Statistic of the Day #52

According to a study released by InsideSales.com, if you follow up with web leads within 5 minutes you’re nine times more likely to convert them into a sale, making the Lead Response Time one of the greatest metrics that an organization can have. 

If your organization uses the Enterprise Edition of Salesforce.com, there are ways to go about this using Workflows and the Last Activity field. However, if you’re an organization using Professional or Group Edition, your options become very limited (recently non-existent). 

Thankfully, with a bit of ingenuity, a simple writeup, and some free tools (courtesy of Passage Technology, an ISV partner at Salesforce.com), your PE/GE organization can now also track this essential metric in nothing more than a handful of steps.

Preparing for the Rollup Setup   

Let’s start by creating a custom Date/Time field under Lead Object. We’ll call it the First Response Time (First_Response_Time__c). This field will house the Date/Time for the first activity that is related to that Lead. 

We highly recommend keeping this field out of the user’s Page Layout, or at the very least identified as a Read-Only field. This will prevent any tampering of the data, maintaining the integrity of your reports.

Downloading Rollup Helper

The app can be found in the AppExchange. Its most basic version is free of charge for all users. It allows you to run up to three active rollups at any time. More robust versions are also available in paid editions, which is very much worth it if your organization deems necessary.

Setting up the Rollup Helper

Once installed, set up the Rollup to source the Created Date (CreatedDate) field the Task Object. This field will be mapped to the First Response Time field we have created. When selecting the Created Date, it is important to select that you are looking for the Minimum value to be rolled up. Selecting the Average or Maximum will give you inaccurate results.

We recommend also setting up a scheduled run of the Rollup. How frequent is up to you, however most companies adopting this would like to pull an instant report to see what leads are new in the CRM and have yet to be contacted. Fifteen (15) minutes is usually a good starting point. Some of our customers go as low as three minutes per scheduled run. 

Note that the free edition of the Rollup Helper batches 500 records at a time. Therefore if you have 1500 records with a batch running every 15 minutes, it’ll take 45 minutes before they are all updated.

Time to Start Calculating the Lead Response Time

Back in the Lead object, you now have to create the calculations to get to the Lead Response Time. You will need to create a formula field, which we will call Lead Response Time (Lead_Response_Time__c). The formula will be the following (including the parenthesis):

( First_Response_time__c – CreatedDate ) * 1440

In case you don’t see the pattern, you multiply the result by 1440 because there are 1440 minutes in a day. This will ensure that your Lead Response Time field returns the result in the format of minutes instead of days.

Final Touches

You’re not done yet! Make sure to stop by again at the AppExchange and give Passage Technology a stellar review for the service they are providing us. You can go directly there by clicking here

You are now good to go. We recommend placing the field somewhere highly visible. We usually insert the field in a section at the very top (above the Lead Information section)

Taking it One Step Further

Your organization can now create Reports and Dashboards to calculate average Lead Response Times! That gives you a live feed of such data. However, what if you would like to track the average Lead Response time on a month-by-month basis? This would allow your organization to track the improvement of the Lead Response Time over the months, identifying any potential need to streamline this process.

There’s a solution for that as well with Analytic Snapshots and a new feature called Historical Trending. Both features are very similar, so you could technically use one or the other. Historical Trending is easier to set up, but either one would do the job just fine. 

Documentation on setting up both is readily available online. If you have any questions, feel free to ask us through our social media @AskCRMexperts or by going to our Facebook or LinkedIn pages online.