4 Tips to Reduce Lead Response Time with Salesforce Sales Engagement [Former High Velocity Sales]
7 min
In a call center environment speed is essential to increase the rate at which agents make sales. And as its name suggests, Salesforce High-Velocity Sales has proven to be helpful for speeding up the sales process and reducing lead response time.
Lead Response Time is a sales metric that dictates the average time it takes for a sales representative to follow up with a lead after taking action showing that they are interested in your company’s products or services.
Lead Response Time is the total days, hours or minutes it takes for a sales agent to follow up with a lead, since the moment they first contacted your company.
To know the average time it takes your team to respond, add up the time that they have taken to respond to all new lead contacts, and divide it by the number of new lead contacts received during that same period. Here are 3 tips to effectively track inbound lead response time in Salesforce.
Why Calculate Lead Response Time?
The company that manages to contact leads first has a dramatically greater chance of winning business from that lead. In fact, according to LeadSimple, 50% of buyers choose the vendor that responds to them first. And if you let 30 minutes pass before you contact a lead, your sales efforts become 21 times less effective than if you called them within 5 minutes of them reaching out.
Here’s Why You Should Actively Reduce Lead Response Times
Leads aren’t usually willing to wait half an hour for you to call them. So when your lead response time is long, you risk allowing the lead to lose interest or contact a competitor.
By analyzing and optimizing all the components that impact lead response time, you can help your company achieve a lot more sales in less time. Contacting potential customers promptly, with clear urgency and respect, you show you believe they are important.
When calculating lead response time, it’s best to segment leads to prioritize the more critical calls and follow up immediately. Segmentation can be done by scope, lead sources, type of product or service, for example. There are some lead sources that offer warmer leads than others. So based on the criteria you choose, you should follow up on a prioritized timeline.
According to research published by HubSpot, 82% of consumers rate an immediate response as important or very important when they have a question related to marketing or sales. An even larger percentage believe immediate responses are important when dealing with customer service situations.
Today, people have high expectations for the businesses they choose to purchase from. If you can’t provide them with immediate service, they’ll gladly shop elsewhere in most cases. That’s why it’s critical that companies pursue efforts that help reduce lead response time.
Reducing Lead Response Times
There are a few ways to effectively reduce lead response times, all of which Salesforce High-Velocity Sales can help implement across different business processes.
- These methods include:
- Managing your lead sources
- Changing your approach communications
- Coaching agents on best practices and improved sales cadences
- Automating the process of contacting prospects and managing contacts
- Informing leads on how much time it will take for your agents to respond
- Reducing the need for leads to interact with your call center before making a purchase
What Is Salesforce High-Velocity Sales
Some companies have hundreds, if not thousands, of leads in play at any given time. To manage them as efficiently as possible, sales engagement tools are generally a necessity.
- Salesforce High-Velocity Sales is a sales engagement solution that offers:
- Lead Scoring to focus on the most promising prospects
- Configurable Sales Cadences to stardardize and speed up the sales process
- Work Queues with pending tasks, upcoming calls and reminders
- Integration with Sales Dialers
- Conversation Insights and Call Coaching for phone interaction analysis
- Deeper analytics out of the box
- Einstein Activity Capture integration, combining email and calendar automation as well
The primary feature of this workspace is Sales Cadences, which can be used to create custom sales processes that guide sales representatives through the process of contacting different types of leads.
Planning and organization often go a long way toward helping agents understand what tasks are important to complete and at what times. High-Velocity Sales allows teams of sales agents to plan, control, and track the sequence of activities and tasks that are related to each lead or contact. It also allows them to organize their planned activities and schedule time in a productive way.
High-Velocity Sales also includes Einstein Call Coaching. With this tool, sales managers can gain insights into their teams’ sales calls. This increases the visibility of coachable moments, making it easier to properly train your sales team. Einstein Call Coaching works by analyzing recordings of conversations and tracking mentions of competitors, products, custom keywords, pricing discussions, and next steps. Once the sales manager reviews the report generated by the call coaching application, they’ll have starting points from which to start the conversation with the representative.
4 Tips To Reduce Lead Response Times Using Salesforce High-Velocity Sales
Here are four ways you can use High-Velocity Sales to reduce lead response times.
1. Start Using Sales Cadences To Manage Your Approach To Outreach
Sales Cadences allow sales reps to advance through their list of pending and upcoming tasks at maximum speed. With the Sales Cadence Builder, sales managers can create consistent, scheduled cadences of outreach activities for every type of lead. The scheduled cadence activities will appear in agents’ Work Queue, showing them which prospects are ready for outreach. Here are 5 Cadence Creation Tips for you to leverage Salesforce High Velocity Sales.
As an example, imagine that you created a Sales Cadence suited specifically for email leads. You can set that Sales Cadence to prompt reps to complete several consecutive steps, like sending emails, making calls, arranging meetings, and sending text messages. Additionally, users can add leads, contacts, and personal accounts to any sales cadence, allowing reps to use the right cadence for each specific prospect.
2. Use Your Work Queue To Automate The Process Of Contacting Prospects
The Work Queue brings all of your Sales Cadences into a single place for you to review. This is critical when working with a multitude of leads at once because large numbers of leads can make it complicated to track who to contact next. With all of your reps’ activities gathered in one place, they’ll have an easier time keeping up with the faster speeds that your company demands.
Integrating a multiline dialer to High Velocity Sales holds various advantages.
3. Use Einstein Sales Coaching To Develop Sales Teams
The Einstein Sales Coaching tool can be leveraged to make pinpoint changes in the performance of your sales teams. By honing in on specific phrases and call situations, you can push sales reps to make better decisions when engaged in a call. This will reduce lead response time, as the more efficient your reps are, the more calls they’ll be able to take in a day.
4. Monitor Rep Performance At a Glance
The High-Velocity Sales tool enables sales managers to quickly see customer engagement metrics in a simple dashboard. Dashboards also show users how sales reps are currently performing. For example, sales managers can use the tool to review how many sales cadences are currently in progress. Since the application offers detailed email and call response statistics, managers can make informed adjustments to the team’s operations based on their observations.
Check out the Top 5 Salesforce Dashboard templates for a VP of Sales to keep an eye on in 2022.
Combine High-Velocity Sales With a Salesforce CTI To Boost Call Center Efficacy
Why switch through multiple applications to make calls, track information, and review notes when you can perform all of these tasks within a Salesforce CTI system? If your goal is to reduce lead response times and improve productivity in your call center, a CTI system is the way to go.
When paired with the Salesforce High-Velocity Sales tool, CTI systems can rapidly accelerate your call center processes. Since CTIs allow you to take and make calls, record notes, text customers and generate reports directly through your Salesforce CRM, agents who use them can benefit greatly from having access to the features offered in the High-Velocity Sales application.
To learn more about CTI systems and what they can be used for, read this.
If you’re already aware of CTI systems and their value, consider investing in software that boosts your call center’s capacity. For a free consultation with one of our representatives, call us at 415-358-7276.
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