In another post, I mentioned that we had launched our 10th Secret Prospect test — and promised an update on our findings. As it turns out, the “winners” and “losers” aren’t as interesting as some of the startling results from this latest test. In my original blog post I posed the question “Does your sales force need a kick in the pants?” Let’s just say that you might think that harvesting prospects is Job One in a recession, but a lot of sales forces don’t seem to agree.
The response rate is pretty dismal — even in these tough economic times. Overall, our Secret Prospect successfully engaged with target sales teams just over half of the time. If you factor out the attempts that didn’t work the rate jumps to 67.8% — which is well below our last results which were around 75%.
General purpose forms are a loser. Only 25% of the general “Call Me”/Contact Me” forms results in a response from sales. Our POV? If you aren’t going to call prospects back, remove your form.
Forget Call Me Now features — the real action is in the Sales Chat category. Once upon a time “Call Me Now” features were the name of the game. Today, Sales Chat has replaced “Call Me Now” as the most common and most effective approach. To see why, consider this. The completion rate for “Call Me Now” features was a dismal 42.9%, while Sales Chat hit the mark 84.6% of the time. Our POV? Sales Chat is the most efficient way to engage with prospects — and if you want to see a best practice in action, surf over to Cisco.com, which hands off prospects to partners in real time.
Some companies got the memo about too many questions; the rest are still shooting themselves in the foot. We can’t understand why companies continue to ask intrusive questions on their forms that invite prospects to lie like a rug, and creates databases packed full of patently inaccurate information about prospects who may or may not make the cut. Our latest test shows that, when the number of questions asked are the issue, the industry is divided into two camps. 42.8% of our tests required 3 questions or less. The other 35.7% expected us to wade through 13 to 22 questions. Here, Dell.com’s network products zone got the prize for truly egregous behaviors — 22 questions — 14 are required.
