Fix Your Followup Process With This NEW Data! 2024 Harvard Business Review & MIT studies show...

All right, guys, what's going on?

On today's lead follow up training, we're going to be going over a guide that me and my team put together that's got a compilation of nine different studies.

Okay.

And these studies are everything from Harvard to MIT to just some really, really well accredited studies. Recent data too, that show the importance of not only how you follow up with your leads, but when you follow up with your leads. So we're going to go over some of that today. Some stats that I think are very interesting. I've been training team on this, we're training our clients on this.

And so we hope it's valuable to you as well.

So the first stats I want to go over actually the negative stats. And the reason is, is because of this one that our friends at Inside Sales actually figured out. And it said 73 of leads never get followed up with. Okay, I'm going to say that again. 73% of leads never get followed up with. Imagine that 73% of all the people that submit a website form an advertising inquiry, that are reaching out to services for some type of business, some type of inquiry, some Type of information. 73% of the time they're not even getting contacted at all. This leaves the barrier super, super low to be exceptional and the bar set very, very low. Okay, so if 73% of businesses aren't following up with leads at all, you know that that's a huge opportunity for you to just be the best with your speed to lead with, making sure no leads slipped through the cracks. All right? Another thing that can really help with that, I'm going to skip around these stats based on the way that I look at them. And I think this is the most relevant way. So check this out. Study from Drift 7%. Only 7% of companies respond to leads within five minutes, while 55% of companies respond in five or more days. Okay? So literally, guys, if you're just. If you want to be the top 7% of companies in the United States and probably in the world, all you need to do is follow up, respond to your leads within five minutes. You can automate this. So what we do is for every lead that comes in, every new lead, we send a personalized text message within one minute. And the way we do it is we set it up to be a double text so it sends the first message. Hey, Jen, I see that you were interested in getting more information about martial arts. Thanks for your request. One message. The second message sends just 30 seconds afterwards. Because this is how people actually Text and it says, mind letting me know a little bit about what interests you in martial arts? Okay. It can be open ended on the second text. It can be a link. Go ahead and get booked with our, our online scheduler here sends the link. It can be a question like when is a good time for me to reach out and talk, talk or text details. You know, it's just to get a response. And so the thing is, is you want to drive these leads off of the platform that they were on, whether it's Facebook, Instagram, Google, your website, wherever they submit this lead request. And you want to drive them into a conversation with your sales team where you can actually drive them from that into an appointment. And an appointment turns into a showed appointment turns into a deal or if.

You guys don't close them.

