A Complete Guide to Speed-to-Lead
Better customer experience = better results
The greatest moments for a RevOps pro are when you identify targeted adjustments to the funnel that produce significant, compounding results.
And one of the highest-impact changes you can make is to reach out to people who submit a demo or contact request (a.k.a. “hand-raisers”) as quickly as possible.
I love this project for three reasons:
It greatly improves the customer’s experience with your brand
It has a concrete, significant, and measurable impact on pipeline
It burnishes your credentials as a strategic operator with business acumen
In this guide, I’ll show you exactly how we do it at my company. Implementing this process increased our lead-to-opportunity conversion rate for hand-raisers by 40%. Hopefully this helps you replicate the same results.
Summary
This post is, by necessity, quite long, so here’s a graphic with a quick executive summary.
Part 1: Strategy
The goal
The principle here is simple: when someone raises their hand by filling out a demo or contact us form (indicating that they want to begin a sales process) get back to them as quickly as possible.
Why is this so important?
You’ve probably seen these stats before, but it’s worth noting:
A study in Harvard Business Review in 2011 found that companies who reach out within an hour were 7x more likely to have a conversation than companies who didn’t.
Another study by Lead Connect indicated that 78% of prospects buy from the company that responds to your inquiry first.
…there are others, but you get the point.
More importantly, it’s just common sense.
We can all relate to the experience of having a problem to solve and reaching out to multiple vendors to build a short list.
Some vendors respond quickly and professionally, others are more sluggish, and some simply ignore the inquiry.
Which vendor are you more likely to choose?
Remember, customers are looking to disqualify you
They don’t have time to evaluate every vendor, and the window during which a person is building their shortlist closes quickly.
If you take too long to respond, the person has already selected their top 3-5 options and moved on to engaging with the faster vendors.
Conversely, a quick response is a powerful signal of competence. It makes you look sharp and on the ball and suggests you’ll be easy to do business with.
The Business Process
First, define your SLA for the sales user to reach out. We use 10 minutes. This is highly achievable.
The SLA timer begins once the lead has been routed to the user. This is because there’s usually some time required for upstream processing (enrichment, sync to CRM etc.) before the lead is routed.
The SLA is only fulfilled once a call has been made. It’s very easy to automate an email that goes out instantly, but we’re looking for a 1-1 conversation here.
I recommend restricting this process to hand-raisers because typically this is where the vast majority of pipeline comes from (>80%).
Also, getting a quick response to your contact request is a very different customer experience than being immediately hounded after downloading an ebook or attending a webinar.
The former is delightful, whereas the latter can be annoying or even creepy. Part 2: Technical Implementation
So, let’s assume that you’re ready to implement your SLA.
How do you actually set it up operationally?
Pre-requisites
A team of sales users responsible for qualifying inbound leads (typically a BDR/SDR team at more mature companies)
Defined territories and routing rules
A routing tool to perform the actual distribution
To execute this process, you’ll most likely need a specialized tool like LeanData, Ringlead (ZoomInfo), Traction Complete, or Distribution Engine. (Alternatively, you’ll need a fair bit of customization in your CRM.)
I use Distribution Engine for routing, and so this guide is based on that tool. I’ve tried a handful of the major players, and Distribution Engine is my favourite by far because of its robust feature set, flexibility, and ease of use.
I’d love to show how to achieve this process in all the major tools or even other CRMs, but it’s not practical. However, you should hopefully be able to follow the same principles I describe below to make this work with your tech stack.
Route hand-raisers separately
Whatever tool you use, it’s important to segment hand-raisers into their own pool for routing purposes.
This will enable accurate reporting and even load balancing of hand-raisers across your sales users (something that’s impossible if you mix them in with lower intent leads).
In Distribution Engine, we’ve configured multiple “teams” to handle these different routing scenarios. Each team can route to the same group of users, but this structure enables us to define different working hours and SLAs for leads with different levels of intent.
Only route handraisers to users available right now
🚨 This is really the critical feature that makes the process work.🚨
If you route to a user that isn’t available to work a lead, there’s no way they’ll meet the SLA.
But how do we know if a user is available? There are multiple layers to consider.
