When Should My Sales Team Reach Out to an Inbound Lead?

A visitor comes to your website and fills out a contact form. When should you reach out? The right answer is immediately. It’s never too soon to connect with an inbound lead — you’ve got to leap into action right away before a competitor can get there first.

At HubSpot’s Inbound Conference in 2016, Josh Harcus led a session called “The Art of the Five Minute Response Time.” If five minutes sounds like a pipe dream, Josh would say it’s more like a dream come true. His company launched a strategy around maximum speed to lead and saw crazy results:

• They experienced 6x revenue growth within a year
• The sales cycle was 9x shorter
• The team rapidly expanded to 5x its original size

Josh learned that the number of opportunities companies are wasting with delayed responses is stupendous. One look at the data could set a sales squad’s hair on fire:

• Inbound leads are 2,100% as likely to become qualified with a 5 minute lead response time versus 30 minutes after their website conversion.
• Response within an hour makes you 700% as likely to have a meaningful conversation with a decision-maker.
• However, 63% of companies take more than an hour to respond (or never respond at all).
• Only 7% of companies respond within 5 minutes.
• The average lead response time for B2B companies is a jaw-dropping 42 hours.

The bottom line is that the best results come when you reach out to inbound leads within minutes of their conversion action. This chart from the Lead Response Management Study shows the steep drop-off in lead qualification after the 5-minute mark:

(Source: Lead Response Management Study)

Okay, so instant response is critical to sales success. But should that response always come from sales? Should it always be a call? That depends.