Why Response Time is Critical to Increasing Sales!

If you’re running a business, you need to make sure that you continue to find ways to improve your sales. There are several methods you can do this; however, one of the most effective options is to try to improve your response time.

During the sales process, it’s common for customers to have questions about the type of product or service that you are offering. As a result, most people will try to get in contact and seek clarification. Your response time is the amount of time it takes for a member of your team to answer their question. Let’s take a closer look at how this could impact on your sales.

Why Does Response Time Matter?

There are many reasons why response time is so important. One of the biggest is that it impacts on how the customer feels about using your organization. The longer it takes for them to get an answer to their question, the more frustrated they will become. In most cases, a customer expects you to get back to them within five minutes. Clients responded to with a live person or within 5 minutes have a 10x’s more likely chance of landing the sale than those same clients contacted just 20 minutes later. In short, Response time matters!

Increasingly, there is a lot of competition to be found online. Customers aren’t going to wait for you. In most cases, they’ll simply turn to one of your competitors, costing you the sale. It might also make that customer less likely to use your services in the future. If you’re spent a lot of advertising to attract them, this can be a big financial loss. This can be compounded if they decide to tell their friends about their interaction, potentially damaging your reputation.

In a more competitive landscape, you need to make sure that you’re the first one to make an impression on the customer. When they first hear about a product feature, it tends to have the
biggest emotional impact. For this reason, you want to make sure that they hear about any benefits from your company. Because of this, it’s been shown that those who respond to a new lead within one minute can get a whopping 391% higher conversion rate.

Despite the importance of having a quick response time, many companies are failing to do this. It’s estimated that 55% of companies only respond to potential customers after five or more days have passed. In today’s environment, when your competitors are just a click away, this is too slow. However, it does show that, simply by improving your response time, you’ll be able to have a huge competitive advantage.

How to Decrease Response Time

As you can see, responding to customers within a few minutes is key to improving your conversions and improving your sales. There are several ways that you will be able to do this. First, you should make sure that your staff is in constant contact with your social media, email, and phone systems. This is quickly becoming one of the most popular ways for people to get in touch with your company. Setting up an automated alert to let you know when someone sends you a message often won’t cost you anything. You might also want to set up a chatbot system, to give answers to some of your most common questions.

You might also want to consider working with a virtual receptionist if you are simply not able to answer your phone in a timely manner. Simply calling customers back at the end of the day is not good enough. Get a real live person to answer your phones if at all possible. Live chat is another option. This will enable you to talk to customers while they are still on your website! Pretty cool. This is often one of the best times to communicate with a potential client, as they’re actively thinking about making the purchase.

You should also make sure to get up with an automated text response system. This will let you program the system to send a text and actually ask the client not only when they can talk but how they would like to do it. Phone, text, email or even video conference! This will show the customer respect by appreciating their time and comfortability zone.

Finally, you want to make sure that each prospect is qualified before giving their information to the sales team. When you’re placing a phone call, you want to make sure that the person at the other end of the line is interested in what you’re selling. Too many dead-end calls will simply slow down the team and make you slower to respond to genuine customers.

One of the most effective ways for you to improve your sales is by decreasing your response time. In most cases, the first person to talk to a client will win their business. There are plenty of tools that you can use to optimize your approach. So, try some of these tactics today, and land more conversions. All of these and more we offer here at givemeservice.com. Contact Us today to help you with any of these.