Increase Close Rates By Sending Leads Into Slack

Lead response time is one of the most important factors in determining your close rate. There are tons of data that supports the fact that responding to leads quickly will increase your close rate. This article from Vendasta on Lead Response Time has some pretty eye-opening takeaways:

• 78% of customers buy from the first responder
• Only 7% of companies respond to new leads within 5 minutes
• Sales conversions are 391% higher in the first minute
• After 5 minutes there’s an 80% decrease in lead quality
• 55% of companies take 5+ days to respond.

Obviously these all scream that you need to follow up quickly with your leads. Literally your money and business depend on it. If you want to improve inbound close rates, the first thing you need to do is decrease lead response time, ideally to under 1 minute.

Bring Lead Notifications into Slack

Most organizations are using Slack for internal communications. Team members spend the majority of their day in Slack interacting with other team members. By bringing lead notifications, whether that’s from web forms, phone calls, live chats, or text messages, you’ll be able to decrease your lead response time and close more sales. Guaranteed. Let me tell you about what we did at PhoneWagon.Our inbound lead volume was relatively strong. We notified our sales team via email whenever a new lead signed up. However, after talking to the team, we realized that they weren’t seeing the email notifications as fast as we need them to.  We needed an option that was more efficient than email notifications and also allow our entire team to comment on lead status without having to pull up our CRM.I decided to create an integration into Slack and push all of our new leads into our sales channel. I also integrated our live chat via Intercom and phone calls and text messages via PhoneWagon into Slack as well. This gave our entire team real-time visibility when we received any inbound lead - whether it was a sign up, live chat, phone call, or text.After we implemented pushing our leads into Slack, we noticed a 50% decrease in response time (moving from an average of 3 minutes to less than 1.5 minutes). Our close rate also increased from 28% to 34% from lead to sale.

Leverage Marketing Data in Slack

To increase close rates, you want to be able to leverage data from your marketing campaigns. When we push our leads into Slack we also add marketing data like the source, campaign, keyword, landing page, UTM, and much more. This helps us work the leads quickly with the right context.1. Marketing Data Provides ContextBy seeing rich, marketing data about a caller before I answer, I’m able to tailor my conversation based on the keyword they search or the landing page they’re calling from.

2. Frictionless Collaboration on Lead QualityAdditionally, by pushing our leads into Slack we’re able to communicate with the rest of the team about the quality of the lead. In this particular example, the customer needed outbound calling which we don’t currently have. Our AE recommended they look into another program called Close.io.  

3. Competition For Fastest Lead Response TimeBy viewing your leads in Slack you’ve removed friction (typically of having to search through the CRM) and enabled your sales team to respond lightning fast to all leads.

Conclusion

It’s no debate that they faster you respond to a lead the more likely you are to close that deal. If your team uses Slack and you want to increase close rate and response time for new leads, you need to setup your new leads to go directly into Slack in real-time. Are you ready to push your phone calls and text messages into Slack? Are you ready to have a 2-way SMS conversation with your customers directly from Slack.

‍Sign up for a free PhoneWagon account today and increase your close rates.