Timing has always been a critical factor in sales. However, in today’s fast-paced environment, it’s not just important, it’s urgent. The right timing can be the difference between closing a deal and losing a sale. With customers expecting relevant, timely communications, it’s crucial to be on point with your timing to deliver the perfect message at the perfect time.
If perfect timing seems like a distant goal or the mythical pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, it’s time to realize that it’s within your reach. By honing your timing skills, you can hit the nail on the head and land the sale.
Intrigued? Read on to find out more.
The Importance of Timing in Sales
The timing of sales isn’t growing in importance; it’s apparent that it has always been important, and many studies have shown this to be true. Harvard Business Review found that firms that respond to leads within an hour are seven times more likely to qualify the lead than those who wait longer than the first hour.
A study by InsideSales reinforced this, finding that contacting a lead within 5 minutes increases conversion rates 100 times compared to waiting 30 minutes.
These findings scream that you shouldn’t sit on your leads. You need to strike while the iron is hot, capitalise on that initial engagement, and grab the opportunity with both hands.
Understanding Buyer Readiness
Timing is only part of the issue here. You can have the perfect timing, but if the buyer isn’t ready, it won’t matter if you wait 5 minutes or 500 minutes; they still won’t convert.
Understanding buyer readiness is a major issue for sales teams, as buyer intent needs to align with the right timing.
Numerous issues, from company changes to market conditions, budget cycles, and other priorities, can impact buyer readiness. As such, you need to determine if any of these are applicable to move forward.
Now that we understand more about the importance of timing and buyer readiness, let’s take a look at timing strategies that you should consider when making the sale.
Signal-Based Selling In Timing
This leads us nicely into signal-based selling.
Signal-based selling is an approach being adopted by sales teams, which involves them using real-time data to identify the right moment to make the call and seal the deal.
Signals can include, but are not limited to
- Online activity such as visiting pricing pages or downloading white papers
- Social media updates relevant to what the company does and what changes or needs they have that you can provide.
- Company events like hiring sprees, leadership changes, etc.
Companies that can track and analyse these signals can execute more effective timings when it comes to sales pitches, as opposed to guesswork and gut feelings. While gut feelings should always factor in, they should not direct your activity solely; instead, they should be used with signal-based selling for greater impact.
Structured Sales Cadence
This involves having an ordered sequence of touchpoints that you can use to maintain consistent lines of communication. For example, social media contact, emails, calls, etc. This enables you to maintain constant communication while respecting timing. To put this into practice, a sales cadence might look like this: making initial outreach while scheduling out follow-up emails before increasing urgency, ie, in the case of an abandoned cart, when time is running out to complete the sale.
Event-Based Triggers
Event-based triggers include company conferences, budget cycles, or product launches. Contacting a prospect prior to these events or decisions increases the likelihood of more favorable engagement and conversion.
Personalisation and Relevance
Every marketer should be familiar with personalization by now. It’s not just a buzzword but an expectation of consumers and businesses alike. Not only does your communication need to be timely, but it also needs to be highly relevant and personal to the individual you are contacting. It might target something a person has been looking at and shown an interest in, or be a solution that solves a problem they’re having. This enables you to show the prospect you are respectful of their time and have an understanding of their needs.
Rapid Response to Inbound Interest
It should go without saying that inbound interest should take precedence over cold calling or other leads. This is because the customer has initiated the conversation and clearly wants to engage more with you, and it’s imperative you react to this immediately.
If someone calls or fills out a contact form, it should be marked as urgent and followed up with as soon as possible, ideally within the time frame as mentioned above (i.e., within 5 minutes or no longer than an hour). These days, people want answers and information now, and they don’t want to have to wait. This underscores the importance of following up and delivering a rapid response to those who have contacted you so you can follow things through to their natural endpoint.
Behavioral Retargeting
Behavioural retargeting is the process of retargeting a lead because they have shown prior interest in something. It might be a query they made a while back but didn’t follow through on, or it can be a previous abandoned cart or lingering on a product page, for example. A well-timed ad or follow-up email can be all you need in some cases to reopen lines of communication, and done properly, the timing of this can be all that is needed to complete the sale.
Trial or Demo Expiry Timers
Another useful timing trigger is creating urgency for a limited-time demo of the free trial of the software you offer. If you’re a SaaS company, for example, you trigger an urgency for people to take out the demo or trial and then use this for follow-up conversations to help you maximise sales and selling impacts.
As you can see, timing is everything when it comes to following through on leads. The better your timing, the more likely you are to have informed sales and conversion, and that can only be a good thing.