59% of Businesses Fail the Test!

You might have seen all the media coverage of our recent survey all about the failure of sales process inside Australian businesses.
 
We are talking very basic stuff.
 
It is a fact that 59% of Australian businesses do not follow up web-generated sales enquiries within 7 days. Only 6% will pick up the phone to do so. And almost half of the auto-response emails promising follow up are never acted upon.
 
It speaks to a very basic issue within many businesses… do they have a sales team managed by a sales process… or do they have a whole bunch of order takers sitting back and waiting for the phone to ring?
 
Have a look at our white paper

Ever see a cow jump over the moon?

Did you know that only 6% of Australian companies (that is six percent – it is not a typo) pick up the phone and respond to a web generated sales enquiry with a phone call?

 

Did you know that those 6% take, on average, two days, 17 hours and 59 minutes to do so?

 

That means it takes, on average, 3959 minutes for an Australian business to follow up a web enquiry by phone (if they bother at all). It took Apollo 11 just 4526 minutes to fly to the moon.

Email / Web Response Rates

In 2007 I started to research various suppliers in relation to building a new shed in the back yard.

As seemed only natural, I used the internet.

Looking back, I probably never expected a shed retailer to respond to my email. After all, what would blokes who build sheds be doing using the internet?

But I did expect Readymix, Australia’s market leading supplier of concrete, to respond; especially given the exacting detail required of me when filling out their ‘Request Quotation’ contact form on the company’s web site.

Eight months later I am still waiting for a response to my form.

The more I thought about it the more I realised my attitude to the shed retailers was also troubling.

I found the retailers I approached by searching on Google. I am an Adwords junkie… I always give preference to advertised links as I figure they are the ones most keen to win my business.

Therefore, I was selecting a subset of shed retailers that were web savvy enough to use Google Adwords.

But nonetheless I still never really expected a response to my emails.

In fact, thinking deeply about it I never really expect a response from emails that I send to the generic addresses published on web sites.

How often do you get responses (other than automated ‘we will be in touch soon’ emails) when you send an email or fill out a web form?

Why else would we feel frustrated when a company web site includes an email address or web form on the Contact Us page – but no phone number?

Surely, the reason I feel compelled to reach for the phone is that I instinctively know my chances of actually communicating with a prospective supplier are significantly enhanced compared with the internet.

Or is it that I have just been unlucky and, as a result, am unnecessarily jaundiced in my lack of faith in emails and web forms.

In this paper we will present conclusive statistical evidence that I am not Robinson Crusoe… It is in fact the case that Australian businesses are very poor at responding to and picking up the business knocking at their front door.