But optimally, if we're getting more appointments in the door, we're going to close more. And you can be the top 93% of companies just by responding within five minutes. Do I think automation and just relying on the text within one minute is sufficient? No. That's a good starting point for when you guys are busy. And our company actually does that in order to allow you guys to have that speed delete benefit. But somebody still needs to be on the other line for when that customer responds. Because we see over 50% of time that customers are responding to that first message. And so if they take the time to fill out your ad, they get a text, it's personalized, so it looks like it really came from you, and then nobody's there to respond on the other end. You're literally wasting that precious lead and that precious speed to lead time. And I'm going to show you, I'm going to prove that to you today with these statistics. Look, emotions are what they are. We might feel like we're doing a good job with lead follow up, but statistically the data shows that in general people aren't doing a good job with it. And it's time to admit it and it's time to fix it for your business because this is the number one thing that you can improve. Okay? And we're not even talking about your scripts, your frameworks, your offer, your tonality your rapport building abilities. We're literally just talking about the time it takes for you to call your leads and if you call your leads or not. All right, so one, one thing more on, on the positive notes and I guess actually before we get into that too, in the five minute rule, you know, everybody's got the five minute rule, which really now I think it's a one minute rule. But let's just say if you don't call a lead within five minutes. Vendasta, which is a huge platform online, did a study and it said 80% decrease in your odds of qualifying the lead after five minutes has elapsed. Okay. And other studies have shown a really similar statistic to that. About 80% decrease in your odds of qualifying a lead if you call them just five minutes after and try to qualify them than when they came in. The reason is because people are on social media, they're busy. And our minds on social media quickly go to different things. And when we're always thinking about different things, it's easy to get distracted. And after five minutes, I'm already on to the next video. I'm already on your competitor's website. I I'm already making a sandwich. You know, people aren't on social media for that long. And so you need to literally try to catch people when the phone is in their hand. Literally when the phone is in their hand. That's when you want to catch people. You don't want to catch them later on when they're doing something else. You want to catch people when they're thinking about this stuff. Okay. That's going to be the most important opportunity for you to really uncover in your business. And imagine this. Let's just look at it under a math equation. Okay, so 80% decrease. So if I'm waiting to call my leads after five minutes, I'm going to have 80% less success. And so what that means is if I would have got a hold of 10 people now, I only got a hold of two people. Okay, let's say we have 100% contact rate under five minutes. That means that if I'm running ads and let's say I'm spending $10 per lead and I'm getting 10 leads for $100. And then, but I'm only talking to two because I've got an 80% decrease because I'm waiting. Well, now what that looks like is I'm actually spending $50 per lead because I'm only actually getting in contact with two leads. And so it makes your ads far less profitable when you don't get this simple thing right and it actually messes up the entire deal. Like if you just maintain speed to lead and that was the only thing you focused on, you will close more deals no matter what your salespeople say, just by getting in contact with people while they're hot. Okay, this Includes after hours. Okay. This includes weekends, this might even include holidays. If you're willing to commit to that for your business, you will see hockey stick growth in your level of appointments and contact rates. We're going to talk about rapport a little bit later. We're going to talk about how you can actually master these calls and how you can really take, take the call over, you know, and it depends on the niche you're in, how to approach. But for, for car sales, you guys have to build trust. If you're, if you're selling, you know, if you're selling a car and a lead just came in, they saw a picture peace of mind, car buying and somebody calls them and they don't have that peace of mind attitude, then there's going to be a disconnect, people are going to feel it, you're not going.

To close as many people.

