← Follow The Yellow Brick Road
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- [00:03]
A
All right, so today we're going to dive into one of the most crucial topics that any business that sells anything can get into, and that's lead response mastery. So to start off, like, I think it'd be helpful to just talk about the basics. Why is lead response time so critical for any type of business? Anybody that's selling anything? And there's a couple different studies that I think highlight the importance of this over almost anything else you're doing in your business. Okay. There's a Harvard Business Review article that talked about leads contacted within an hour were seven times more likely to qualify to be qualified leads than those who responded after an hour.
- [00:42]
B
Wow.
- [00:43]
A
Right. So seven times better customers, basically, if you can reach out to them within an hour.
- [00:48]
B
That's big.
- [00:48]
A
That's huge.
- [00:49]
B
Yeah.
- [00:49]
A
Let me see if I could increase my business by seven freaking times just by reaching out to them, just by calling my customer. But. But the faster you do that. And then there's another study by insidesales.com it talks about leads contacted within five minutes were 100 times more likely to be contacted and qualified than those who are contacted after an hour.
- [01:10]
B
Wow.
- [01:11]
A
Yeah, 100 times more likely to be qualified and contacted. Because that's the other thing is, like, sometimes you reach out to somebody, but they don't respond back. Right. And why is that? Because they're going to go down the rabbit trail. They're looking for a solution. You know, if you reach out, you were talking about, like, reaching out to somebody, they didn't respond immediately. They didn't answer their phone. And that's the other thing. Like, we deal with this all the time.
- [01:34]
B
Yeah. If I call someone and they don't answer my phone, I picked up the phone and I called the next person that the Google told me was their competitor.
- [01:40]
A
We talk about customer service stuff all the time.
- [01:42]
B
Right.
- [01:43]
A
Answer your freaking phones. Why? Because the customer has an issue right then. And if they don't reach you and talk to you, guess who they're calling next?
- [01:48]
B
Their bank or your competitor.
- [01:50]
A
Or your competitor. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So whether it's on the front end on the sales side or if it's on the back end for customer service side, the speed of response is critical. Critical. So. So what I'd like to kind of do from this point, I think, is I think it'd be good to talk about some of the key metrics around lean response times. This is something that I think it's available in most people's systems to track, like, you know, customer service side on the back End. Are they answering the phone? Right, right. We can track those metrics. We know exactly what they look like. We have data platforms that are providing, that we put together, you know, KPIs where we can see the half a ring. Yes, right. Because it's a big deal.
- [02:26]
B
It's important.
- [02:27]
A
It's important. So that's on the back end, but then on the front end you've also got, you know, is somebody answering your call when they're calling in as a new leader prospect? Right. And if you're not, you know, maybe that's not the end of the world, but how quickly you respond to them, do you acknowledge it? Do you, do you have any system, any flow that brings them into your sales process to engage them? And I think that's probably the thing that most people may not really spend a lot of time thinking about what their customer experience is. Right. Because your customer's going on a journey, they're reaching out to you to begin to engage, to see, is this gonna be the company that I work with or do I find somebody else? Right. And so when they're reaching out, they're interested, they're ready to make a decision, or they're moving in that direction. And so you're either going to push them, pull them into your funnel or push them into somebody else's funnel just. Just by whether or not you respond and how quickly. I think it's something that's, that's somewhat easy to do. You can see how many answers you get. Like, you know, you can track, you know, what's your average wait time? You can track all these different types of, types of metrics that are in phone systems. You know, I think you set that up a little bit more typically, like you work with our clients on the customer service side a little bit more than I do on that. But, you know, every system has a phone reporting platform and so pulling.
- [03:40]
B
Not every system, not every system fair. But you need to only use systems that have a phone.
- [03:45]
A
You should only be using systems that do. Right, right. So let me ask you this before we kind of dive further in here is when you're, when you're looking on the customer service, just on the back end side, what are the key metrics that you're measuring specifically that are telling you this is a problem here or something we need to adjust or change.
- [04:04]
B
As far as lead response time.
- [04:05]
A
Yeah. Or even customer service answering on the back end because.
