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3 ways timing is affecting your B2B sales
They say time waits for no one.
And with around 78% of businesses buying from the first company they speak to... it’s clear that your prospects don’t, either.
Timing is crucial in almost every aspect of business, but what areas should you focus on to make the biggest impact on your sales?
And how on earth do you keep an eye on multiple leads at once without losing your mind?
Take the time to read on, and you may just find out!
Response time
When you get an inbound lead, it’s crucial you respond as fast as humanly possible. Or as inhumanly possible, if you use a chatbot.
Studies show that responding in one minute makes you 4x more likely to convert your prospect. Taking longer than 5 minutes actually gives you 80% less chance of qualifying the lead at all.
We could throw more eye-watering statistics at you, but you probably get the point.
To facilitate a speedy response, you need real-time alerts for inbound leads, and an automatic process to assign them to the best salesperson.
But what about your prospects who are interested, but don’t enquire?
A tool like CANDDi enables you to set up alerts for very specific activity on your website… and this doesn’t have to involve a direct enquiry!
Maybe you want to be alerted and assigned if someone returns to your website for the third time, or if they visit both your products and pricing page.
Further still, perhaps you want to be alerted of these things… but only if the visitor is from the Manufacturing industry. The beauty of Visitor-Level Tracking is that you can get as detailed as you like!
Strategic timing
So, we’ve established that the best time to respond to inbound leads is right away.
But when is the best time for outreach?
If we’re talking months, the absolute best time to reach out to people is at the start of the year, when most businesses are planning their new budgets. Specifically, outreach in February performs 10% better than average.
That isn’t to say that the only time to reach out is at the start of the year… but it’s definitely a great time to launch new campaigns!
On a smaller scale, the hour and day you reach out to your prospects matters too. It’s important not to get too obsessed with this - setting your alarm for 4:33 AM to hit your overseas audience might be overkill - but experiment with timing and figure out what works for you!
Internal efficiency
Teams who aren’t effectively pooling resources and sharing knowledge often lose a lot of time… or worse: leads!
This is particularly true of sales and marketing. Studies actually show that misalignment of these two departments can cost companies 10% or more of revenue per year.
So how can you fix it?
For starters, fostering the kind of culture in which your sales and marketing teams collaborate is absolutely essential. Develop strong bonds between the individuals on both teams, and understand that generating leads and converting them into sales is a team effort, not two separate functions to be carried out in isolation.
One of the best ways to make sales and marketing more effective is by having both business functions use the same integrated software.
Since CANDDi tracks every action from every visitor who hits your site, marketers are able to accurately assess the success of their campaigns. And once the system identifies leads from these campaigns, they are automatically identified and assigned to the most relevant member of the sales team.
Now that’s efficient.
If you’d like to improve your marketing and sales process, feel free to sign up for our free trial. Definitely worth your time!
