Why Speed To Lead Will Make Or Break Your Business!
How fast is your lead followup? If it’s more than 5 minutes, you’re losing business — and you’re losing a lot of it. Believe it or not, while many companies still cling to the belief that it’s good to “wait a few hours” so they don’t seem desperate, the truth is that if you don’t follow up within the first 5 minutes, you won’t make the sale.
In the Lead Response Management Study, Professor James Oldroyd performed an in-depth study of response times & contact rates, and found that for every 5 minutes you wait, there’s roughly a 4x reduction in your chance of contacting the lead. If you wait more than an hour, your chances of contacting the lead are 10 times lower than if you’d called them in the first 5 minutes!
Keep in mind that 75% of prospects do business with the company that contacts them first. However, the average response time to an online lead is 44 hours and 50% of online leads never get a response! Why is there such a large disparity? In small business, the issue is usually that you’re busy with task-work and don’t have time to jump on new leads. With all the responsibilities on your plate, lead response often falls to the bottom of the list when in fact it should be a priority.
According to studies, the odds of calling to contact a lead decrease by over 10 times in the first hour — one way to improve your speed to lead time is with a MyOutDesk virtual assistant services, which can give you the leverage you need to boost your business.
The odds of qualifying a lead in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 21 times. And from 5 minutes to 10 minutes the dial to qualify odds decrease 4 times.
Online leads are a great source to grow your business and yet, they are extremely underutilized. Many leads get resold over FIVE TIMES mostly because business owners like you don’t call them. Many leads prospect several Realtors before settling on one but keep in mind that first statistic we shared, 75% of prospects do business with the company that contacts them first!
A study by the Harvard Business Review revealed that contact within an hour of inquiry, you have 7x more of a chance to have a productive conversation compared to reaching out after over an hour, and compared to someone who waits 24 hours to contact a lead, you’re 60 times more likely.
In real estate, 64% of buyers and 66% of sellers end up working with the agent they speak with first, according to the National Association of Realtors. Those who are first-to-the-draw have a tremendous advantage.
As an example, let us tell you about one of our clients Amy and her Real Estate ISA. Rex is in charge of calling leads as soon as they enter their system. His speed to lead is extremely important and this sense of urgency was instilled in him from his first day with Amy. Aside from being tasked to make at least 100 calls a day, he is also given new leads that he must reach out to within 5 minutes of their query. Rex set 199 appointments in his first year alone and out of those, Amy has closed 142 transactions. This is 7 million in trackable sales volume and over $200,000 in GCI!
Amy, like many business owners we work with, simply could not take everything on herself. She realized that her team needed someone who could focus on their speed to lead time. So she hired and trained a Virtual Professional who could pick up the slack so she and the rest of her team could focus on what they needed to accomplish.
This is only one part of the whole speed to lead game, stay tuned as we will explore more strategies such as the best times of day to call leads, etc.
If you want to improve your speed to lead but know you can’t do it all yourself, be sure to book your Double My Business Strategy Session with us today so we can have a conversation about how a MyOutDesk real estate virtual assistant can help.
