if they wait 30 minutes, and they have a 21-fold greater chance of qualifying that lead—i.e., setting up a follow-up appointment.
Fun Facts About Sales Effectiveness
Most of these bullets and the point about speed are from Krogue’s article 7 Best Practices for Increasing Contact Ratios, which also cites other sources for some of the stats.
—Only 27 percent of sales leads coming in to a company actually get spoken to.
—The odds of a potential customer picking up the phone go up 58 percent if the caller has a local phone number.
—Persistence pays. Most salespeople give up after an average of about 1.5 calls. But it really takes six to nine phone calls to improve contact ratios (the number of contacts per call made).
—The first big problem in sales is that salespeople don’t make enough calls. They should make at least 50 calls a day—and up to 170 depending on the size of the business.
—The best times to reach someone on the phone are 4-6 pm, with 8 am second-best.
—Wednesdays and Thursdays are the best days to reach people. Fridays are actually very good for reaching them, but people are less likely to make buying decisions on Fridays.
—You get three times the number of appointments if you have someone’s direct dial phone number.
—Fax is eight times better than e-mail for reaching people, and LinkedIn is seven times better than a fax. That seemed really weird to me, and I think to others. But, Krogue asked, when was the last time you didn’t read a fax?
Fun Facts About Response Rates (Including Our Dinner Guests)
—An InsideSales survey of the top 540 Web marketing companies, according to Alexa, indicated 45 percent didn’t call back at all when responding to a sales lead, with a 56-hour average response for those who did. “That’s like going to Nordstrom on Wednesday and the sales guy says `Why don’t you come back Friday afternoon?’” Krogue said.
—As a bit of fun discussion fodder, Krogue’s team called the companies of our dinner guests with “real” sales leads. The good news is that only six of the 27 didn’t call back—much better than the world’s top corporations do. The not-so-good news was that the average response time was 17 hours, 22 minutes, two seconds. (Yes, they tracked them down to the second).
One company, Logentries, responded in four seconds!
Other Pearls of Wisdom
Ellis: Large companies should take an “Ocean’s 11” strategy and look for teams that together have all the skill you need. Don’t try to find all those skills in one person—that isn’t realistic. “Startups usually don’t have the luxury for a full growth team, so they need an individual growth hacker that’s pretty dynamic,” he said.
Krogue: Learn from others. “True innovation is taking something that works in another field and applying it to you.”