- [04:09]
B
So customers, Customer service and sales is two different departments for us. And we, while we do get sales calls into Customer service because someone's on a page and has a question. Yeah, it's, it's not very. The amount that we get isn't statistically significant for me to give my 2 cents. But on a product from, from. Right. And a product. So from my perspective from customer service, when someone calls in, they need to have their phone answered within the first two rings. That's why I said we, we spec it out to half a ring, literally, like we understand to that level. And then if they email within 2 hours. I hate 2 hours, by the way. But it's the only thing that's reasonable really, because I'll kill my poor stuff. I'd like it to be two minutes, but it's two hours for email. For chat, it's 30 seconds.
- [04:57]
A
Yeah.
- [04:58]
B
I don't want someone sitting, waiting for you to respond to a chat on a web page. I've lost them.
- [05:03]
A
Right.
- [05:03]
B
So that's 30 seconds. Text messages, 30 seconds. And so if a human being is reaching out in a human real time way, I want a real time response.
- [05:15]
A
Right.
- [05:15]
B
And that's how I feel about the customer service end. But the sales side, that's all you.
- [05:19]
A
Yeah. So on the sales side, I would say it also, it is dependent a little bit on the industry itself as well. So you know, obviously if it's like a low ticket product or a quick type of purchase that somebody has like a question or that they're trying to get information on or setting an appointment or that kind of stuff like those, those are the types of things where there's an inquiry and they have to have like a quick response. The faster the better is right. As, you know, evidence.
- [05:43]
B
Isn't it funny, isn't it funny how the higher ticket stuff can wait but the lower ticker stuff is right now.
- [05:49]
A
Well, so let's think about it.
- [05:50]
B
It makes, it makes sense. It does. But it's still frustrating.
- [05:53]
A
If I'm going to spend, you know.
- [05:54]
B
I'm going to spend $30,000. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna impulse by that.
- [05:58]
A
I mean, I'm not, I mean I am hashtag Drew. But you think about what the expectation is of the customer and you want to meet or exceed that expectation.
- [06:10]
B
Right.
- [06:11]
A
I, I wonder if it's a little bit different though. Like, so I'm gonna kind of throw like a random thing here. Cause I do that sometimes because like just sometimes. Well, so you know, let's talk about like Facebook or social media, like reaching out to a company. One thing to get a fairly quick response. If you're reaching out to a personality or an influencer, you may not probably expect them to.
- [06:34]
B
I expect them to really me immediately. I said everyone.
- [06:37]
A
You do. But if somebody thinks that they're like actually engaging with.
- [06:42]
B
So even our influencers that we've worked with.
- [06:44]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [06:45]
B
We've made sure that we had customer service on the back end of their social pages responding to them within 30 seconds. Acknowledging, responding, not acknowledging, responding, answering, engaging.
- [06:55]
A
Yeah.
- [06:55]
B
I don't have acknowledge in my vocabulary. You respond, you, you respond, you answer and you engage.
- [07:02]
A
Right. But if somebody's not doing anything, the simplest thing that you can do is an acknowledgment with an action step to, to pull them further into the sales cycle.
- [07:11]
B
Sure.
- [07:14]
A
Even if it's not personalized or customized. But the more you can get in that path, the more you can begin to customize the messaging to that customer.
- [07:21]
B
It's just so easy to customize the messaging. Why wouldn't you.
- [07:24]
A
Right. My opinion easier now than it's been before in different automations.
- [07:28]
B
Right. The manychat alone, like it's crazy. I can spark a conversation. I mean not to get too off but you know, you see people all the time on Facebook like because they're stupid and don't understand, they'll write like who's interested in my email course? Come and email now and get a DM and then they have some human being going when they notice it and DMing the person. It's the dumbest thing. That whole structure y'all was set up for ManyChat. You can create a word to say yeah. And the automation automatically sends the thing to the person. So you would put. But I have a lead scoring process. Who wants it? Comment process now.
- [08:14]
A
Right.
- [08:14]
B
Many chat sees process and instantly when you hit send goes into your dm.
- [08:20]
A
Yeah.
- [08:21]
B
From me and says thanks Travis, here is my process. You click on it and then it says hey Travis, download today. Travis's name, Travis's phone number, Travis's email. Now I've got the lead, you have the free information and now you've been added to my follow up series and the thing that I'm going to sell you on the back end of that freebie. Right. So it's the, the ability to respond to leads has exceeded every possibility of 10 years ago, of five years ago, of last year.
