Winning deals isn’t easy. People spend years perfecting their pitch to get someone’s attention, and it’s getting harder to convert leads into sales.

Email plays a huge factor as Sales teams communicate directly with leads, Support follows up, Marketing generates new leads, and Customer Success upsells to existing customers. 

Learning to use email more effectively to manage your pipeline starts with two metrics:

Response Time

How quickly your team replies to an inquiry makes all the difference between engaging a lead or losing out on an opportunity. Your prospects expect a quick turnaround, so the sooner you reach out the better! 

Let’s imagine: you need last-minute catering for an office event happening in 2 days. A cursory search results in two potential caterers: Guy Fieri Catering and Gordon Ramsay Catering. Now while both are suitable, ideally you want Gordon because he seems a little better. 

Ten minutes later Guy follows up with a quote, ready to go. You let a day pass waiting for Gordon, without a reply. You have no choice but to accept the one-way ticket to Flavortown, even if it wasn’t your first choice. If only Gordon had been quicker… 

It doesn’t matter if you offer a better product; if you’re not available when you’re needed, the competition will always win!

Response Rate 

If things are being allowed to slip through the cracks, you could be missing some serious profit. Responsibility is often spread over multiple people, and this can make it easy to miss emails.

So how can we measure these two and make sure we’re getting 100% of the potential sales from our inboxes?

Start with an email analytics platform like Email Meter. Get your whole team set up for full coverage. Next, take a look at your response time.

How long are leads waiting for a response? A famous Harvard Business Review study from 2011 found that:

37% responded to their lead within an hour, and 16% responded within one to 24 hours, 24% took more than 24 hours—and 23% of the companies never responded at all. The average response time, among companies that responded at all within 30 days, was 42 hours.

An average of 42 hours!? While there were a lot of replies within 1 hour, a large portion took much longer. Another study found that replying with the hour makes it 7 times more likely to be qualified than a lead replied to within two hours—and 60 times more likely than a lead replied to in 24+ hours.

What’s your current average response time? If it’s under 1 hour, that’s great, keep it up! If it’s more, you should be targeting that one hour mark.