January 23, 2012 – Establishing a relationship with a prospect depends on a lot of things going right. One way of looking at it is to say that it is the craft of the salesman; whatever methods are employed by the salesperson are fine as long as they work. A salesperson, working on commission, will naturally hone their own best practices and deliver results. This is a self monitoring way of operating that makes sense. But what sales manager hasn’t wished that some of the skills belonging to their most effective sales person couldn’t rub off on their least effective. After all, it is towards this end that sales people undergo training.

But the establishment and adoption of best practices doesn’t have to be relegated to showing a new guy the ropes and then depending on him relying on himself beyond that. Best practices can be enforced across an entire sales organization by adopting a lead management system. Lead management differs from CRM in that it is laser focused on the task of turning prospects into customers. This being the case, it has different core functionality that is based less on tracking a customer relationship and more based on contacting leads converting a sale for the first time.

One of the real strengths of lead management software is that it enables sales managers to adapt their best practices in response to the needs of their sales staff and changes in market conditions. Best practices can take shape in a number of ways. Examples include; the number, timing, and content of automatically sent marketing emails; automatic contact schedules for leads, i.e., when uncontacted leads become ripe for another contact attempt; and content of sales scripts. Intelligent lead assignment strategies can also be tweaked to ensure that the right leads are being assigned to the right sales agents.

Leaving the establishment of customer relationships to the various strategies of individual sales reps isn’t necessary. Using lead management software, it is possible to enforce proven sales strategies that ensure that no leads are ignored, and every lead benefits from a sound contact strategy.

January 19, 2012 — Ah, the New Year.  January always offers a chance to move forward with a clean slate and an eye for the future.  In that spirit, here are some blog posts that offer a look forward to 2012 and some predictions and previews for what the year has to offer in private-sector higher education, mortgage and insurance.

#1 – Five reasons why for-profit schools are here to stay via @washingtonpost – In this column, Jay Mathew’s begins his look at the future of for-profit education with a clear and definite bias against the institutions, and initial reluctance to review the book titled “Change.edu: Rebooting for the New Talent Economy” written by Kaplan’s Chairman, Andrew S. Rosen. While the book didn’t shake Mathew’s feeling completely, he noted “Rosen convinced me that for-profit educational ventures are here to stay.” He went on to detail five reasons why. http://wapo.st/sSAwCQ

#2 – The Mortgage Battlefield of 2012 via @NatlMortgagePro – John Walsh offers up his predictions for the embattled mortgage industry from the frontlines of the struggle, including continued low rates and the reemergence of innovative products. http://dlvr.it/12P29W”

#3 – Experts 2012 Rate Outlook via @MortgageNewsMND – Rob Chrisman gives an overview of mortgage rates and industry predictions based on outlooks from industry experts Freddie, Fannie and others. Predictions anticipate a similar year to 2011, with HARP 2.0 and expected low interest rates throughout the year likely to have a positive impact. http://tinyurl.com/cwl8zfe

#4 – Three Ways Insurers Will Compete on Data in 2012 via @insurancetech –  highlights how analytics is likely to change insurers approach to underwriting, claims, and risk management in 2012 http://ow.ly/87ZXG

#5 – Health care reform you can expect in 2012 via @Bankrate – The piece looks at what patients, doctors, and insurers should expect from the pieces of the affordable care act going into law in 2012. http://bit.ly/zuUE7U

#6 – Insurance Veterans’ Forecasts for 2012 via @ijournal – The piece discusses the future of the industry in the coming year with nine different industry leaders to get a better grasp on what to expect. http://bit.ly/yjGcS0

#7 – 3 Key Challenges Facing Agents in 2012 via @ijournal – In this podcast with Bob Rusbuldt, CEO of Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America, Bob articulates what he believes are the three biggest challenges facing independent agents and brokers in 2012. http://bit.ly/z6gNSb

It’s a new year. If you’ve made any resolutions about growing your business, i.e., providing better service to your prospects, working more efficiently, or even just making more money there’s a quick way you can lock in all three. Lead Management software is a software solution which helps you get in contact with leads more quickly than by any other means.