Working Hours
On the most basic level, you need to ensure you only route to a user when they are working that day (i.e., not on PTO), and it’s within their working hours as defined within your routing tool.
Most tools have a place to configure working hours and time off.
In Distribution Engine, we define standard shifts for our teams across different markets, and we log public holidays in each of those markets to restrict availability. Users are also enabled to log their own PTO.
Real-time availability
Now, just because a user is working that day doesn’t mean that they’re actually available to receive leads at that specific moment. They could be in another meeting, on lunch, away from their desk, etc.
If a user isn’t available in that moment, they won’t meet their SLA. So, we need to validate the user is actually free to action the lead before we route it to them.
This requirement is the most difficult to execute, but it’s the difference between a 10 minute response time and a 2 hour response time.
After considering various options, we decided to use Distribution Engine’s User Availability Toggle.
The benefit of this toggle is that this gives users direct control over their own availability, which is usually more accurate. None of the other options we considered (e.g., a calendar sync) would have been robust enough.
The downside is that it requires continual action from users and a relatively significant change management cycle. I’ll discuss that further below.
What if your routing tool doesn’t have an availability toggle?
Unfortunately, I’m not aware of a similar “availability toggle” feature in other tools. However, you can create similar custom functionality with a bit of effort.
For example in Salesforce you might:
Create a custom field on the user object called
AvailabilityCreate a Flow that toggles the value in this field from “Online” to “Offline” or vice versa
Add that flow to the Utility Bar in a Lightning app, where users can trigger it
Here’s a quick mock-up of this approach in action from Todd Sprinkel, Principal Solution Architect at Sponge.
Routing based on availability
Once your team is using an availability indicator, it’s pretty simple to configure specific distributors / routing scenarios to respect that property in routing rules. For example, you can use this field as a filter in the nodes on your LeanData graph.
Distribution Engine makes it even easier, with an option available in the distributor settings to respect or ignore the toggle status:
Holding hand-raisers until a rep is available
Most lead routing systems work like a coin sorter or decision tree, where a lead passes through a hierarchical series of rules and gets routed according to the first matching scenario.
But you may have windows during the day where all your reps are unavailable. Depending on your configuration, your hand-raisers may then get routed via a different branch of your routing logic with a more permissive SLA. This is bad for conversion and also throws off your load balancing.
To prevent this, it’s important to create a “dam” to keep these leads in a holding pattern and ensure they get routed the first available rep within the hand-raiser scenario.
To achieve this in our system, we have a filter on the next Distribution Team in the hierarchy that excludes hand-raisers. This prevents them from moving onwards in the process. They stay in a holding pattern until a rep is available.
Pro Tip: Always couple your automated routing with a human safety net that checks for any hand-raisers that may be “stuck” for whatever reason. This ensures that no one slips through the cracks. Hand-raisers on evenings and weekends
It’s inevitable that some hand-raisers will come in after hours—evenings, weekends, holidays, etc.—when no one is available.
We’ve found it’s important to handle these a bit differently, as otherwise the first rep to toggle on the next business day gets the entire pool of leads. This uneven distribution gives them an unfair advantage and offers no benefit, since the lead has already been waiting hours or days for a follow-up, and the rep can only handle one lead at a time.
So we have a separate distribution team for evening and weekend hand-raisers, which isn’t subject to the 10-minute SLA. It has a unique shift that kicks in one minute before our standard shifts do, and it distributes any after-hours hand-raisers evenly to the team.
Tracking SLAs
Distribution Engine has a built in feature for defining and tracking SLAs—for example, how long a rep has to take action, what data points in the system indicate the SLA has been fulfilled, and so on. Other tools have a similar capability.
All the SLA-related data (time to action, SLA infractions, etc.) gets stamped on a custom object log record for that specific routing event. This data model allows you to track SLAs granularly every time a lead is routed without needing to overwrite lead or contact fields.
For us, the “Time to Action” is stamped when a call activity is logged, which triggers an automation that updates the lead status and fulfills the SLA.
Pro Tip: To achieve maximum accuracy, you need to log the call activity when the call begins, not just when it ends. (Otherwise, a long connected call could create the appearance of a failed SLA.)
