Want to increase your sales rep’s monthly quotes by 62.5%? We can tell you how and show you proof.

We recently helped a B2B manufacturer improve their lead-to-quote ratio by 62.5%. This company had averaged a 40% lead-to-quote rate for the last two years and in the first quarter of this year, that rate improved to 64% — an increase of 62.5%.

To be clear, this was not about getting more total leads. This had nothing to do with increasing website traffic, or the website’s conversion rate.

This was about about taking the manufacturer’s existing leads and putting a new process in place to convert an additional 62.5% of those existing leads into quotes (over the course of one quarter).

Before I tell you about how we did it, I need to ask you five questions.

To get the most value out of this post, you need to answer these questions as honestly as possible. Ready?

1. What percentage of your leads do your reps get back to?
2. How fast do they respond?
3. What percentage of your leads do your reps not get back to?
4. Why not?
5. How do you know the answers to the first four questions?

If you’re like many companies out there, you don’t know how many leads your reps did or did not get back to, or how fast. You might hope, and I’m sure you certainly have very high expectations, but you don’t actually know.

You don’t know because you don’t have the data. And without data you can’t measure this.

Here’s the #1 why you can’t measure your rep’s performance:

You List Your Sales Rep’s Contact Information On Your Website

Let’s get right down to it. This is the core of the problem, and the foundation of the opportunity in front of you. You probably have a “Find a Rep” page (by location/territory), or you might list your rep’s contact info right there on your contact page. Both are pretty common scenarios.

This is exactly what our client did; they provided all their sales rep’s contact information on a single page (broken up by region). The idea was: the prospective buyer could easily come to this page, find their sales rep and contact them immediately.

What this also meant was that a prospective buyer interested in their business’ products would contact a sales rep directly (via their direct email or phone) without our client’s sales management ever knowing. This direct communication is why most companies cannot answer questions #1–4 above.

This is not uncommon. Many companies simply don’t know if their reps are being contacted, or when, or why.

You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

When the sales rep information is listed directly on the website, here’s how the process works:

1. Prospective buyer visits company website
2. Prospect finds rep’s email/phone number, contacts rep directly
3. Rep responds to prospect directly
4. Rep notifies company of lead (if it seems promising)
5. Company adds promising lead to CRM

By listing their rep’s contact info on the website, our client had little visibility into:

• Which prospects were contacting reps
• When prospects were contacting reps
• Which prospects received a response from reps
• What the prospects were contacting reps about
• How long it took reps to respond to prospects

While our client had a lot of trust in their reps, there was no way to measure.

And just to inject some data here, a recent study of 2,241 US companies found that the average first response time of B2B companies to new leads is 42 hours.

They also found that 23% of companies never responded at all.

The Fast Lead Response System

We knew there was a better way. Here’s what we did. We created a new system that gave our client more visibility, earlier on in the process.

This is how the new process works:

1. Prospective buyer visits company website
2. Prospect fills out the “Find a Rep” form to locate a rep in their region
3. Form sends out email notifications to both the rep and sales manager
4. Sales manager responds to all leads immediately (copies rep)
5. All leads are automatically entered into CRM when the form is submitted
6. All leads are tracked, measured and nurtured until closed or dead.

Note in step 5, more leads (overall) are being entered into the CRM in this scenario. By having all leads immediately entered into the CRM, there is increased opportunity for nurturing leads that might not be ready to buy yet. Not to mention increased visibility and measurement of those leads.

It’s About Control, Visibility and Measurement

This new system allowed our client to:

1. Have immediate visibility of all leads generated from the website
2. Have visibility into how many leads each rep was working
3. Identify leads that needed further nurturing
4. Measure each step of the process
5. Control and improve the entire process

There’s an old saying, “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.”

And we like to tack on, “and if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” This adage rings very true when it comes to converting leads into quotes.

An Increase of 62.5% In Leads Quoted

After making just a few simple changes to the way this manufacturer tracked lead data and managed leads, reps were able to get 62.5% more leads quoted and the company was able to gain more visibility and control of lead performance.

We believe that you can make similar improvements by taking the simple steps outlined above. Got any questions about the process? Let us know — we’re always happy to talk marketing!