Speed to lead in investor acquisition: the four numbers that decide a 506(c) raise

What speed to lead means for a sponsor

An accredited investor sees a LinkedIn ad for a multifamily fund. (An accredited investor meets the SEC's test to put money in deals like this.) It is 8:40 on a Tuesday evening. They read the landing page and send in the form. For the next few minutes, and maybe the next hour, their mind is on the sponsor. After that they close the tab. The evening moves on. Maybe they think about it again later. By then the sponsor is one of several things they looked at that week.

Speed to lead is how the sponsor answers that window. It means the time until a person, not a system, reaches them. Most sponsors would have to say, "the next business day, if someone remembers." Most can't say for sure. Nothing records it. The vendor who got the lead was done once the form came in. The sponsor's team is busy running the deal. The CRM sent an email. The investor never heard a human voice.

What the research on response time says

The study people cite most is called "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads." It ran in Harvard Business Review in March 2011. The authors were James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington. They sent a web lead to each of 2,241 U.S. companies. Then they timed the reply. The average reply took 42 hours. Only 37% replied within an hour. 16% took between one and 24 hours. 24% took more than 24 hours. 23% never replied at all. The authors also used data from a firm that sells sales software. Some firms tried to reach a lead within an hour. Their odds of qualifying it were nearly seven times those of firms that tried an hour later. To qualify a lead here means to reach the person who decides. It also means having a real talk. The fast firms' odds were more than sixty times those of firms that waited a day or more.

The study looked at business-to-business web leads in general. It did not look at real estate investors. It is also fifteen years old now. We cite it here for the shape of the curve. Every sponsor who has tracked their own response time has seen that same shape. A connected conversation is a live talk, not a voicemail. With each minute you wait, the odds of one drop fast. They keep dropping, and there is no flat spot to hide on.

The four numbers

Ascent manages every sponsor lane to four numbers. It reports them each week, from the first full week live. Each one is defined here just as it is reported. The definitions are the point.

1. Speed to first human touch

Start when the form comes in. Count the minutes until a live person first tries to reach out. This number is the median of those times. The median is the middle value. It does not count the autoresponder. It does not count the text that says you got the form. Those are first touch. First touch gets its own time in its own field. That way no one can mix the two up. Some CRMs have just one "first contact" field. They will report the autoresponder and call it speed.

2. Contact rate, by response bucket

Contact rate is the share of leads who had a connected conversation. That means a live voice on the line, not a voicemail. Sort the leads into buckets by how fast a human first tried them: under five minutes, five to sixty minutes, one to twenty-four hours, and later. The buckets are what turn speed into a budget case. Say the under-five-minute bucket has a contact rate that is a multiple of the next-day bucket's. Then the case for staffing the phone makes itself.

3. Set-to-held rate

Of the meetings that were booked, this is the share that took place. It is the number that shows the no-shows. Most vendors do not report it. That is because it is the one their work affects least. Three things move it: a confirmation the day before, a way to reschedule no-shows, and a nurture sequence between touches. A nurture sequence is a set of planned follow-up messages. None of these is a media buy.

4. Cost per appointment held

This is media spend divided by meetings held. It counts media only, unless the report says fully loaded. It is the main number because no one can game it. Booking a meeting nobody attends raises the count of meetings set. It does nothing to the count of meetings held.

How to track it

1. Reply at once, by text and email, from the sponsor's name. Seconds, not minutes. This is the automated layer. It buys time, but it does not replace the call. The lead agrees to texts on the form.
2. Send the lead to a person, with a clock running. That person is a live setter or a named member of the sponsor's team. A setter is the person who makes the first call and books the meeting. They should have the lead in front of them within a minute. They follow a set script.
3. Timestamp first touch and first human touch separately. Use two fields. The system writes them, not the person who made the call.
4. Log each try and each result. Was it connected, voicemail, no answer or a wrong number? Was it booked, rescheduled, held or a no-show? If it is not in the CRM, it did not happen.
5. Record each call. This is for the sponsor's counsel and for coaching. The script tells the lead the call is recorded. That is because investor leads come from all over the country. Several states require consent from everyone on the call.
6. Confirm before every meeting. Reschedule every no-show. You win the set-to-held rate in two places. One is the touch the day before. The other is the follow-up after a miss.
7. Report weekly, from the CRM and the ad account. Spend fifteen minutes on the four numbers. Do longer reviews at thirty, sixty and ninety days.

What the person on the phone may and may not say

Speed raises a compliance question. A slow process never has to answer it. If someone will reach an investor lead in minutes, what may they say? On a regulated raise, the answer has to be narrow and written down. Ascent's setters call as the sponsor. They call from a number registered to the sponsor. They use a script the sponsor's securities counsel has approved. Securities counsel is the sponsor's lawyer for the raise. They talk about logistics only. They confirm that the lead asked to hear from the sponsor. Then they get a meeting onto the sponsor's calendar. They never talk about returns, valuation, merits, timing or terms. They never ask about or judge whether the lead is accredited. A breach stops the work. The calls are live and human. There is no prerecorded audio, no artificial voice and no robo-dialing. The calls go only to inbound leads the sponsor brought in. Those are people who asked to hear from the sponsor. The sponsor runs the talk with the investor. The setter's job ends when the meeting is on the calendar and confirmed.

The setter's job is to get the meeting held. The sponsor's job is everything said in it.

A five-minute check of your last raise

Pull the leads from your last campaign into a spreadsheet. Then answer six questions. If any answer is "we don't know," that is the finding.

• What is the median time from form to first live call attempt?
• What share of leads ever talked with a live person?
• How many meetings were booked? How many were held?
• Who made the calls? From what number, and on what script?
• Are the calls recorded? Has counsel ever heard one?
• What did each held meeting cost in media?

A scoping call with Ascent works through those same questions. It puts them in dollars, using the sponsor's own numbers.