Lever 1. First response speed
The benchmark is five minutes during working hours. The market average is 42 hours, and only about one company in four replies within five minutes. An enquiry answered inside five minutes closes around 32% of the time; answered after a day, around 12%.
This is the cheapest lever you have. It needs no people and no budget, only a rule about who picks up an enquiry and how fast.
Lever 2. When price gets quoted
Until price is on the table the customer cannot decide anything. Double Sales measurements found price came up in roughly half of conversations, on average at the eighth to eleventh message. Once it became a rule, both numbers moved within a month.
Lever 3. Follow-up on stalled deals
Eight out of ten sales need five or more touches after first contact, and reps stop at the second or third. What fixes it is not character but a list: the system collects threads with no reply and no next step and puts them in front of the rep every day.
The order to do it in
- Measure three things on your last 50 enquiries: median first response, share of conversations where price was quoted, follow-ups on stalled threads.
- Set three rules: a response deadline, price no later than the third message, a minimum number of follow-ups before a thread can be closed.
- Start a stalled-deal list, a spreadsheet is fine.
- Measure the same three things a month later.
- Only then go near scripts and training.
What not to do first
- do not change CRM: three months of work and no effect on conversion in month one
- do not hire another rep into a process that does not exist
- do not rewrite the script before you have read twenty conversations