COVID has taught us many things; chiefly that email isn’t going anywhere. In fact, studies show that email usage is up by 20% – and is often the primary communication tool used by sales teams, especially when working from home. That’s why we’re thrilled to have launched timetoreply Sales – a brand new tool that measures the most impactful ratio sales teams can track and improve on to close more leads: the timetoreply RatioTM. Here we explain more about the ratio, how it’s calculated, and why it matters so much.
In the competitive world of sales, responding quickly is key to success. It’s not rocket science if you think about it, really. Just put yourself in the customer’s shoes — would you be happy doing business with a company that takes ages to respond to your inquiries? Nope – you’d probably go elsewhere. In fact, a study by Harvard Business Review reveals the hard facts: Respond FIRST = Close more deals! Respond in 1 hour, and you’re 7 times more successful than if you respond in 2 hours, and 60 times more successful than if you respond in 24 hours! Crazily, the large majority of companies still take over 24 hours to respond. So, with this in mind, we wanted to provide sales managers with a way to track the impact of their team’s email response times on their contact rates. Hence the birth of the timetoreply RatioTM.
It might look like Algebra, but essentially your timetoreply RatioTM is simply a score above or below 1.
*First Contact Success Rate = Percentage of inbound leads replied to by an Agent that gets a customer response. **Agent First Reply Rate = Percentage of inbound leads that receive a first reply from the agent. ***Average First Time to Reply = Average time it takes an Agent to first respond to an inbound lead. If that has still left you feeling confused, let’s take a look at a real example.
We recommend keeping your ratio above 1, but of course, this might differ according to your industry.
When you sign up for timetoreply Sales and link your sales agents’ mailboxes, within minutes, you’ll be able to see your first report that looks something like the below. We’ve used dummy data here, but as you can see, they’d easily be able to improve their ratio by speeding up their reply time.
This dashboard view provides real-time analytics on both individual and team reply times and contact rates, all without interrupting workflow or distracting agents with further training. As a sales manager, you could use these reports to coach team members to improve where they need to and reward your superstars. In fact, one of the best features is the ability to set reply time goals at an individual and team level.
With the ratio report, you’ll also be able to use our extensive filters as seen below) to find email conversations that are still waiting for sent responses, so no leads will ever slip through the cracks. 
As with all of the timetoreply products, you can also schedule your reports to be delivered to you, your team, and anyone you choose at a frequency you prefer. To conclude, we’re want to say that we’re really happy to be able to help businesses and teams navigate and even thrive in the challenging environment that Covid-19 has created. Integrating and preparing data for analysis, providing products that measure exactly what you need to see and enabling fast implementation at scale usually takes a lot of time and effort to get right and can be very costly. With the introduction of timetoreply Sales, revenue teams can focus on what they do best, while managers can accurately track and optimize their teams’ productivity and workload, no wherever they’re located timetoreply Sales is available for sales teams using any email provider, from o365 to Gmail and everything in between.
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