Imagine you’re a Sales Development Rep (SDR) and you’ve just sent out a batch of cold emails to potential leads. Guess which of the four things below is most likely to follow:
- “Yes, please tell me more about the benefits your product offers!”
- “You’re going into my spam folder - don’t bother emailing again.”
- “Out of Office”
- Ignored
If you guessed 03 “Out of Office'', great job! It’s most likely a no-brainer for SDRs, who deal with these out of office responders every day. Let’s dig deep into how you can streamline your process with a tool like Exceed.ai.
Calculating How Much Time You Waste on Out of Office Responses
According to our data science team’s research on responses to email drip campaigns with an average duration of 8 weeks, sent to 11,345 prospects, with an average of 7.1 emails per campaign, we’ve found some interesting insights that may help you on your next campaign:
Throughout an 8 week period, we found that there is a high chance of people being out of the office for at least a few days. In the study mentioned above, we received one out of office response from just over 50% of the recipients.
What does this mean? Potential prospects who may have been interested now fall through the cracks. Reps forget to follow up with them because of the numerous other inquiries they must answer and prospects they are scheduled to talk to. This shows that it is imperative for sales reps to keep these missed prospects in the back of their minds, and remember to follow up with them when they are back in office. But is this truly realistic for busy sales reps? Is there an alternative strategy to ease the pressure from sales reps while still being able to capture these opportunities?
Here’s How You Should Respond To an OOO
What should SDRs do when they receive an OOO response? According to internal research, we’ve found that if SDRs follow-up after receiving an OOO response, the chance of lead qualification goes up by 50%.
The timing of when SDRs send these follow-ups is also very important. We’ve found that if reps engage with leads within two days after they’ve returned to office, they increase the odds of getting a reply by 20%. This is compared to engaging on the same day or a few days after they return.
This means the rep has to note who has responded with an OOO message, craft a follow-up email, and schedule the email to go out to the lead on the correct date. This isn’t very scalable, if we assume that each follow-up email process will take a few minutes each. This can quickly cut into your reps' work days, and take away precious time and energy that could have gone into more important work.
Saving Your Reps’ Time With Automation
So far we’ve covered the importance of following up on out of office messages, and the fact that manually crafting, scheduling, and sending these messages can be time-consuming and tedious.
Sales reps would provide more value for their company if they had more time to research prospects, identify the needs, interests, and objections of individual leads, and most importantly answer complex and in-depth questions.
This is where automation can help alleviate SDRs’ workloads. Emailbots and chatbots are fully equipped with the ability to craft customized messages, schedule emails and meetings, and follow-up with out-of-office responders without the manual work of sales reps. Automation can take away tedious and time consuming tasks from SDRs so that they could focus on attaining human insights that will allow them to connect better with their leads and potentially sell more products and services.
Learn more about how Exceed’s automation tools can help you save your sales reps time and capture missed business opportunities!
