“When the opponent is just beginning to plan its strategy, it is easy to strike” – Sun Tzu
So your company website is looking crispy, its extremely fast and everything is perfectly optimized. You’re blogging, email marketing, retargeting and buying keywords on Google. Now, what happens when someone submits a lead on your website? Do you get back to the person immediately, later that day or sometime that week? A prospect generally submits their information for a demo/information at the peak of their interest level. This means that their intere
st starts decreasing every second after they click that submit button!
My love of new technology leads me to fill demo forms all too often and in doing so, I’ve noticed that most companies have awful response practices. They will take several days to get back to me, use very generic messaging, make little effort to understand my intentions and even forget to include a description of the product in their response (I can’t remember details on something I requested a week ago if you don’t help me out!). Smart companies are the ones that give me a call within minutes or seconds after I click the submit button. They catch me right after I’ve decided that I wanted to learn more and most of the time I’m willing to do a demo on the spot. I am not alone in this effort, in speaking with friends at other companies its become very clear to me that the chances of a prospect becoming a customer decreases exponentially with the amount of time that it takes for the company to call.
At Glia we saw this happen so often that we decided to build one of the most powerful inbound sales feature to date. We nick-named this new feature “RLR” which stands for “Real-Time Lead Response”. While complex to build, the result is extremely simple- as soon as a potential customer starts to fill out a lead form, your sales representatives can instantly take control of the sale. Here is how it works:
1. RLR captures lead information in real-time as soon as a prospect starts to fill out a lead form
2. RLR notifies all available sales representatives that a lead is about to be submitted
3. RLR assigns the lead to the first sales representative that responds
4. The sales representative can then reach out and speak with that lead using co-browsing, voice, video and chat
With RLR sales representatives can reach out and speak with prospects when they are at the peak of their interest. Prospects are expecting immediate gratification and you can bet that as soon as they submit a lead on your website, they are likely heading over to your competitor to do the same. By engaging prospects even before they click the submit button, your sales representatives can take control of the sale at exactly the right time.
Marketers spend a lot of time and money convincing prospective customers to come to a website and ultimately speak with someone or submit a lead. But getting a prospect to that point is only half the battle (its not over until the sale is closed). Sales consultants need the tools to respond to prospects in real-time without any delay. The closer a sales representative can get to speaking with a prospect right when their interest has peaked, the more sales will be closed. As Sun Tzu has said in the quote above “strike” (take control) before the battle begins.
