That vendor demo in Columbus made me rethink our whole sales pitch

Last month I sat through a 45 minute demo from a CRM company at a small trade show in Columbus, and they showed how they track follow-up timing down to the hour. Their stats said 78% of deals go cold if you wait more than 3 days after first contact. I went home and set up a simple reminder system with Google Sheets, no fancy software, and our close rate went up noticeably in 4 weeks. Has anyone else found that just changing response speed made a bigger difference than any new tool?

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the_miles21d ago

Wait, is there any chance that quick follow-ups just get you more meetings with people who were going to buy anyway? I ran the same thing last year, set up instant alerts, and yeah, my numbers went up too. But then I dug into the lost deals and found a bunch of them were people who ghosted after 2 days because they needed more time to think, and my constant pinging just annoyed them off. Some buyers actually need space, and chasing them too fast can look desperate or pushy. The 78% stat probably ignores that a chunk of those cold leads were never real prospects in the first place.