Lucep Survey – CEOs and Sales Managers on The Importance of Fast Lead Response

I want to share with you some of the quotes provided to us by CEOs and sales managers as part of a market study of the sales processes of companies in the B2B and SaaS areas. This lead response study was conducted for Lucep by researchers from the IBD program at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley.

The study was meant to provide a path forward for Lucep in terms of broad trends and growth strategies.

But these specific lead response insights and gems of wisdom provided by industry leaders to our team of researchers are so valuable that we can’t keep them locked up in an internal report.

Ryan Alshak, CEO of Ping Inc.

Ryan Alshak is a former corporate attorney and now the CEO at Ping Inc., a company that has developed automated timekeeping software for lawyers as a SaaS offering.

Ryan notes that an instant response tool could help personal injury firms. People who have recently been in accident would fill out a website widget to receive immediate call­back.

Sumukha Rao, Managing Director and CEO of Ta3s

Sumukha Rao is CEO of Ta3s, a software testing and test automation company that is already a Lucep customer. Sumukha said that Lucep helps promote a brand of care and responsiveness through fast response. His first conversation with leads is typically a quick five minute chat just to establish contact and set up the next calls. He notes that customers really like the immediate call­backs since it makes them feel like they’re cared for, and that fast response is especially important when a customer is in pain.

“Email, phone, and Contact Us links will likely turn off potential customers since these tools do not lead to real­time follow­up and people don’t want to interact with a machine.” – Sumukha Rao, Managing Director and CEO, Ta3s

Vinod Muthukrishnan, Co-Founder and CEO of CloudCherry

Vinod Muthukrishnan is cofounder and CEO at CloudCherry, a customer experience management software firm. Vinod said that an instant callback should be given to people signing up for free trial. He noted that fast response can actually improve the perception of your brand and increase the confidence customers have in your company.

“Customers love very fast response and instant callback is encouraged after people sign up for a free trial.” – Vinod Muthukrishnan, Co-Founder and CEO, CloudCherry

Karthik Krishnamurthy, Head of Enterprise Sales at Exotel

Karthik Krishnamurthy is head of enterprise sales at Exotel, a cloud telephony company. Exotel leads who sign up for free trial memberships often do so just to extract the value of the free membership with no intention of purchasing the product. “No lead converts on their own without a conversation,” says Karthik. It is therefore important to have the conversations with the right people.

Karthik highlighted the importance of fast response through an incident in which a customer did not get a timely callback. Exotel’s typical response time is 5 hours after sign­up, but this customer was called back a week after signing up, and asked why it took so long for a rep to respond to help him walk through the product’s technical and setup details.

Tushar Mahajan, Founder and CEO of Statusbrew

Tushar Mahajan is founder and CEO of social media management platform startup Statusbrew. The company is collecting 5,000­6,000 new signups a day. Mahajan attributes this incredible growth to Statusbrew’s culture of quickly responding and attending to customer / lead needs. When questions, complaints, or comments are submitted through social media channels, Statusbrew makes it a point to respond within a few short minutes.

They have found that these interactions have made a clear impact. Impressed customers have retweeted these positive experiences to their own network. This effect has created an effective, virtually free marketing campaign for the company that continues to feed its remarkable growth.

Gurtej Gill, Customer Success Manager at TINT

Gurtej Gill is customer success manager at TINT, a social media aggregation and content curation platform. He spoke of his awareness of fast response and how it might be beneficial to their selling process. Gurtej decided to experiment with lead response time, and has started to call back leads within 5 minutes when before it would take him 2­5 hours. To his surprise, the sales cycle was considerably shortened from 25 days to about 22 days. Gurtej attributes this to two things – calling the customer back while in the purchase mindset, and contacting them before they could reach out to TINT’s competition.