I saw this on the Harvard Business Review today and thought I’d share it with you. It makes me smile because far too often folks don’t realize the importance of quick follow-up! 🙂
Online leads grow cold quickly: Companies that try to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving queries are nearly 7 times as likely to have meaningful conversations with key decision makers as firms that try to contact prospects even an hour later. Yet only 37% of companies respond to queries within an hour, according to a study of 2,241 U.S. firms led by James B. Oldroyd of Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea.
http://hbr.org/2011/03/the-short-life-of-online-sales-leads/ar/1#