So rapport is going to be really important. But you just got to make sure in the beginning that you just get this core pieces right with speed to lead. Okay? So the main things that we've went over so far is that 70, 73% of leads never get followed up with at all. Only 7% of businesses follow up within 5 minutes and 80% decrease in your odds of qualifying a lead after just five minutes has elapsed. All right, so guys like this is, this is what you need to understand when it comes to lead follow up. Okay. Lead response management actually found a 10 times less likely to have leads respond if your outreach takes more than five minutes. So you have to set up the automations and you have to have a human on standby ready to respond to their inquiry and call them right when the lead goes through. They should be looking at your text that they just got and then getting a call and making the decision to answer it or not and then answering it and talking with you right when they saw the ad. And then it's a way fresh conversation. They remember what they clicked on, they're there, they're ready and you can just ask them, hey, what made you want to click on my ad? Why did you want to reach out? What did you see? We got a lot of stuff out there we'd love to know. What, what drove you to want to reach out to us? And then you get to hear what the person is looking for. Guys, this is super, super important. People, people miss this all the time, even when they call me especially. Okay. You have to, you have to actually call somebody with the intention of just seeing why they reached out in the first place. And what happens is then the person's going to say, actually, I'm looking for a truck and maybe a car for my daughter. I got about 3,000 down. I don't really like dealerships. I've got, you know, I don't really have time to come in and I just wanted to know my options. And I really, I wasn't even going to click on your app, but I thought I'd give you a shot. This tells you so much about them. And now they're basically selling themselves. Oh, man. Well, and then, and then the car salesman has to be there to give them that peace of mind. Oh, man. Well, you called the right place. I actually hate car dealerships too. You know, that's why I got into this because we really take care of people and, and we got a great, great stuff down here. So what you, what, what ad did you see exactly? Oh, I saw one of your trucks. Cool, you're looking for a truck. What are you driving now? You know, and get into an organic conversation and build some rapport with them. It doesn't have to be all business. You know, a lot of people talk about B2B advertising business to business or B2C business to consumer. And I think of all advertising and Follow up as B2C or as P to P, person to person. Okay? It's all person to person communication. And so when you call somebody or, or they call you, you have to turn it into a human conversation as fast as possible and establish that rapport. What you don't want to do and what, what somebody's done to me just recently when we tested one of our dealerships is they call and say, hey, boss. And they had a good energy. Hey, boss, just want to get you set up for an appointment. And I'm like, who is this? Why? When? Oh, I filled out an ad three days ago on your website and now you're. I don't even need a car anymore. I'm not even thinking about that, you know, and so. And then they just go, oh, well. On a scale 1 to 10, what's your credit? I don't want to tell you that if I don't know you, you know, but somebody that you connect with, it's going to be easy to have that conversation. Somebody that you're just trying to ask questions just for the sake of asking, not going to get anything out of. So you have to ask your questions in a way that they unfold in, where the person kind of spills out to you. So, like, great questions are like, if it's an inbound lead, what makes you want to reach out? What makes you want to reach out? What, what makes you interested in our. Our ad? Exactly. Just so I can make sure I'm on the same page. Aside from getting a great car at a good price, what makes you interested in our ad? Aside from learning how to grow your business, what makes you interested in my ad? You know, that's, that's the way I frame it. And then people start saying, you know, the ones that aren't interested, they'll just say, I just want more sales or I just want a car. You know, that's the people that you're going to have to get to them in a different way. But a lot of people will just cut straight to the chase and, and you thank them for, for their time, too. Hey, thank you for your time. Thank you for reaching out. I just want to cut straight to the chase here and be respectful. Your time, what makes you want to reach out now they're going to cut straight to the chase. Look, I'm looking for a truck. I'm thinking about buying this other one, but I saw the one on your lot, thought I'd give you guys a chance. We'll just get down here right now and let's make it happen, you know, and you have to have this affirmative confident language of, yeah, we'll be able to help you out totally. Hey, if you want to save yourself time, why don't, why don't you do this? Let's do this. Fill out the credit application on my website. That'll send all your information over to my finance manager. My finance manager is going to actually review all your information and let you know which cars we can get you approved for, what your down payment is going to need to be and what your monthly payment on average, is going to be. And then when you sit in front of us, we'll at least have something to go over, some numbers for you to consider. And then you can drive home with a car if everything looks good to you. Does that sound fair? You know, people are going to, you're going to be getting full credit apps, booking appointments, and getting people that are very interested without having to, like, force them or make them feel like they're part of just a, an average sales process, like, reach out to them with the intent to help them and show your expertise. And no matter what you're selling or who you're selling to, it's going to really be helpful. But you have to know that you're that person and that's where building up the confidence is good. I think some car dealerships don't have success because they know in some elements maybe they're not doing the best business, maybe they are ripping some people off. And so it's hard to sell with confidence when you don't really believe in what you do. That's why the best car dealerships, the most ethical ones I know, I, they don't have this problem. They build huge reputations and trust with their community because they know how to share that message, that they're here to help people. They just got a single mom approved for a car at a great price and she drove out with a quality car that same day, you know, versus the guy that knows he's selling lemons. It's hard for his team if, if his team knows every car they sell them, the person, the person's coming in a week later mad at them or posting on their Facebook. It's kind of hard to call somebody like you're going to help them, you know, and that's why having case studies and having testimonials and reviews that you review with your, your sales team is so important. We have a channel in our Slack called client wins. And every time a client posts a win, we're posting in that Slack channel. And what that allows us to do is to actually have the ability to, to just go through and prep ourselves, read through those client wins on a weekly basis. And my sales team, I have them doing it on a day to day basis and reciting those things in their head. Because you will have times where it's not even your fault as a car dealership or as a marketer where things don't go as planned, they don't go as expected. And those times can hurt your confidence. And so what I found to ledge to hedge against losing your confidence is actually by just remembering those case studies, remembering the impact you had on somebody's life, remembering how transformative it is and holding on to that. So we've got a list of 10 names I can think of right off the top of my head of people that are very happy with us. They've been greatly impacted. It helped them over a long period of time. And they really love what we do and they're thankful for us. And anytime that somebody's trying to say that, you know, we're not that, or anytime I feel like we're not that, I can go back to those wins. And those wins remind me of the impact that we made and it puts me back in that frame. Where I can sell, where I can call, and where I can prospect. Okay, so that's what I've got. On the negative side, guys, for the PDF, is there any questions or does anybody have anything that they want to.

