A lead goes cold within an hour
Someone asks to be contacted through your website. The faster you respond, the better your chance of a conversation. Why it so often goes wrong.
On Tuesday afternoon, a marketing manager fills in the contact form on your website. She has budget and wants to decide this month. On Thursday your salesperson calls back. She does not pick up. By now she has spoken to two other suppliers.
The problem
Website enquiries are followed up too slowly, or not at all. In 2024 RevenueHero, a supplier of lead follow-up software, requested a demo through the website of 1,000 B2B software companies. Only 365 companies responded. And those that did took an average of 1 day, 5 hours and 17 minutes.
That is expensive. A classic study in Harvard Business Review showed back in 2011 that speed matters: companies that called within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as those that called an hour later. The principle is timeless: someone who fills in a form is thinking about your subject at that very moment.
The cause
It is rarely a lack of will. It is the way of working.
- Forms land in a shared inbox and nobody feels responsible.
- The salesperson who picks it up does not know what the visitor was actually looking for and first has to work out who they are dealing with.
- Outside office hours, nothing happens at all.
Most sales organizations need new tools and processes to meet the demands of the online age.
Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, Harvard Business Review
The solution
Respond immediately, even when nobody is at their desk, and give your salesperson everything they need for a good start.
- Let the visitor get an answer straight away and choose a time for a conversation themselves.
- Ask about what is going on in that very first contact.
- Give the salesperson a summary and one concrete action, so they do not have to go looking.
Stiqqs AI Agent talks to the visitor straight away, even at ten in the evening. The assistant asks about what is going on and lets them choose an appointment. You receive the conversation with a summary, a priority and the action you need to take. With one click, you turn it into a preparation for the first meeting.