- [08:57]
A
Yeah.
- [08:58]
B
And it's such a time to be alive. But no one's doing it. Even though five minutes means 100 times more likely.
- [09:07]
A
Right, Exactly. Well and so, so this is the thing is like if you're not doing anything, any type of automations, any type of lead scoring, any type of like speed to response time.
- [09:15]
B
Dude, hire someone offshore for 5 to 11 bucks an hour to just be messaging on your behalf.
- [09:23]
A
Even so, so cheap.
- [09:25]
B
But by the way, automations.
- [09:27]
A
Yeah, well think about it like no matter what size your business is, almost no matter what size your business is, if you're, if you're actively generating any type of leads and you spent five or ten grand to hire somebody to build out some, a few different automations.
- [09:41]
B
It'S not even that much.
- [09:42]
A
Travis, this is my point, this is my point.
- [09:44]
B
Like reasonably a small business, 750 to $1,500 will get you well on your.
- [09:51]
A
Way to having some things in place.
- [09:54]
B
Having, having, having not only lead response in place but also having customer journeys automated and also having customer ongoing engagement automated. Right, right. And so the dollar amount that you're talking about is a mass. Like it doesn't, it just doesn't make sense because.
- [10:14]
A
Right.
- [10:14]
B
I literally said and, and I'm the queen of don't hire people, create a process. But I literally said go ahead and hire someone rather than yeah, like better.
- [10:25]
A
To build out your process but, but.
- [10:26]
B
Literally it's better to build out the process and it's better to bring in an automations expert. And right now it's a trend. So we got a ton of them. Yeah, we literally have a ton of them. And so it just makes tons and tons of sense to get your leads and get your leads in your ecosphere as quickly as possible. So let's talk about that. Okay, now I've reached out to my lead from whatever method. I sent them a bottle and a telegram. I sent them a message in a bottle across the ocean.
- [10:53]
A
Perfect.
- [10:53]
B
Carrier pigeon. I prefer the owl from Harry Potter, but I mean you get the point. I've gotten in touch with them. Now what is now how do I turn my lead response time?
- [11:06]
A
How do you capitalize on it?
- [11:07]
B
Right, how do I capitalize? How do I make it mastery? How do I take it from bare minimum to mastery.
- [11:13]
A
So again, I think spending time on driving and drilling into your customer experience through that whole sales cycle. Right. Because it's one thing to go like, okay, what are the steps in the process to get a sale and onboard a new customer or make a transaction or whatever, it's another thing to look through that from the experience side and like how can you enhance that experience through that process to optimize that increasing customer satisfaction in the purchasing process itself can increase the customer lifetime Value pretty easily. Right. Because they've engaged in a way that was their method and preferred method of communication. Like somebody, if you're all your automations are set up for email and your customer never checks their email, but maybe once a month or once a week.
- [12:03]
B
Or whatever, they have that problem.
- [12:07]
A
And they prefer to text.
- [12:09]
B
Right.
- [12:09]
A
You know, we have clients that they're using text platforms all the time and inviting people to text a personal cell phone so they can get engagement.
- [12:17]
B
Right.
- [12:18]
A
And so, so inviting people to respond in the format that they want, but so that you can deliver that customer experience and with the purpose of always bringing them to the next step in the, in the process. So thinking through that critically, thinking how to enhance that experience, thinking how to, to just get them to respond, to give you information that you need to keep them moving down the chain.
- [12:39]
B
So everything in, in what we've just talked about all boils down to speed.
- [12:45]
A
Yes.
- [12:45]
B
And so what I'd love to invite everyone to do is take your sales to delivery process.
- [12:53]
A
Yeah.
- [12:54]
B
And get with a friend that doesn't know your space.
- [12:57]
A
Yeah.
- [12:58]
B
Get with who does not know your space. So perhaps you have a good buddy who. I have no idea where I was going with this, but just someone who isn't in your industry. And I mean literally not in the industry. If they're selling gadgets and you're selling supplements, that's in your industry. So go outside of your industry and have them go through your entire sales process and then the onboarding process and then see what was wrong and ask them to take notes along the way. And so I've not done this for our internal brands and we should. Yeah, I've done it for client on board. Of course I have that.
