Your first and most important priority in the sales cycle, after marketing does its thing, is to connect reps to buyers. It’s not to rack up an impressive list of random activities, nor is it to enroll people into generic email nurture.
The problem is that the default strategy for business development and sales teams is often an exercise in “doing more”—because more activity is easy to measure. When you get more done, you feel good about it. “Yesterday I completed 50 tasks. Today, I did 60. That’s progress.”
The thing is, doing more is only progress if it’s more of the right things—things that lead to more quality conversations.
Don’t make the mistake of doubling down on more of what doesn’t work. That just creates more black holes in your funnel. Sure, you’ll see some marginal benefit from increased effort. But there’s no leverage in untargeted activity.
And no amount of optimistic forecasting, soft skills training, or increased productivity can compensate for reps failing to actually connect with interested buyers in meaningful first conversations.
So what should you focus on? It’s your job to figure out which tasks help you intersect buyers at the precise time they show interest.
ENGAGE LEADS IN MINUTES, NOT DAYS
Let’s zero in on that last part: time. Teams used to pound the idea of speed-to-lead—the belief that to influence a buyer, you have to get to them fast and first—into reps’ heads.
Is it still important? Yes. If anything, it’s more important today than it was three years ago, and even more than last year.
Buyers now complete 60–70% of their criteria before they ever engage with a rep. Buyers have access to more information than your reps. They’re harder to reach. And your reps’ window to influence buying decisions is shrinking.
But teams are still thinking in terms of days and weeks before the first attempt. Just this month, a report from one of our competitors suggested the ideal time frame for the first attempt is two days. Two days!
We did some research—on 5.7 million marketing leads and 55 million sales tasks across 400 companies. Conversion rates were 8X higher when the rep attempted contact within 5 minutes versus waiting 6 minutes or more. That’s a far cry from two days.
What’s amazing is that, of all the leads worked (and not many were—more on that below), less than 1% were attempted within that ideal 0–5 minute window. And fewer than 15% were attempted within the first day.
Instead of starting with more activity, focus on making your reps 8X more effective. Would that translate to more deals closed for you?
NOT ALL LEADS ARE CREATED EQUAL—DON’T TREAT THEM THE SAME
Our research revealed another trend. Of the 5.7 million leads reviewed above, only 23% received even a single contact attempt. That means 77% of leads never get touched except by your marketing automation tool.
First, this suggests that teams have embraced a counterproductive behavior of enrolling most—sometimes all—leads into email nurture campaigns. But marketing automation is supposed to warm people up, not replace meaningful sales engagement. Sales-ready leads don’t need warming up.
Second, we audited a few million closed deals from several thousand companies to see if rep efforts were aligned to deals that actually closed. Reps spent 297% more time chasing deals that never close versus deals that do. That means only about one-third of the deals pursued are actually good. The same math applies to leads.
So if you only chase 23% of all available marketing leads, just one-third of that—7.6% of the total—is in the sweet spot. Taking it further, of the 77% of leads your reps ignore, one-third of that—25.6%—is actually worth your time.
Lastly, even though it’s 8X better to engage within 5 minutes, an astonishing 57.1% of all attempts occur after a week.
The takeaways here are:
Teams leave way too much on the table.
There’s still too much guessing in sales.
Guide reps to engage sales-ready leads quickly, then let marketing automation nurture the rest until they’re ready to talk.
BE PERSISTENT—YOU’RE IN SALES AFTER ALL
But how soon should sellers give up? It’s true you won’t connect with or convert every marketing lead within the optimal 5-minute window. But is one attempt enough? How about two or three?
The reality is that after the first attempt to engage an inbound marketing lead, your efforts begin to mirror outbound engagement. So why not follow similar best practices?
Generally, reps think they’re more persistent than they are. The average number of follow-up attempts for outbound motions is 1–2. With inbound, we’re a little better, but 80% of follow-up activities fall below five attempts, and most sit around 2–3. And remember, 57.1% of first attempts don’t even begin until after more than a week.
If you’re willing to strike early and stick with seven or more attempts, your connection rates can increase by 15% or more.
DON’T WAIT TO REFOCUS
Getting to buyers first has always mattered. But it’s no longer just about getting there first; it’s about getting there early enough to influence decisions. It’s about taking advantage of what marketing is doing to generate interested leads—and not allowing that interest to fade away.
COVID only made this more urgent. B2B buying and selling were already evolving when 2020 accelerated the transformation, but most teams weren’t ready. They were forced to adjust in ways that hurt marketing lead performance at every stage of the funnel. There has never been a more urgent time to align strategies to data.
What does this mean? Doing more isn’t the answer. And while speed-to-lead should be a tactical priority, the real key is aligning your strategies to data so you can do more of the right things and less of the wrong things. Playbooks can help you do that now.
Data for this research came from an analysis of more than 55 million sales interactions at 400+ companies across 5.7 million inbound marketing leads over a 3-year period, and from outbound activity and outcome data on Playbooks over a 2.5-year period.
