Reach a new lead fast

1. Why speed pays, and what it costs

The figures offered for speed are all credited to outside studies, not to anything measured by the business that uses them, and this page gives them as those studies' figures.

Figure	What it says
391%	The increase in sales conversions when leads are contacted within the first 60 seconds
7x	Companies that contacted customers within an hour were 7x as likely to qualify the lead as companies calling even an hour later
60x	And 60x more likely to qualify it than companies that waited 24 hours
21x	Contacted inside five minutes, a lead is 21 times as likely to qualify; the comparison point is not given
80%	The drop in the odds of qualifying a lead by the ten-minute mark
30 minutes	By then, people are significantly harder to reach
78%	The share of customers who buy from the company that answers their inquiry first

The last three, and the 391 percent with them, come with a caution: they may seem outlandish, and the studies behind them were not looked into closely. The 391 percent, read here as a blend of two large studies, is the gain at every stage of the funnel multiplied together, not a fourfold rise in what each lead spends: more leads pick up, more of those book, more of the booked turn up, and more of those buy.

So where does that leave you? The answer is, probably, to call leads faster. You are probably thinking this runs into the same obstacles as availability, and it does: it sounds like a pain, it will cost you, and it will make you far more than it costs. What other single change can get a 4x or greater increase in sales? Not many.

The cost is spare capacity. As with availability on SOP 85, reaching every lead the moment they arrive means having people on the sales team or at the front desk who will not always have a fresh lead in front of them. The alternative is a team that is always busy and leads that wait. Leads who wait leave the door open for a competitor to take them, or, more realistically, for boredom, distraction and drifting attention to take them.

Flag: staff to the standard, or automate it. This section and section 6 put the cost of speed in people: enough of them free to reach every lead in under five minutes. A second view puts it in automation: automated first contact lets a founder working alone respond as fast as a sales team of twenty, and, set against hiring one more rep, it costs nothing and never sleeps. This page does not settle which reading is right.

2. The three kinds of speed

Speed is increased in three ways:

1. How fast you make first contact: sections 3 and 4.
2. How fast the first appointment comes: the time between booking and the appointment, which is SOP 86 — Cap the booking window at seventy-two hours.
3. Speed of response: section 5.

3. First contact

What it is. How long it takes you to call or message a lead after they show interest in what you sell: when they reply to an ad, join your list or book themselves in. The figures in section 1 show how much money slow first contact burns.

Where the time comes from. If you made the availability changes on SOP 85, especially the extra start times, your team now has gaps in its calendars. Those gaps are time to contact new leads at once. None of it is wasted; all of it goes to reaching leads faster.

The standard. Contact every lead in five minutes or less. That is the gold standard. Put as a staffing rule, that means hiring enough people to respond to leads in under 5 minutes, with extra credit for doing it in under 60 seconds. Dial out to every lead who showed interest.

Which leads it matters most for. The view here is that it turns on lead source. For leads from pay-per-click ads, the outside figures more or less hold; for leads bought from a broker who also sells them to other businesses, they hold without question. Warm leads probably allow more leeway than cold ones. A rule of thumb here: design for cold leads and put warm ones through the same process, since a process built for cold converts everyone, and one built for warm works only on warm.

Another benefit. Every delay before first contact means more contacts needed before a sale; reach leads sooner and it takes fewer. Work your leads faster and you do not have to work them as much: a rare case where doing less really does make more.

On the phone. Call a lead within five minutes of their opting in and you will see both the show rate and the close rate rise. Many times a lead has said how fast that was, and how good a business that makes you, and bought on the spot. This call is step 1 of the week-long cadence on SOP 89 — Run the seven-day follow-up cadence.

Give each new lead to whichever rep is free. One practice here is a round robin with a timer:

1. A lead comes in from any source, such as a form or an ad.
2. The system checks which rep is free at that moment, assigns the lead to them and notifies them. If you sell alone, it comes to you.
3. If two minutes pass without that rep calling, the lead goes to the next rep.

Inside the five-minute standard, that gives two or three reps a turn. The thinking behind it: whoever will not handle a lead with care loses it to someone who will.

Flag: the best closer, or whoever is free. SOP 84 sections 2 and 3 match the strongest leads with the strongest closers. The round robin above sends each new lead to whichever rep is free, and passes it on after two minutes. One routes by the quality of lead and closer, the other by speed. This page does not settle which reading is right.

4. The daily test

If you are not hearing a lead say, at least once a day, how fast that was and how on top of it you are, you are not calling your leads fast enough. A first impression is a chance to impress somebody and make more money; there is no reason to waste it.