- [13:40]
A
The Shoemakers kids.
- [13:41]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. So I'm sorry, um, but, but I found massive, massive, massive misunderstandings. Complete lack of decent communication. Because we understand what we understand. It's kind of like if you walk into the hospital and a doctor walks up to you and says, hey, Travis, your wife Sherry, she had a minor myocardial infat. I can't talk. A minor Marty. Myocardial infarct. And we're going to have to keep her overnight. What does that mean?
- [14:14]
A
Yeah, something with her heart.
- [14:15]
B
You're fucking terrified. You're terrified, right? You're scared out of your mind. It's a minor heart attack. She's going to be just fine. But because they speak a different language than you do, if they don't speak your language, then you don't know. And because We've been speaking our language for so long, we don't even realize it. So having someone go through your sales to delivery process, I just recently were. We. We just launched a book and I super excited. We just launched a book. But when we were going through the process of hiring a publisher, I got really, really close. And then it was terrible because it was like the communication was so broken from one person to the next because they spoke different languages. The sales guys didn't speak the language that the editor spoke and the editors didn't speak the language that the publishers spoke. And I felt anxious and awful throughout most of that process because no one was telling me the same thing.
- [15:12]
A
Right, right.
- [15:13]
B
And I was frustrated. And it finally took the owner of the publishing company that we ultimately went with to get on a call with me and take over our launch for me to feel comfortable. And then after the, the final call I had with him, it wasn't that they were telling me different things, they were always saying the same thing, but.
- [15:33]
A
How they communicated it, but how they.
- [15:34]
B
Communicated it was so different. It left me uneasy. Because we're not talking about a little bit of money here.
- [15:40]
A
Right.
- [15:40]
B
And so having someone go through your process and really like how long did things actually take? Cause it's about responding to the lead as soon as it comes in and then it's about keeping that lead engaged all the way through them being delivered your product, not from most people stop the second they get the money.
- [16:01]
A
Yeah.
- [16:02]
B
But it needs to continue through. Cause they can still get their money back until they get it delivered.
- [16:07]
A
Right.
- [16:07]
B
And I think that's crucial in, in the whole thing. So action steps.
- [16:13]
A
Yeah. So I would say one of the first things that you should be doing is looking at your current technology stack to just see what's available that you're not using.
- [16:20]
B
Right.
- [16:21]
A
I mean that's probably the simplest thing that you can do.
- [16:24]
B
Right.
- [16:25]
A
Whether it's like you were saying like ClickUp or Close or a CRM that you have go High Level or any of these things.
- [16:31]
B
And so let's just talk about those really quickly. So Close is a platform that it.
- [16:38]
A
Does email, text messaging and social media posts, I believe. But basically anytime an email comes in with contact information, it automatically creates a new contact in the database. And so then you can set up automations or all kinds of other responses or your whole sales process within that platform.
- [16:57]
B
Okay. And then High Level has its own sales. I think what is that called?
- [17:04]
A
Is that, what do they call it? Pipeline?
- [17:07]
B
Pipeline. So that sales pipeline, your sales pipeline there's a whole segment in your customizer. Yeah. And so you recommend keeping your leads for. This is probably for services, communities, masterminds. What about for product owners? Where are their. Where, where. What are they doing with their leads?
- [17:27]
A
Like, like direct response or E commerce type of product owner.
- [17:30]
B
Sure. Okay, so I'm in Shopify or I'm in Sticky IO. What do I do?
- [17:35]
A
Yeah, so a lot of those systems already have. A lot of those are designed to have flows that are available within them and automations that are already supported. So this is what I mean. Like, look at what you're currently doing and then.
- [17:49]
B
So but let's be granular here because look at what you're already doing doesn't tell people who aren't doing it because you don't know what you know if.
- [17:55]
A
You have a platform, if you have Shopify.
- [17:56]
B
So if you have Shopify or you have Sticky or you have ghl.
- [17:59]
A
Right.
- [17:59]
B
You should see what's happening with your abandoned carts and your declines. And if there is an automation already set up, and if it's not set up, you should set it up.
- [18:07]
A
Absolutely, absolutely. And some people don't. Again, we talk about.