Interject on on that?

Okay, let me go back into. Yeah, go ahead, Jen.

Now's the time to ask.

Yep, we've got the chat too, so it's all good.

So, yeah, guys, the negative is more important to understand than the positive.

Okay?

But if you do this right and you hone in on this and you put focus towards this and you care and whoever cares the most wins.

By the way, that's a pro tip.

What you'll have is you'll, you'll get.

To experience some of these positive benefits. And so that looks like this.

78% of customers buy from the company that responds their inquiry first.

Lead Connect did that study. Okay, it was a few years ago.

But it's still relevant as ever. If 78% of the company, 78% of customers buy from the company that responds to their inquiry first, all you need to do is be first. And this comes back to speed. Delete. Okay, we're going to go over to this 391%. I said that, I said that one minute is to do five minutes. And that's because Velocity did a study and they found that there's a 391 increase in lead conversions when responding to leads within one minute. And that's why I like to literally, they, I like them to still be looking at my ad and I'm calling them. You know, people answer. I, I had a guy answer the other day at 2:30 in the morning. He filled out my lead at 2:30. I was up just randomly and I saw he owned three dealerships. And I was like, this guy's busy throughout the day. Let me just call him right now. And I called him and I'm like.

You know, because my, my, my girlfriend was sleeping. I called him and I'm like, hey.

Man, how you doing? Super excited for you filling out my application, man. I know it's late, but a couple guys like us were busy during the day. Tell me what makes you want to reach out, man. And I booked him and his team for a call that following week. They've got three dealerships. We didn't close them down yet, but we're still, we're in a. Who else is going to call him? He's going to always remember that kid.

That called him at 2:30 for his business.

Some might call it unprofessional. But he. He just clicked and asked for information. It's unprofessional if it's anything more than 60 seconds later. Like, if it's. If it's three minutes later, you don't know what he's doing. He's watching a movie or whatever. If it's right. When you click on my ad, you can actually talk to me. A real human is going to be there. People are hungry for real humans. Like, really hungry for people to just have real conversations. AI is not going to solve the problems. And people like, you ever been on one of those things where it's just like, you've reached, blah, blah, blah, blah. Listen to our options. Press 1 for this, press 2 for that. You press 2, you go to the other one, and it's like, hello, listen to our options. Press 0 for operator, and then you're on hold for a while, and the operator transfers you.

And.

And you're just like, you're. Or you're getting a robot voice that's trying to get. Gather the information. It's not working. It's like, error. Must speak to an operator. And you do that over and over and over. And you end up wasting, you know, hours at times just to get through to somebody, and you're wishing, you're like, just give me a human to talk to. That's what everybody wants. They just want humans to talk to. They don't want to feel like they're part of a sales process, though. So you have to learn your scripts to turn them into frameworks to be able to have them conversationally. All right, last ones on this. You're 21 times more effective when calling within five minutes.

Oh, we talked about that one. Oh, here's the other one.

7%. Seven times more likely to qualify leads when reaching out within an hour as.

Opposed to just one hour later.

And by the way, this was a Harvard Business Review study. So, guys, if you don't get a hold of them within five minutes, which you're going to be losing a lot more leads, you're still seven times more likely to qualify when reaching out within one hour. So one minute is like you're a rock star. Five minutes is like you're the top of your industry and the top 93% of all companies, okay, one hour is good enough to do some damage and make lead generation work for you. Anything more than that, turn your ads off right now. You're wasting your money if you don't have this figured out.

Like, that's 100% for sure.

