Tempus Fugit So You’d Better Carpe Diem

I have time on my mind. How the timeliness of certain interactions can have a big impact on conversion. For instance, there’s this one statistic I’ve come across repeatedly that spans multiple industries and marketing channels – that your best probability of cross-selling or upselling a customer is within the first week/month/year of that customer buying your product for the first time.

I also discovered some interesting data in a study conducted by Dr. James Oldroyd on Web generated leads. His Lead Response Management Survey was performed under the auspices of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and had these insights:

- The odds of calling to contact a lead decrease by over 10 times in the 1st hour

- The odds of calling to qualify a lead decrease by over 6 times in the 1st hour.

- After 20 hours every additional dial your salespeople make actually hurts your ability to make contact to qualify a lead.”

Lead follow-up is an area of opportunity that is frequently overlooked as it falls in that gaping black hole between marketing and sales processes. As marketers we tend to focus on delivering high quality leads and after the hand off happens, it often feels like it's out of your hands. But there are actually several ways to influence timely follow-up after the lead enters the Sales pipeline:

- Communicate with Sales management on the goals, structure and timing of your lead generation campaign ahead of time

- Demonstrate how your campaign supports their current goals

- Clearly define lead type, quantity, timelines and systems for lead delivery

- Set up a hand off process that ensures the lead will be visible and actionable in the shortest possible time

- Get buy-in and confirmation that resources will be assigned to follow-up

- If Sales management is struggling with conflicting priorities and over-extended teams, negotiate a timing and follow-up scope that is acceptable to them

In an interview with CBS Moneywatch, Dr.Oldroy said “Always give priority to your newest leads. If you have a lead that is two hours old and one that just came in, focus on the one that just came in. If you do the opposite, you'll always be fighting an uphill battle trying to reactivate leads that are already dead.”

I’m aware that this study is not telling us something radically new, many of us already know that a “hot” lead is a recent lead. But it’s a great reminder for the next time you start grappling with predictive models and lead filtering criteria. The best one could quite simply be – time.