XANT Releases New Research Study on Response Practices

Provo, UT—June 14, 2011—XANT, the leading provider of sales intelligence and productivity solutions for inside sales professionals, released today the results of its research study conducted at the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals (AA-ISP) Leadership Summit in March 2011—and the numbers were surprising. Out of 159 companies audited for lead response practices, 55.3% did not respond at all to two separate sales inquiries generated by XANT researchers on the organizations’ respective Web sites. XANT Senior Marketing Director Thomas Oldroyd stated, “I’m surprised, very surprised frankly, that this is the number we saw. The AA-ISP as a professional organization consistently draws some of the best minds in sales, but based on our findings, there’s a lot of companies that need to get back to the basics: pick up the phone and call an inquiry when it comes in.” The research analyzed the practices between audited companies, comparing email responses versus phone responses, the timing of each response in relation to when the inquiry was submitted, and the total number of response attempts made. This study comes on the heels of research recently published by the Harvard Business Review, which identified the same problem: “Companies are making big investments in order to obtain customer queries from the Internet, and they should be responding at Internet speed. Why aren’t they?” Oldroyd repeated the same question: Why aren’t they? “We’ve heard over the last 18 to 24 months just how much sales and marketing need to ‘align.’ Yet here’s an example of marketing making it incredibly easy for sales—an inbound lead, generated directly from the company Web site—and someone, the sales manager, marketing manager, whoever, is dropping the ball by not having a process in place to capture and respond.” To get a copy of the study, click the link on the right to be taken to the XANT Research page, and submit the request form.

About XANT

XANT offers hosted dialer software and lead management technology for Inside Sales departments in B2B companies, as well as for sales professionals in insurance, mortgage, debt consolidation, marketing, online education, non–profits, and more. XANT is currently on the salesforce.com AppExchange with the PowerDialer for Salesforce.

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