- [18:11]
B
Because looking at what you're already doing isn't helpful.
- [18:13]
A
Well, it is if you have this. If you don't know, like, what else can I be doing? And this is, this is what I was gonna say is like, if you're doing this as like in isolation. Right. Because a lot of times it's very easy in direct response or E Commerce to do what you're doing essentially in isolation. But there's a huge value of community. So I'm going to suggest, like beyond looking at what you're currently doing, reaching out or finding or developing or buying your way into a mastermind or a group or something where you have a little bit of community about seeing what other people are doing, other businesses are doing. Right. Because I think that opens your eye. Even like listening to podcasts and stuff. It's great because it begins to open your eyes a little bit about when.
- [18:52]
B
The podcast host doesn't tell you go look at what you're doing and actually explains it to you. Maybe.
- [18:57]
A
Maybe this way. This is why we're partners.
- [18:59]
B
Right? Okay. So just to recap a little bit of what you just said, I just want to make sure that people get the takeaway. The takeaway is to go in and view what's happening to your abandoned carts, your applications, to your content, contact forms, whatever it is, your book call, even your book of calls.
- [19:19]
A
Yes.
- [19:20]
B
Frickin book a call for one of the companies that I'm COO for. I, I never been so embarrassed in my life. The book a call was broken for probably a month. We, and we were, I was like, we gotta figure out what's going on with leads, why we're not getting leads. And then sure enough, it had been broke. We, it, it was broken. It was broken. It just didn't work. You couldn't book a call. That was the problem. And then there was, there was no way to even contact anybody when you couldn't book the call. It was just stupid. It was a big mistake. And that's because we weren't shopping our own system.
- [19:52]
A
Right, right.
- [19:53]
B
So shop your own system. Even if you think like I kind of think I have my stuff together.
- [19:59]
A
But every time you shop it.
- [20:00]
B
But every time I shop it I find something wrong like literally every time. And, and, and, and I do feel like I really do have my stuff together. But human element mixed with automations, that break is a real thing. And so we have on our calendar every Tuesday and every Friday for our customer service team, different people are assigned different clients funnels and, and whatnot. But somebody goes and shops those.
- [20:28]
A
Right.
- [20:28]
B
And so once a week every single thing has a touch point. But even that's not really enough.
- [20:33]
A
Yeah, yeah, I know. We've also talked about building out automations where every touch point in your sales funnel or in your process pings into a database that's tracking then responses so that if something breaks you don't have to try and figure out where it's broken. Right. So you can get a response.
- [20:55]
B
We've had, we've had those like I think you're talking about pingdom. Right?
- [20:59]
A
Yeah.
- [20:59]
B
We've had systems throughout but I can tell you right now customer service is found issues fastest, fastest because of the systems that we have. But this has nothing to do with lead gen.
- [21:11]
A
Right? Right, right, right.
- [21:12]
B
So lead response time, let's just kind of go down.
- [21:14]
A
Yep.
- [21:15]
B
So some, some action steps. Number one, have a friend review, have them record like on a loom or whatever what they're going through and then talk through what they're confused about, what they feel took too long, what they felt like was too fast.
- [21:31]
A
Right.
- [21:31]
B
You don't want to be too fast either. Look into your CRM, your customer journey in your CRM for when they decline or when they abandon their cart. Is there something already set up? If so, what is that? Is it enough? Is it fast enough, is it aggressive enough? Abandoned carts and declines. They should get not one email but many emails until they buy. The next thing is review your tools and what they're capable of doing as far as automations and reaching out to your leads. So Travis you mentioned the Harvard Business Review Business Review study and the Inside sales study. We're going to link those in our members area.
- [22:16]
A
It'll be in our lead response time guide so they'll be in there and then have links to those studies as well.
- [22:23]
B
Great. So you can also grab your manual Lead response time Mastery guide I think is what it's called and roadmap for sales to delivery process. You're responding to your leads is important. Selling your leads is important. Delivering well is equally as important. So we have a quick roadmap for the sales to delivery process in your members portal and then Travis also created how to for lead scoring so it's a complete process and how to create a lead scoring system within your business.
- [23:02]
A
Cool. I think that should cover it. Hopefully you guys got a lot of value out of joining us today. We look forward to catching you next time and with that thank you.