ZoomInfo Technologies : Accelerate Your Lead Response Time And Turn Inbound Leads into Opportunities

Lead response time can make or break your sale.

Need proof?

Consider the data:

• According to HBR, if you don't respond in 5 mins, the probability of establishing contact decreases by a whopping 400%.
• InsideSales says that you're 100x more likely to actually speak with them if you engage within 5 minutes of them indicating interest.

On average, an SDR takes about 42 hours to get in touch with their prospect - but that doesn't have to be you.

You put a lot of effort towards getting your buyers to even visit your site in the first place, so once you have them there, there's no time to waste. Read on to find some fool-proof ways to increase your speed-to-response time when it matters most.

How to Lower Response Time on Inbound Leads 1. Automate Email Follow Up and Scheduling

Automation is a great way to speed up your marketing operations. One approach would be to set up email workflows that are triggered by any leads that fill out a form on your website.

The email should acknowledge your prospect's interest and offer them an opportunity to take the next step. It could be a link to your calendar, an invitation to reply with questions, or a piece of content they can download and consume in the meantime.

2. Embed scheduling into your contact and demo forms

Integrating your calendar with your contact and demo forms lets your leads move the process forward themselves. This not only allows you to filter your qualified leads; it also increases the likelihood that your prospect will show up to the call. (Besides, it's now in their calendar too.)

In this demo pop-up, once a visitor completes the form fields, they have the ability to choose the time and day of their live demo. Again, this scheduling will have a direct booking in both the SDR and prospect's calendar.

The downside of this approach is that you'll be exposing your AE's calendar to unqualified prospects, too, which could affect the overall efficiency of your sales and marketing engine.

In order to combat this, your tool should give you the ability to build different audiences, qualify the form submission in real-time, and provide calendars only for prospects with the highest engagement.

Or, offer up your AE's calendar for highly engaged visitors and your SDR's calendar for less engaged visitors. This method eliminates the huge inefficiency of setting up meetings through back and forth emails and can reduce the sales cycles up to 20%.

3. Chat with your most engaged buyers on your website In this image, Amy (prospect) and Leo (AE) were previously chatting on email. Through an integration to their chat and marketing automation platform, Leo was able to know when Amy landed on their website again, and used their chat to re-engage her on-site.

The moment your buyers are engaging with your high-value pages that detail your product or service, there's reason to believe there's some sort of buying intent.

This is where timing becomes crucial. The faster you can alert your sales team about qualified leads on your site, the faster they can engage them in real-time. This is where chatbots take the lead, as they can be configured to identify your qualified leads and alert sales when they meet an engagement threshold.

Putting a human at the frontline of your conversations will help buyers feel more connected to your product. This elicits interest and moves the buying process forward.

4. Automate Lead Processing and Increase Sales Productivity with Data Enrichment

Manually researching and qualifying leads takes up a lot of time. Even the act of finding basic contact information (i.e. phone number, industry, company type) can drag your reps through a tedious, slow process that ultimately takes them away from selling.

In other instances, marketers require prospects to fill out long lead forms to gain this information, which can add more friction and encourage bounce-offs.

In this image, the sales rep speaks to the live website visitor and an account profile populates on the right, which is enriched using IP resolution. With this setup, the SDR has less manual work and spends their time speaking to the prospect.

With data enrichment, the process becomes simpler and faster. As leads come in, they are screened and processed instantly, leading to automatic lead qualification.

In the above image, you can see how data enrichment can work for your forms. With just the visitor's work-email, the SDRs are able to automatically profile the prospect.

With just a work email, you can instantly fill firmographic and demographic data points. This way, your forms are short and to-the-point, and your SDRs are able to reach out sooner with less data entry in the way.

Your Response Time Matters.

Reaching out to prospects when they are the most receptive is the key to converting leads. The faster you can reach out to active website visitors, the easier it becomes to engage them and establish a meaningful connection.

How can you adopt all four methods listed above?

ZoomInfo Chat is a human-first chat platform that leverages visitor intelligence to help you instantly identify the right accounts on your website and open a channel to speak to them right then and there.

As a bonus, It integrates with your existing forms and accelerates your buyer's journey to your AEs calendar.