Businesses are responding to leads quicker, according to a new study from InsideSales.com (News - Alert).
The average response time fell by 18.2 percent to 34.6 hours. It was 42.3 hours, the study said.
InsideSales.com, a cloud-based provider of sales automation and analytics, announced the results of the study at Dreamforce 2012.
"The average response time dropped significantly this year for the first time in five years of doing this," Dave Elkington, CEO at InsideSales.com, said in a company statement. "Companies are starting to realize that immediacy and persistency in responding to leads make a huge impact on the results that come from those leads. This improvement appears to coincide with the recent wide spread adoption in enterprise companies of inside sales teams and practices. We are excited that our publicity and educational efforts are finally paying off."
The average response time prior to the study was 46 hours and 53 minutes – based on over a dozen studies done in five years. These include data on more than 10,000 businesses.
The average response attempts to reach a lead before giving up have been 1.3 attempts. This year, average attempts came in at 2.63.
"The biggest issue is that only 27 percent of leads actually get contacted by sales teams," added Ken Krogue, president of InsideSales.com. "Imagine what a CEO or CMO would think if they knew that only a fourth of leads are getting spoken to, when with better techniques and technologies they could be speaking to 92 percent of leads. That is a 3.4x improvement in wringing value out of leads by just making sure they get contacted."
In other recent company news, InsideSales.com has named customer operations executive, Tom Milligan (News - Alert), the company’s vice president of client services. He will be in charge of client services, sales engineering and customer implementation, according to TMCnet.
Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO West 2012, taking place Oct. 2-5, in Austin, TX. Stay in touch with everything happening at ITEXPO (News - Alert). Follow us on Twitter.
Edited by Braden Becker