You'll get some sales that drip in almost automatically. People will show up that didn't need a call and they just showed up through the automations. But generally in order to get somebody to buy, marketing needs to meet sales in the middle and sales needs to take over and walk them through the rest of the way. Marketing can serve you up great customers, great leads, people that are interested and it's not that they're bad leads. If somebody takes the time to go to your website and fill out your stuff, they show great intent. The more that they fill out, the more intent they show. Okay. When you're generating your own leads, you need to take them seriously and, and, and, and, and be very intentional with the way that you treat your leads because these are people that clicked on your brand. This isn't some lead that came from a random website in the middle of nowhere that just generates leads. These are leads that clicked on your page and they want to know about your services and they want to know info about your products and the way that you interact with them after that process is incredibly, incredibly important. So.

Let'S see if there's any that I missed.

Oh yeah. 30% of prospects go to a competitor if not contacted. And you see this, this perfectly displayed between 78% of customers buying from the company that responds to their inquiry first. And 30% of prospects go to a competitor if not contacted. Those are two separate studies that show essentially the same thing. And that just goes to show be first and make sure to contact every single one of your leads if they. There's another study that MIT did. If you're, if your leads don't respond within that first one hour call. If you don't get on a call with them, it takes on average five to six, okay, five to six calls, phone calls before you get them on a phone versus it's like one call average if you reach out within five minutes and with even within an hour. So you're wondering, yeah, I called these leads. Nobody answers. It's like, yeah, because you're calling days later, you're calling, you know, even hours later in some cases is too much. And so these things are important. So little, little things to do. Make sure that all your leads come, you get notifications in real time, whether it's a text, an email notification or a live notification. You want to get those right away. Make sure the leads get routed to the right salesperson and make sure that they are on them. Be able to have some kind of checks and balances to make sure leads don't SL the cracks, if they stall out, if the deal's not moving forward, that should trigger some kind of automation to try to refresh that lead.

Okay.

And then automate as much of this as possible. But of course, you're going to have to deploy and build a solution for your team members to be able to handle these leads and then be able to coach them through the process too. So we do call tracking, call reporting, call recording, and we also audit people's sales process to help them improve because this is the leaky bucket for most business owners. Okay, so that's what I've got on the statistics today, guys. I hope that's, that's helpful. Just to see the importance of speed to lead and, and how that goes. Aside from that, the biggest tips that I have is all about the energy that you bring into a call. So, you know, you guys, on these calls, we're going to do these every Thursday and usually they'll go an hour, I gotta run today. But on these calls, you guys are able to ask any questions. We can look into the system deeper.

You know, I'm happy to do role play.

You know, you just have to mention, you know, comment what you're looking to go after, what you're looking for information on and, or, or just unmute and talk about it when we've got small crowds like today. So, Hannah, alert. Did you guys have any questions before I hop off today?

Hi, good evening. I'm sorry, you're good?

Alert.

Yeah. Okay, you can.

We had a, I had a session with Alert earlier.

Nice, perfect.

What's your question?

Alert?

No, I don't have a question. I'm good. I missed the call. I came in late years. The link you sent me isn't the link for the call that was on another call as well.

But yeah, I'm sorry about that.

Yeah, yes.

Yeah, that popped up. The Google Meet popped up automatically. But thank you for joining.

All right, thank you. But I'm good. I understand everything.

Yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll upload the recording if you need to go back and.

Yeah, we'll get the link so it, so it sends out automatically and, and everything for the next week. But yeah, if, if you guys have any other questions, just mention in your channel and, and we'll keep working on this stuff. But yeah, guys, appreciate you guys being here. We're going to keep doing these very frequently and very often because this stuff is the most important thing that anyone.

Needs to follow up with.

So. Hannah, did you have a question? I saw you come off mute there.

Yes. Can I request for a sample of a call from a lead?

Yeah. What kind of leads are you going after?

Just so I can make sure that I send you the right type of call.

This is for car automation.

For dealerships.

Yeah, dealerships, yeah.

Yeah.

So I've got a bunch of them. Are you in my school, Hannah?

Not yet.

I am not sure.

Okay.

Okay. So there's this app that I've got called school and I'm going to send.

You this, the link in the chat.

Here and alert you you might want to jump in here too.

Whoops.

