We Tested Lead Response Times Of 1000 B2B Sales Teams. Here Are The Results.

We started running some experiments this year at RevenueHero.

As we started seeing more traction from this experiment I realized our current hack-y solution was no longer going to work. We need a proper enrichment tool. 

So I started evaluating tools in the market. Started filling up multiple forms on at least 4 different websites. 

After waiting patiently for 3 days I had no luck — there was no automated email, nobody got back to me, and for some reason one of them added me to their drip sequence.

Are you kidding me? What year is this?

Since I needed to get this sorted, I couldn’t afford to wait, so I did a quick search, and ended up going with a different vendor at the very last minute.

I found identical features. And the same exact price. But there was one big difference: my experience as a buyer.

They responded to me faster. 

I booked a meeting with them on the spot, they showed me the product, and made my purchase effortless.

I shared this experience with the rest of the team at RevenueHero, and it got us thinking:

If that experience was so bad, are other businesses also treating people the same way? How do leads get treated in a world where buyers expect responses in real-time?

Back in March 2011, the HBR published a report that taught us that companies that reached out to prospects within one hour were 7 times more likely to qualify the lead and more than 60 times likely than their counterparts who waited for more than 24 hours. The kicker was, if a company responded 5 minutes after a prospect requests a demo, the odds of qualifying a new lead drops by 10X.

But in the summer of ChatGPTs and GenAI, people are more impatient. So the looming question is where do B2B SaaS companies stand when it comes to responding to their customers?

Here’s what we found.

The Methodology

We took 1000 B2B SaaS companies with the help of Clay. 

The split of companies based on employee size was:

We set out to find out if these companies are providing a good buying experience for their prospects by submitting sales inquiries and demo request forms. 

When filling out the form, here are the things we looked out for:

• How long do they take to respond to a lead?
• Are they making it easy for buyers to talk to them and letting them schedule a meeting with them?
• How frequently do they follow up to schedule a meeting?
• Do they have pricing published on their website?

We categorized responses as:

Don’t worry, we get into the nitty gritties as well. 

And of course, we created a separate work email address to ensure our form submissions do not get disqualified for using personal email domains (gmail, yahoo, hotmail) or as fake. 

How many form fields do companies ask prospects to fill to request a demo?

When we were filling out the forms, we had this overwhelming feeling of filling an endless number of fields. Surprisingly, the average number of form fields on every demo request form was 7. 

There were three companies who had 16 fields on their form and one company that had 21 fields.

How long do companies take to respond to a demo request?

To calculate how long a company took to respond to a prospect, we took note of when we submitted the demo request and looked at the timestamp of when we got a response from the company. We considered automated responses also into this calculation

When we requested a demo on 1000 B2B websites, we received only 365 responses in total with an average response time of 1 day, 5 hours, and 17 minutes.

When we dug a little deeper, here’s what we saw: 

EDIT:

Shout out to Joseph Hill for asking all the right and important questions. He pointed out in one of the LinkedIn threads that these 635 companies that did not respond could have been using an enrichment tool to disqualify us in the background. And so, we got to number crunching once again.

We went back to our second favourite tool, Clay, used a waterfall model that first enriched on Apollo, then on BuiltWith, and finally used Clay's own "Find Tech Stack". If at least one of the tools returned a value that said the website used an enrichment tool, we considered them to have an enrichment tool.

We saw that of 635 companies that did not respond to us, 30.86% of the companies did in fact use an enrichment tool. We mostly saw either Clearbit, 6Sense, or ZoomInfo. While it is likely that many of them used an enrichment tool to disqualify our request, we also saw that 100% of them did not send us an email or take us to a separate page that informed us that we might not be a good fit for them.‍

When we inspected code for all 1000 websites to see if they were using any scheduler. Turns out, only 113 websites had any form of scheduler. And of the 635 companies that did not respond to our demo requests, only 35 companies had a scheduler.

Show me the numbers!

Of course, generics like “Instantly”, “Within an hour”, and the likes is a great start. But we heard Jerry Maguire scream asking us to show the numbers. And so we did some number crunching.

Instantly: 172 companies who responded instantly took an average of 2 minutes to respond when we timed them. Of the 172 companies, 95 companies had employees in the range of 51 to 200 and the remaining were from 201 to 500 employee segment.

Within an Hour: The 31 companies that responded within an hour took an average of 25 minutes. 17 of them had employees between 51 to 200, 13 companies had 201 to 500 employees, and 1 company had greater than 500 employees.

Within a Day: 109 companies who responded within the day took an average of 10 hours and 32 minutes to get back to our demo request. We had 57 companies belonging to the 51 to 200 employees segment and 52 companies who had 201 to 500 employees.

