If you want to increase your sales conversion and customer satisfaction, increase this.

Back when I started in sales in had a couple of telesales jobs, both outbound and inbound. I did well and was among the top performers, but at that point in my career I had never had any type of training and was making tons of mistakes.
So why was I still able to outperform the others? One thing: The speed at which I was operating.

About 90% of every incoming email was called within a timeframe of 5 minutes, and when that wasn’t possible (if they didn’t leave a phone number for example), I immediately send them an email.
We live in an age where whenever we want something, we want it NOW. Maybe it’s not yet available in your country, but we can actually pay wireless here so we can save 4 seconds not having to type in our PIN number. It’s ridiculous if you think about it.

With all the information available online we should also acknowledge that when we do get an inbound email or phone call it is almost always going to be a hot lead. Most questions can be answered by just googling or searching the company website, but making an inquiry about your service or product and really making an effort to contact you means they are beyond the ‘just looking around’ fase.

Also consider that it gets harder and harder to reach your prospect the longer you wait. When you call them the moment they try to contact you, they are fully focused on your company. When you call them a day, or a couple of days later, they might even have forgotten they reached out. Or even worse; A competitor got their business.

Beyond the higher closing rate you will achieve by connecting faster with your prospect, there is also the added benefit of a higher customer satisfaction. Your customers will love your urgency. So often I have gotten compliments regarding the speed at which I connect with them!

If my personal experience didn’t win you over, then take a look at the next couple of sales facts:

• If you call a lead in the first 5 minutes after they've submitted a web form, they're 100x more likely to get on the phone. — InsideSales.com

• An analysis of more than 2,200 American companies found those who attempted to reach leads within an hour were nearly seven times likelier to have meaningful conversations with decision makers than those who waited even sixty minutes. – Harvard Business Review

• If you follow up with web leads within 5 minutes you are 9 times more likely to convert them – Insidesales.com

• 35-50% of all sales are won by the vendor that responds first. – Insidesales.com

And if you also consider that:

• Only 7% of the 433 companies responded within the first five minutes. – Drift.com

• More than half (55%) of the companies did not even respond over the course of five business days. - Drift.com
  You can see that this really is a game changer.
  
  I understand that we get a lot of emails and phone calls during the day, but this has to become a priority!

Be sure to have a process in place where incoming leads are seen as golden nuggets. So often companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on their marketing budget to get some new prospects in, only to lose them during the initial point of contact.

I hope this gave you some new insights! Do you have a solid process in place to give your customers the attention they deserve? I’d love to hear about it, please share in the comment section below.

Have a great day!