Slow lead replies can waste paid ad spend
A services company was spending about $4,000 a month on ads and believed many leads were low quality. The bigger problem was the time it took to answer new inquiries. The same inquiry sent through the company’s contact form took 26 hours to get a reply.
The same inquiry sent to its main got a human phone call after 11 minutes. The company was not mainly losing to a better ; it was losing to a faster one. A Harvard Business Review study found that companies replying within an hour are about 7 times more likely to qualify a lead than companies that wait even a few hours.
Many companies take almost two full days to reply at all.
Key points
- The company spent about $4,000 per month on ads.
- Its own contact form reply took 26 hours.
- A replied by phone in 11 minutes.
- Fast replies can make leads much more likely to qualify.
- Lead response is a concrete workflow where may have clear value.