Unfortunately, relatively few softphone providers support this feature. When you have the data tracked with this level of granularity, it produces beautiful reporting. You can now track the average time to action and the % of records where reps are meeting the SLA—and slice it all by rep, market, and so on.
Integration with a meeting scheduling tool
In addition to our 10-minute SLA for hand-raisers, we also use Chili Piper to enable leads to book a meeting immediately after submitting the form.
There are a number of tools in this category (Calendly, Revenue Hero, etc.). I highly recommend you use one of them. It’s very easy to set up and super high impact.
For the people who book a meeting, we still send follow-up emails, but we exempt these leads from the 10-minute SLA since the meeting is already on the books.
Only about 40% of our hand-raisers use the meeting booker. This process is for the other 60%.
Part 3: Change management
The technical aspect of this project does have its challenges. But it’s the change management work that will really determine your success.
The only way you win is if your reps are bought in and committed.
Addressing your team’s concerns
Whatever your team’s status quo is today, they most likely aren’t required to click a button every time they leave their desk or face scrutiny if they don’t action a lead in minutes.
The bar is being raised for them significantly. I’d argue this is a good thing, but you need to have eyes wide open about all the anxieties this change may produce:
Performance implications if they don’t hit their SLA
Feeling trapped at their desk to avoid toggling off and missing a hand-raiser
Missing their target if they don’t get an even share of hand-raisers
Feeling rushed / stressed and overall experiencing a decline in work satisfaction
We had to address all these concerns and more.
The good news is that these problems are solvable, and our team went on to thrive under the new process. However, you need a thoughtful and sensitive approach to get everyone on board.
Get your messages clear
There’s a few key messages you need to relay to the team:
This will help them earn more $$$: the reason for implementing this initiative isn’t to punish anyone—it’s to generate more opportunities. Everyone wins if that happens.
10 minutes is highly achievable: our team was concerned about the feasibility of a 10-minute SLA, but as you can see in the report above, most reps are in the 90-100% SLA fulfillment range and many have sub-5 minute average response times!
No one is getting fired for missing an SLA: the initiative should roll out gradually, with plenty of grace in the beginning as the team learns the ropes. Systematically slow response time does become a performance issue—but there’s no reason to stress about a few leads that slip through the cracks.
Hand-raiser distribution evens out over time: some days, a rep will have lots of meetings and receive fewer hand-raisers. But then those hand-raisers will generate meetings for other reps, who will become less available, and more hand-raisers will go to others….everything balances out assuming that everyone plays by the rules.
Have a structured communication plan
This isn’t the sort of initiative you roll out by email.
You should have a structured communication plan with a variety of touch-points. For example:
Join rep team meetings to introduce the project and share a plan with them, emphasizing the messages above. Highlight that there will be a chance to ask questions and address concerns.
Have the SDR/sales manager(s) raise the topic in 1-1s with each of the affected reps, giving a chance for them to surface concerns they might hold back in a group setting.
Join team meetings again, this time to listen to questions / feedback and provide answers.
Provide a thorough enablement on all new processes and features related to the process. Ensure that reps take the training.
Once the initiative goes live, celebrate wins and don’t dwell on failures. If you make a hero out of the reps that are doing well, others will want to emulate them.
Managing performance
After you go through the initial learning period, you’ll likely settle in to a steady state where most reps are meeting or beating the SLA. And you should start to see a corresponding increase in conversion.
It’s now up to managers to monitor response time as a KPI, just like any other metric, and to make it part of coaching and performance improvement discussions. Ops should also keep a watchful eye here to surface any issues.
Pro Tip:
Watch for sneaky behavior. Some reps may decide to just leave themselves as "available" all the time (i.e., never toggle off), even if they have no chance of responding in 10 minutes.
They'll realize it's better financially to take the hit on their SLA and create more deals by getting a bigger share of hand-raisers.
These sort of shenanigans need to be dealt with quickly and sternly, as it can destroy team morale and create resentment.
Distribution Engine has a report that allows you to audit when reps are toggling on and off, which exposes this behaviour instantly. Conclusion
I hope this guide gets you started on a path to improved customer experience and higher conversion.
Feel free to post a comment if you have any questions about the implementation in your org. I’m happy to help where I can.