What is speed to lead?

Speed to lead is your lead response time, and it reflects the total elapsed time between prospects expressing interest in your business and their receipt of the earliest response from one of your sales representatives. Your lead response time is made up of two general components:

Lead Response Time = Lead Processing Time + Representative Response Time

As a revenue team leader, you have two levers to push and pull upon to affect your speed to lead. The first lever impacts the operations and systems that process leads and assign them to representatives for follow up. The second lever involves enabling and managing the performance of representatives responsible for follow-up accountabilities with prospects.

Common challenges affecting speed to lead

When it comes to speed to lead, companies are often their own worst enemies as their lead response times lengthen primarily through self-inflicted wounds.

Challenges generally fall into the following four classifications:

Leads sit – stalled, unattended and unacted upon – before they’re ever routed to a sales rep for follow up
Leads lack sufficient contextual information attached to their records, resulting in costly delays to further research and triage for missing data
Leads are initially misrouted within the organization, requiring rerouting and subsequent time delays
After leads are correctly routed, sales reps – for reasons ranging from workload capacity to performance issues – delay follow-up activities