Prospect inquiries for a B2B product can arrive in the form of a phone call, a voicemail, an email, a chat conversation, a form fill, or a new record in a CRM system. Regardless of how they arrive, they should be treated as urgent requests that require a rapid, effective response.
Prospect Inquiries Require A Rapid Effective Response
“Form fills are urgent voice mails: respond before the requester finds another solution or moves on to their next challenge.”
Sean Murphy in “Tips for Low Cost Marketing of Your Services“
We work with early-stage firms, typically a team of two to five engineers or scientists who are bootstrapping. Often, one or more of the founders is in charge of sales–-they don’t have a dedicated salesperson—-and when they get the first contact from a new prospect, that prospect has already gathered a lot of information. They learn to treat e-mails and web form inquiries like urgent calls because the prospect can be pretty far along in their decision-making process.
What Makes a Rapid Effective Response to Prospect Inquiries Hard
An early-stage firm may only see a handful of inquiries a week or many more inquiries, but only a handful that require more than a default response. The same people who know enough to answer difficult questions are busy working on the product. They have to prioritize customer problems and prospect inquiries above new features. These interruptions will slow development, but you will lose many opportunities if you respond too slowly.
What Makes Rapid Effective Response Expensive For Your Engineers
Interrupts can cost engineers much more than the time spent processing them because the engineers have to document what was learned and then recover their context for the task they were working on beforehand.
Design, development, and debugging work benefit from long periods of focused attention. Engineers benefit from spending time to build a coherent mental model of the design objectives and options, or failures detected and the potential root causes and related remedies. It’s true that “lateral drift” or a certain amount of context switch can be of benefit if they have been working on a problem for a while and need a new perspective. But it’s more common that even a five or ten-minute interruption can slow progress for half an hour to an hour due to the “now, where was I?” effect. If the engineer must get up to speed on the technical details of a prospect or customer situation over the course of a 30 to 60-minute call, it may take an hour or two after the call to properly document what was learned and then regain the original working context.
So the business is faced with the need to respond while the prospect still has context, requiring a rapid response from engineering. But this may slow:
- development work to meet customer commitments,
- new features that may further differentiate existing products,
- and new products that may open new markets.
A further complication for engineers used to working with customers is that negotiating with prospects is more complicated than negotiating with existing customers for several reasons:
- Prospects have much less invested in the relationship and may go elsewhere for a solution in much less time than a current customer would.
- The seller’s team has much less insight into the prospect’s real needs and their decision making process because of this lack of shared history.
- While a customer that has experienced strong support for the last six months to a year is likely to be tolerant of small delays and mistakes, the prospect cannot tell if this is the seller’s standard operating procedure or rare mistakes or misjudgements. There are higher stakes for small mistakes with a prospect.
The Seller Must Balance Three Primary Objectives
- Close new deals or at least advance deals to increase revenue.
- Meet commitments to customers to minimize churn, increase quality and quantity of referrals, and increase likelihood of expansion in existing accounts.
- Extend the current product to provide further differentiation or develop new products that increase differentiation or open new markets.
With Three Constraints
- Responding while the prospect is still in the mindset to discuss needs or product questions. Practically this means responding in less than an hour, and ideally in a few minutes so that the conversation takes place while the prospect will easily and quickly recall the context of their inquiry. Objective is to treat an inquiry as an urgent phone call.
- Providing an effective response, not just a rapid one. Automated systems that generate a default email acknowledging the request or a chatbot that asks for an email address after the question has been asked don’t count.
- Minimizing interruptions to senior technical contributors. They who will be needed for some conversations but not for basic ones. Each interruption can break their train of thought and cause a disruption that is effectively 30 to 60 minutes, not the two minutes it took to deal with a trivial question.
The problem is that there are a number of trade-offs that early stage startups need to manage to be both productive and effective. They need a process that meets the following requirements:
- Provides a rapid response that can at least involve more senior personnel on short notice
- Recognize that the demands of closing new business may, from time to time, slow development work. Schedules and commitments to customers should reflect a certain amount of “lost time” or “friction.”
- Not every request is a serious opportunity but a certain amount of technical analysis will need to be done to determine if the seller can extend the product to meet the prospect’s real needs or should encourage the prospect to investigate other opportunities.
Real Trade-offs That Make A Rapid Effective Response More Challenging
- Balancing the need for urgent response with a low tolerance for interruption in engineering and scientific work.
- Rapid response can mean self-service or immediately starting a conversation with a person depending upon context.
- Enabling effective self-service requires high quality content that is well organized and frequently updated to incorporate both new features an new information from customer use.
- Rapid acknowledgement of a prospect inquiry is effective for basic questions but more complex issues benefit from a person crafting a thoughtful response.
- Automating response can be very helpful or fall into the “Uncanny Valley.”
- Engineers tend to gravitate to automating responses even when a direct conversation would be more effective.
- Techniques that offer rapid effective response may not scale because they require expert support, and experts are hard to grow fast.
- You can measure effectiveness as closing an initial or getting paid but the customer ultimately assess it by when they see value. It’s a critical to understand when the customer experiences a value realization event.
- The infrastructure that supports rapid effective response can require very different engineering skills from those needed to develop than new product features.
- New prospects blur with customers when it comes to renewals, upselling, expanding internal adoption, etc..
The need to respond quickly is both especially challenging and necessary for teams who have developed a complex product for a demanding market and are pricing it above a credit card transaction level: e.g., $1,000 monthly subscription or $10,000 annual license for software. They are often selling to enterprise prospects who want to read and gather a lot of detail on the product and how it can be used. When these prospects want to speak to someone, they are ready to buy–or at least ready to start an evaluation, trial, or proof of concept test. Enterprise buyers will normally perform a detailed needs analysis and solution configuration in conversation with the seller. When a prospect wants help understanding what the product can do, it’s crucial that they speak to someone with the right knowledge. These conversations are typically quite technical, or least the product functionality and needs discussions are, and generic questions from the vendor’s support or sales person are at best waste a prospect’s time without adding insight at and worst lose them as prospects.
Related Blog Posts
- Wolfgang Huber Describes Bootstrapping Matrix Requirements
- Why is an Enterprise Sale So Complex?
- Peter Cohan: Differentiating Your Offers Starts With The First Contact
- John Gardner: Leaders Detect and Act on the Weak Signals of the Future
- The Early Bird Already Has The Worm
- Priorities Trump Productivity
- How To Ask An Expert For Help
Photo Credit: Dark Day “Fire Ball”