As a seller, you know that both inbound and outbound leads are important. While they’re both valuable, inbounds deserve a fundamentally different approach in the beginning stages of a sale. Because they’re already familiar (and interested) in your business, they’re not the cold leads you’re accustomed to in an outbound sale.
What this means is that response time is incredibly important as you connect with your inbound leads. Catching them soon after they’ve expressed interest leads to a much higher chance of a positive outcome. This is where technology can help, allowing reps to be notified and respond quickly. In fact, one of our Sales Operations pros, Evelyn Fayad, joined us in a recent episode to discuss a step-by-step strategy on how to cut inbound response time to under four minutes.
Today, Kyle Norton shares the technology he uses to thrill prospects with a short response time and how you can do the same:
Transcript
Hey, Kyle Norton here. I’m going to talk to you today a little bit about tools we found effective for managing inbound leads. A lot of factors can contribute to the success of a deal but really, one of the biggest is inbound response time. Many companies have different tactics and tech stacks that allow them to have a short response time. We tested a few ourselves and found three tools that help your team capitalize on response time.
First up is immediate notifications when an inbound lead takes an action on your website. These notifications are based on automation rules. Automation rules between Salesloft and SalesForce allow you to customize sales actions based on specific criteria. We’ve created an automation rule to notify an inbound rep via Slack whenever a prospect takes an action. Being both desktop and mobile friendly, reps have immediate feedback, which means they can reach out faster.
Next up is beginning cadences automatically. Once again, it uses automation rules to trigger a cadence as soon as a prospect fills out a demo request form. This capitalizes on the response time of the first message while providing the structure for more personalized responses later on. If you’re interested in learning more, our sales operations team just did a full explanation of automation rules.
Another way to provide great response time is using live chat. On that note, our personal favorite is Intercom.Live chat lets you see site traffic and interact with prospects who are currently visiting the website. Interacting in real time removes all the challenges of delayed response. I often get similar questions from website visitors. Intercom has a great feature which allows me to drop in snippets of pre-composed messages to respond quickly to prospects. This, once again, gives prospects a better experience because they can get immediate answers to their questions.
Thanks for watching, I hope you learned a few tips to help you lower your response time on the inbound front. Feel free to drop any questions or comments below. Thanks again for watching, have a great day.