a lead converts on a form fill or shows interest, you’ll need to make it easy for your sales rep to follow up prompt. To do so, you’ll need to create a sales cadence or sequence strategy. A sales cadence is a series of touchpoints that engage prospects over time.

An effective sales cadence is multi-touch and multi-touch using different forms of communication such as email, social media, phone calls, and voicemails. Sales prospecting tools like Salesloft, HubSpot or Reply.io can help you automate a cadence.

To build a sales cadence, you should consider these key components:

• Buyer Persona: The audience of your prospect, pain points, and which platforms they use for research.
• Content: The message and content within your cadence, including research, relevancy of your message, content, and your request for action.
• Media: The sales channels include email, phone calls, voicemails, social media, video, and sometimes text messages.
• Attempts: Total attempts it’ll take to engage your prospects.
• Duration: The length of time between the first and last touchpoints.
• Spacing: Time between touchpoints determined by hours, days, and weeks.
• Tiering: The customer segments the prospect belongs to include regions, company size, and industry.

Here’s a simple example of a demo request follow-up sequence:

4. Use a website chatbot

More companies use chatbots such as Drift or Intercom to interact with prospects live on their website.

Website chatbots allow prospects to directly engage with an actual human when they promptly need answers instead of waiting or filling in a form. Using a chatbot can increase lead response time and provide more reliable service.

Even if sales reps aren’t near their computer, you can automate your chatbot to instantly respond to prospects and point them in the right direction.

5. Use an instant meeting scheduler

Automated scheduler tools make it seamless and quick for prospects to book a meeting. Tools like Chili Piper can automatically qualify leads to ensure prospects are routed to the right sales rep.

Since prospects are so used to self-serve options as consumers, instant meeting schedulers reduce the friction. Instead of waiting minutes to get a response, it takes seconds to schedule a meeting.

Final thoughts

Speed to lead provides a better customer experience for your prospects and helps increase sales conversion. It is an important metric to be aware of and measure constantly. Roadblocks such as insufficient data, poor processes, and a lack of tools can hinder your speed. With the right processes and tools, you can increase your speed to lead and ensure no prospect gets left behind.