Know the number. Track the average gap between a lead arriving and your first contact, down to the second, and keep pushing it lower. If the only answer is that the team is pretty fast, the view here is that it is not fast enough.

5. Speed of response

What it is. How fast you get back to a lead after they book and before the appointment happens. This is where leads fall through the cracks. Leads often make their buying decision before the sales call, which makes it the competitor's sale to lose.

Two ways it can go. In both, you opt in, you are contacted at once, you confirm an appointment, and after the call you text a question.

	What happens next	What you conclude
Slow	Nobody answers until the next business day. You send another message; the answer comes the next business day again	You probably decide they are scattered and disorganized, and you probably stop asking. You feel they are not putting you first, because they are not. If they will not show up for you, why show up for them?
Fast	They answer at once. You ask a second question and the answer comes straight back; then the closer adds some context. Both questions are answered inside a minute	These people are on top of it

The fast one wins, obviously.

Measure it. Every messaging service time-stamps its messages, and every inbound and outbound call carries a time stamp; use them. Plenty of software pulls it all together. If show rates drop, look here first, and above all if they drop for one rep. The same records show who puts in the extra time, and that is worth encouraging if you want to make more money: leads never sleep. Paying and ranking reps on show rate is SOP 88 — Pay and rank reps on show rate.

6. Setting it up

Pulled together from the sections above, in no fixed order, the setup comes to this:

• Make the time. Take the availability changes on SOP 85, so the team has gaps between appointments.
• Staff to the standard. Hire enough people to respond to every lead in under five minutes; see the flag in section 1.
• Route with a timer. Pass a lead nobody has called within two minutes to the next free rep.
• Cover the hours leads arrive. Check when your leads actually come in. In one example, an owner's leads came in as often at weekends as in the week, some out of hours, around 10 or 11 at night or 6 in the morning, and calls made at 9 the next morning went unanswered. If yours arrive like that, those hours need the five-minute standard too, met by people or by an automated first reply. Make any automated reply say plainly that it is automated, as reminders do on SOP 89 section 4, and keep within the laws of your area.
• Dial everyone. Call out to every lead who showed interest.
• Run the daily test in section 4, and treat a day without the remark as a warning.
• Watch the time stamps on messages and calls, by rep, and look there first when show rates fall.
• Fill the gaps. A little extra work in the gaps between appointments keeps booked leads warm: answer their messages quickly.

The reason, in one line: prospects are strongly motivated for only brief moments, so contact them as quickly as you can from the moment they show interest, and make the most of it. And the payoff: the faster you contact leads, the more likely they are to book and turn up, and the less work you do.

7. The whole of it, in short

Be fast. Reach out quickly, and get them into a sales meeting as soon as you can. Do that and you contact more of them, follow up less and sell more. Aim to set the booking inside 72 hours, which is SOP 86. And if, for whatever reason, the appointment is not yet booked, or it is booked and the lead gets back in touch, answer fast. It tells them you are serious, and it keeps you from undoing the work it took to win them.

8. What this page does not decide for you

• How many people spare capacity takes. This page gives no figure for headcount.
• Whether the outside figures hold for your market. Section 3 gives the view that it turns on lead source; this page gives no figure for when or where they were measured.
• What the 391 percent is measured against. Section 1 gives a reading of what it covers; the baseline it is compared with is not established on this page.
• How fast is fast enough after a booking. No target is set; the example answers inside a minute.
• Which standard to hold the team to. Five minutes is the standard and 60 seconds the extra credit; nothing says when to move from one to the other.

9. The checklist

Question	The answer
Why speed	Faster contact is tied to higher conversion, qualification and sales, on outside figures
What it costs	Spare capacity on the team
The three kinds	To first contact, to first appointment, of response
First contact standard	Under five minutes; under 60 seconds for extra credit
Your number	Average time to first contact, known to the second
Routing	The next free rep; passed on after two minutes without a call
Who to dial	Every lead who showed interest
The daily test	A lead remarks on your speed at least once a day
Speed of response	Answer messages quickly; use calendar gaps to keep leads warm
Where to look when show rates drop	Response time stamps, and above all by rep
In short	Fast contact, fast booking, fast answers

10. What this page does not cover

Speed to the first appointment and pulling appointments forward are SOP 86. The calls, texts and voicemails that make up first contact, and dialing twice, are SOP 91 — Run the first-contact channel stack and the double dial; the rest of the week's attempts are SOP 89. Availability, the first lever, is SOP 85.

Telephone-marketing law and dialing software are not covered on this page.