That's not the right link. That's the link we're on right now. Don't click that one, click this one instead. All right, cool. So this is the actual link. This is. Yeah, this one is. So it's a school community and I'll share what that is. But basically it's just a place where these calls will be tracked through there. So like you'll get a notification for the call in school, but also through the slack, so you don't have to worry about that. And then what this is, is when you log into here, you'll have your community. And this has some stories and some client results and stuff. You've got salmon people from my schedule as you guys. You guys feel free to, you know.

Put anything that you, you want to mention in here.

Anything that's relevant to, you know, just.

Networking or wins or success or questions.

That you have, you can post in.

Here for the community and then in the classroom.

This is what's going to be really relevant to you. I'll give you guys both access to.

My sales process master class here. And, and that's me going over kind of the whole framework for, for closing dealerships.

And then I've got one other become a remote appointment setter.

So that's kind of what you guys are. And in this appointment setting, overview or actually I have a live discovery call booking and it. And it's me doing a call. You got a nice collection.

It's me going through, doing a call.

Doing an audit, everything.

I am already here and it is asking me, you.

Need to be approved.

Yeah.

Yeah, I got you. Yeah, the community's, you know, super awesome in here too. We've got a lot of really cool people. So I'm going to add you to this, this course and then you're going to be able to see those examples as well. Let's see. Okay. You should already have access.

Okay.

I might have to update it, but yeah, just Reach out with any other questions you have too.

Okay. Hi, I, I think I'm on the call. I have an account but I'm not sure if I'm in your own program. I don't know how to do this.

Yeah, you're on there. You're on there. Yeah.

Now you should be able to go.

Yeah, yeah, I see you. So you should be able to go up in. Up where it says SMMA scale Legion Edition. And then you'll have your communities and you'll have the, the shift social one right there.

Okay.

And then the classroom is where all the courses are housed.

Okay. It says this working but yeah, I've seen it. But some of the courses are locked.

Yeah, some of them are locked. I'm going to give you access to the one right now that I was just telling you about. The. Yeah, it's going to say become a remote appointment setter. So you've got access to that. Now that's like. Usually you got to like level up and stuff but I'll just give you guys access up front so you can, you can go in and you can see how I do that through go high level. And also you can see some examples of live ones and I'm going to be uploading more as well. So you guys both have access to that now. And there's other stuff in the classroom too. So if you just want to see.

The whole journey learning about marketing, I.

Talk about how I got clients in here.

I know you guys have done some.

Prospecting in the past. So in this become a remote appointment.

Setter, I've got our prospecting system where.

I go over how we get leads for the shift, how the whole process works out. And we're building something very similar out for Sherry. But this will help you guys to understand that and feel free to engage with the community we're here to, to help. You can read through the stuff. It's all kind of just to motivate each other to, to excel and, and just, you know, all grow together.

So that's, that's the school community. There's an app for it.

You should be able to download school or you can log up on the desktop. So. But yeah, glad to get on with you guys. Have you started to make any calls yet?

So alert. Actually she's just started to collect. Go ahead. Alert about the leads you've been collecting.

Yeah, yeah, I actually don't blue cosmetic. I just do inbound appointment setting DM settings. So I don't do calls. So I haven't really actually done anything for this niche. What I've been doing is just for the roofing company the way I normally do it. So I, I tend to pause with this gardenership because we didn't have anything up on our socials to prove that we do what we say we do in the DMs. So I was talking to Jen, I was telling her that when the, the socials are up and running, something we can post and talk about what we do, then I can just start reaching out to people in the DMs.

So, yeah, yeah, that's perfect. And that's what we're.

We're working on getting built out for Sherry to be able to show that we got some social media content. And then we're going to get some actual, like, case studies for you guys.

We're just making them like white labeled.

For you, but it's going to be the same results and stuff that I get. So you'll be able to leverage those for yourself.

Yeah, for the creatives that had that. Sorry, Geraldine created recently. Can they use them to put on their IG for now?

Yep, yep.

Okay, I'll. I'll send it to Alert.

Yeah, that's what they're made for. So we got Facebook, Instagram, social media, all that contents for them to post on social media, anywhere, stories, posts.

Yeah.

Okay, that helps. Thank you.

All right, guys, thanks so much.

I got to.