Within a Week: We had 41 companies get back to us within a week at an average of 3 days, 9 hours, and 31 minutes. 20 companies had 51 to 200 employees, another 20 companies in the 201 to 500 employees segment, and 1 company that had more than 501 employees.

Took More Than a Week: There were only 12 companies that took more than a week to respond to our demo request. They took an average of 27 days, 14 hours, and 33 minutes. 5 companies had 51 to 200 employees and 7 companies belonged to 201 to 500 employees segment.

Emphasis on the buyer experience seems to start at the form

Companies that reduce friction right at the form interaction seem to be the ones that also emphasize the buyer experience by responding to the prospects quicker. 

• When companies had 1 or 2 fields, they took an average of 3 hours and 14 minutes.
• Companies with 3 to 5 fields took an average of 1 day, 5 hours, and 13 minutes.
• Companies with 6 to 9 fields took an average of 1 day, 7 hours, and 17 minutes.
• When companies had more than 9 fields, they took an average of 1 day, 4 hours, and 50 minutes.
  

Which naturally, got us thinking…

How many companies sent automated responses and how often did they follow up?

Of all the companies that responded, 60.27% of them sent an automated response. While we were expecting to be bombarded with several follow ups, to our surprise we received only 2 follow ups on an average with a few anomalies that sent 7, 8, and 10 follow ups.

But what really caught our attention was of all the companies that used a scheduler, only 61% of them followed up when we did not show up for the meeting and 97% of them did not cancel the meeting.

This could indicate that no shows weren’t marked accurately which led to follow up sequences not getting triggered if automated sequences were set up.

When we compared the response times, we saw a stark difference.

Companies that manually responded to demo requests took an average of 2 days, 3 hours, and 11 minutes. On the other hand, companies that automated at least their first responses took an average of 17 hours and 20 minutes to get back to us.

‍We don’t have any theories on why it took that long to send an automated response at the moment.

Do companies reveal their pricing?

Of the 1000 companies we requested a demo on, only 165 companies had a pricing page. However, it was good to see that 95 of these 165 companies displayed pricing numbers. Some of them had a mix of displaying actual pricing and request a quote for their highest pricing plan.

We looked at how the response times varied between companies that showed pricing versus the ones that didn’t, we found some interesting differences.

When we looked at companies that did not display their pricing and asked prospects to request a quote, their response time on an average was 1 day, 5 hours, and 18 minutes. On the other hand, companies that displayed their pricing transparently had much faster response times at an average of 3 hours and 5 minutes. However, this group of companies also asked prospects to request a quote on their highest plans. So, we decided to look at companies that displayed pricing numbers for all their plans. Their average response times stood at 2 hours and 14 minutes.

Takeaways

Analyzing a thousand B2B websites and their response times was a massive undertaking. It took longer than I anticipated. However, analyzing a thousand B2B websites gave us a sample size that we could rely on. 

The buying experience still has a ton of room for improvement in the B2B world. Learning that only 113 of the 1000 companies had ways to actually schedule a demo on their demo request flow was heartbreaking. 

With an average waiting period of 1 day, 5 hours, and 17 minutes for the company to respond back to a prospect who is showing intent to buy the product, the prospect has enough time to browse around through competitors, engage in communities, and frame an opinion about the company even before the first call.

And that’s just based on the 365 companies that responded. Of the remaining 635 who didn’t even respond, interestingly enough 94.48% of them don’t even use a scheduler and instead rely on qualifying, routing, and trying to schedule the first call with the prospect, all manually. 

Similarly, we were surprised that only 61% of the companies followed up with us after we did not show up for the meeting. Theoretically, we think no shows weren’t marked accurately which led to follow up sequences not getting triggered if automated sequences were set up.

If buyers are raising their hands to speak to your sales team, B2B companies would get a lot more meetings and pipeline if they gave them the VIP treatment. Given that B2B companies invest a ton to capture the attention of the prospects, it only makes sense to roll out the red carpet to talk to the prospect at the point of highest intent and build on that momentum.

Overall, this is a step in the right direction for B2B companies even if only 11.3% optimize for the buyer experience and allow qualified hand raisers to talk to them immediately. Of the companies that had a pricing page, it was good to see that 57.57% made it easier and transparent for prospects to decide if it makes sense for them to continue the evaluation. And it surely was interesting to see the response times vary based on how the pricing page was structured. We hope to see this trend go up and to the right over time and make it easier for people to evaluate and buy products.

As a next step, we aim to uncover what happens during the meeting lifecycle — how people move through the pipeline, what’s the no-show ratio, what’s the demo conversion rates, and a whole lot more. Until then, stay tuned and hit us on socials if you have questions or found this report interesting.