3 tips to effectively track inbound lead response time in Salesforce
5 min
Lead response time is one of the most important metrics to drive conversions and revenue in B2B businesses. In a recent study by Lead Response Management, it was found out that leads that were called by a sales team within 5 minutes of submitting a form or a query were 100x more likely to connect and 21x more likely to qualify, compared to reaching out 30 minutes later.
How are B2B companies doing on average
A Harvard business review study revealed that 74% of teams can’t meet this goal, resulting in valuable leads lost and meetings never scheduled, ultimately causing decreased pipeline and overall revenue.
This same study audited 2,241 B2B companies in the US, and found that the average lead response time was 42 hours!
A surprising fact is how fast these leads go cold. Even companies that reached out within one hour of a query or a form being submitted were 7x more likely to qualify the lead as those that tried to contact the customer even an hour later, and 60x times more likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer to reach out.
Now that you understand the importance of inbound lead response time, we’ll share X secrets that will help your team consistently connect with new leads fast using Salesforce.
1. Creating an Inbound Lead Response Time report in Salesforce
This report shows the average time it takes a company rep to reach out to an inbound lead (in minutes), and groups the results by lead owner.
First, create two custom fields in the Lead object in Salesforce to track this metric. You can name these fields “First Response Date” and “First Response Time (m)”. The first field is automatically populated using Process Builder, with the date when the first outbound call was made. The second field is a formula field that calculates the number of minutes from the moment of lead creation to the moment the first outbound call was recorded in Salesforce.
Formula field:
Remember that instead of “PhoneIQSF_First_Response_Date__c” will be the API name of your custom field.
You can easily change the definition of an "inbound lead" on the report by going to the report Salesforce, clicking “Edit”, then going to the “Filters” tab, and selecting the values you want for “Lead Source”. We suggest you stick to form submissions for this metric, like “request demo”, “request trial”, etc.
Finally, you can create a visual representation of this report by using a Dashboard so management can easily track this metric.
Go to the Dashboards tab in Salesforce and click “New Dashboard”. Add a component and select the report. You can now select the type of chart and set the component to show information like: The Sum of First Response Time by Lead Owner, The Average First Response Time by Lead Owner, or the Lead Record Count by Lead Owner. Remember that you can create multiple components to view each of these independently.
Setting up your Process Builder automation in Salesforce:
Step 1.
Head to Salesforce → Setup → Process Builder → NewOnce inside the new process builder automation, select the Task object and select “start the process when a record is created or edited”.
Step 2.
On the criteria step, name the criteria, and set the conditions to “Call Type” equals “Outbound”. This will ensure you only count the first outbound call that the agent makes; and “When Id” starts with “00Q”, which is the Salesforce object prefix for the Lead Object.
Step 3.
Finally on the Update Record step, name the action and select “Update records that meet all conditions”, filter records by “First Response Date” is null = True (the custom field you created earlier. This will prevent the field from overwriting if it already has information. On Set new field values, select again the custom field and type the formula “NOW()” (as seen on the attached image). Your custom field will be populated with info. related to the date of the first outbound call made.
2. Create a Sales SLA that includes the Lead Response Time metric.
A service-level agreement (SLA) is a contract or agreement that establishes a set of deliverables that one party has agreed to provide to another. An SLA can exist between companies and their customers or between departments of the same company. Creating an effective SLA for marketing and sales, creates accountability between departments and ensures each party delivers on their commitments.
Mark Roberge from Hubspot detailed some key metrics they used to build their Sales SLA during his speech at SaaStr Annual. Any member of their sales team that appeared on what they called the “Do not be on it” chart (shown below), was effectively violating their Sales SLA.
As you can see, “Lead Response TIme” was their number 1 metric in their SLA.
Using the data we shared above, we suggest setting the SLA at < 1 hour.
3. Select the right tools to automate outreach to new leads.
Selecting the right tools to accelerate the outreach process to new leads in a scalable and repeatable way is key to achieving success with this initiative.
Salesforce High Velocity Sales:
We suggest taking a look into Salesforce High Velocity Sales, a sales engagement tool that lives within Salesforce and is native to your CRM. Similar to Outreach and Salesloft, it helps sales reps automate the outreach process. Although these types of tools are popular for outbound prospecting, they can be very effective to create followup cadences for inbound leads.
As an example, if your sales rep calls your lead, but doesn’t connect, a cadence ensures next steps are triggered automatically like a followup email. If no response is received to that email, you can trigger a follow up call the next day.
As you can see on Hubspot’s Sales SLA, criteria #2 and #3 are related to follow up attempts. Never give up on a prospect!
Salesforce CTI:
A Salesforce CTI solution allows your team to make and take phone calls from within Salesforce. Picking a Salesforce CTI vendor that integrates with High Velocity Sales, allows reps to easily make calls from their work queue, moving steps automatically through the right cadence branch based on call results.
Some leading CTI solutions bring Lead Response Time reports in Salesforce out of the box, enabling management to instantly track this key metric without having to manually create reports.
Finally, management can leverage Einstein Call Coaching in High Velocity Sales, a conversation intelligence module built by Salesforce that surfaces key information about sales calls like product mentions, competitor mentions, and much more.
