Your Website is Generating Leads, But Is Your Sales Team Following Up in Time?

We recently completed an internal study with a client to determine why the leads they were getting from their website weren’t converting into sales.

Bottom line: we found that 79% of their qualified leads were never contacted by the sales team. Not only is this a huge opportunity lost, but it’s a symptom of larger communication and workflow issues between the Marketing and Sales teams.

About Our Study

Let’s start with some context. We had been working with a client during the launch of a new website for lead generation. The Marketing Team was inspired and excited to start using their web presence as a new source for leads.

The Sales Team? Well, let’s just say they believed in proven channels, relationships, and a boiler room-style technique to smile and dial their way to business. They were frustrated that numbers were down, so they simply recruited more people to make more calls, continuing to do what had always worked for them in the past.

As an aside, we run into this quite a bit. It may seem odd that there are still organizations out there that haven’t bought into the value of using their website to generate leads. In fact, many business leaders may feel embarrassed that their company isn’t there yet. Let’s use this as an opportunity to let leaders know they aren’t alone in facing this challenge.

Stats from the Study:

• Length of Study: 12 Months
• Industry: B2B
• Conversion rate: 1.25%
• Total Number of Inquiries > 1,500
• Types of Inquiries:
  • Newsletter Sign-Ups, Hiring, Customer Service, Contact us, & ‘Request-for-Proposal’
  • Over 50% of these were Requests-for-Proposal
• Percentage of Qualified Leads: 23%
  • Manually qualified by a CSR team 
  • Percentage of Leads Disqualified that were miscategorized 30%
  • In other words – they could have had more than double the leads to contact.
• Lead follow-up on Qualified Leads:
  • 79% of qualified leads were NEVER contacted
  • 14% were followed the same business day
  • 8% followed up between 2-7 days
  • 7% took over a week to follow up
• Quoting Percentages:
  • 80% of those responding within 24 hours resulted in a formal proposal being sent
  • 26% resulted in quotes for those responding within 2-7 days

From there, the client’s normal close rate and times were consistent with their historical averages.

The Person or the Process?

Now, was this the fault of the Sales Team? Are they to blame? Well, maybe yes, maybe no. But let’s not jump to conclusions and start crackin’ skulls.

Bear in mind, this isn’t about ‘pointing fingers.’ At Sanctuary, it’s not about the person; it’s about the process. And something in the process just wasn’t working for the company.

If we use the Inbound Flywheel as a diagnostic tool, we found that the ‘Attract’ phase was working, but the ‘Engage’ phase wasn’t. It’s an important point: the flywheel is a great mental model to use as a diagnostic tool when we’re looking to grow our company.

Are Sales and Marketing Teams Working Together?

Inbound marketing was new to the entire company. Up until this point, the site had been used primarily for recruitment and handling customer service complaints. The general consensus was that people in their industry didn’t use the Internet to buy these services.

As a result, no process and little communication existed. The Marketing Team had set up a dedicated CSR to qualify inbound requests and route them to the sales team in a round-robin style.

Marketing was simply “sending them the leads.” So effectively, it was thrown over the wall.
The Sales Team never bought in. They had sales to close and numbers to hit.

The Sales Manager was effectively just their #1 sales leader. He was told he was a manager but was still measured and compensated primarily by how much he sold. He lacked the training, motivation, and authority to properly align his team with the goal.

As a result, he gave lip service to the project during meetings. But in the end, he knew his boss was going to fire him if he didn’t hit this month’s quota.

That’s an organizational problem in my book.

Ultimately, leadership hadn’t established clear objectives, roles, or responsibilities for their team. They paid for a fancy new website and spent over a hundred thousand dollars a year on an integrated CRM.

But they hadn’t aligned their teams out of their silo mentalities. Heck, they hadn’t even really forced the whole team to use the CRM they’d been paying for all this time.

They hadn’t really invested or made it worth the Sales Team’s time to complete the training needed to use the system.

It was Marketing vs. Sales, when it should be Marketing serving Sales, and Sales serving Marketing. And there’s a key point here too: it’s a collaborative relationship.

Marketing provides Sales with great warm leads. They should be easy to close and bountiful.

Sales provides Marketing with feedback to help generate better content and zero in on the right personas that attract, engage, and delight more business.

Diagnostic Measures

I like to start with how you measure success. You can’t manage what you don’t measure. I love my aphorisms.

Yes, it always comes down to revenue. Did we get more sales? But does that help us diagnostically?

If we zero in on the Engagement section of the flywheel, we can surely think of some better measures to resolve their problem.

Response Time

Can we set up a measure to track response times? Can we elevate that measure in a flash report for each sales rep to see how many inquiries they responded to within 4 hours, 24 hours, or later?

Lead Qualification

Lead qualification was also an issue for the client. On review, we found that 30% of the inbound leads were disqualified because they had ‘generic’ email addresses. The CSR assumed it was spam and deleted it based on this assumption. However, if the Marketing Team had consulted with the Sales Team a bit more, they would have learned that 50% of decision-makers in their industry still use Gmail, Yahoo, and yes, AOL as their primary email service. They were pretty ‘old school’ and had never invested in the switch.

Utilization

Another measure that would have helped? Utilization. What percentage of the sales team actually uses the CRM? How many emails are going in and out of the inbox? How many activities are managed and completed through the tools? Are they up-to-date?

In this case, we found less than 5% of the Sales Team used the tool regularly. Many sales professionals live out of their email inboxes. All their clients’ contact information is sequestered on their personal phones and local computers in a disembodied spreadsheet.

By the way, all this information is owned by the company. But you can’t find it. It’s a secret.

Conclusion

This is just the tip of the iceberg. You may have similar challenges but with different causes, which will require different solutions.

The opportunity here is to ask ourselves as business leaders if we have a problem or not. And if we do, we should use a disciplined approach to identify where to start. Then, work to resolve each challenge in turn, measure effectiveness, and over time we should see incremental improvements that will get that flywheel spinning.