Contacting leads quickly involves several steps being taken at a high speed:

1. Receive the lead from the lead source

2. Distribute the lead to a sales rep who is best suited to do business with them

3. Ensure that a Sales Rep acts contacts the lead immediately

Using Lead Management Software guarantees that these steps are taken as quickly as is possible. There is no better way to improve your prospect service than by using the right tools for the job. In this case, the right tool for the job is a lead management solution with an integrated lead dialer. Using a CRM for lead management will yield substandard results. Prospect Service is an art and science all its own. Being the first on the phone with a prospect is an important first step in changing the prospect into a customer. Speed to contact is important, but it’s not the total solution. Intelligent lead distribution that pairs sales rep to prospect based on expertise, licensure, or other criteria helps make sure meaningful connections are made.

If you have resolved to grow your business this year, Lead Management should be on your radar.

December 29, 2011 — Motivation and inspiration for selling can come from many places. To give you some fresh material for the “inspirational” section of your sales portal or even better, your Leads360 homepage message (hint, hint :-)), we conducted a poll of our sales team asking them for motivational sayings, quotes, movie lines, or whatever else they could think of that might inspire them. So from our sales team to yours – happy New Year and happy selling in 2012!!!

• “We’re adding a little something to this month’s sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.” -Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross
• “Chance favors the prepared mind.” – Louis Pasteur
• “Whether You Think You Can or Can’t, You’re Right”–Henry Ford
• “What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight – it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower
• “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” – Wayne Gretzky
• “Big team little me.” – author unknown
• “Forecheck, Backcheck, Paycheck!” – Gil Perreault
• “Patience; this is the greatest business asset. Wait for the right time to make your moves.” – J. Paul Getty
• “Only one thing counts in this world: get them to sign on the line which is dotted.” -Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross
• “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
• “Show me the money” – Jerry Maguire
• “Sell, sell, sell, my kids need money for college.” – David Villarama
• “The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.” – Steven Wright
• “Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.” – James Baldwin
• “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” – Albert Einstein
• “If it don’t make dollars, it don’t make sense” – Matt Wolcott @Leads360!
• “Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s about learning how to dance in the rain.” — Author Unknown
• “Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.”- William Jennings Bryan
• “The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward.” – Amelia Earhart

December 21, 2011 — Managing leads is a multistage process. While the concept of managing leads has been around for a while, there is still some disagreement about what lead management is. For example, you could read one article about lead management that is written entirely from a marketing perspective. From the marketing perspective, lead management looks a lot more like demand generation and marketing automation. Marketers who are interested in lead management will look for different features than a Sales Manger would look for.

So it is useful to draw a distinction between marketing lead management and sales lead management. Lead management from a marketing perspective may very well involve generating the leads. Or it may involve buying them. In any case, Marketing has its own area of responsibility around leads that has very little in common with how Sales is responsible for leads.

A Google search for “Lead Management” may return Marketing Automation and Demand Generation solutions that have features for Search Engine Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Email Marketing, Lead Scoring, more. These solutions are designed to help marketing teams generate and score leads. But also returned by a “Lead Management” Google search will be Sales Lead Management solutions. These solutions will have features like Lead Dialers, Lead Distribution, Lead Prioritization, and more. These features help sales teams contact, qualify, and close more leads.

When looking for business software, it is important to be crystal clear on which part of the process you seek to improve. Not every solution that calls itself Lead Management solves the same problem. If the problem you are trying to solve is that you do not have enough leads, and your marketing efforts are not panning out, then a marketing automation and demand generation solution may be right for you. But if your issue is not a lack of leads, but too few of them are being converted by your sales team, than a sales lead management solution like Leads360 is the solution for you.

December 16, 2011 – I was talking to one of our customers in the mortgage industry this week who reminded me just how important the first touch point with a customer is.

She highlighted the turmoil in the mortgage industry the past few years, essentially undergoing one of the largest regulatory over-hauls in 40 years since the labor and wage turmoil. Large lenders are now subject to laws, rules and regulations in all the states they do business. This of course creates complexity for the lender but also for the consumer, with increasing stacks of paperwork required for submitting a loan.

Amidst this heavily regulated climate, exemplary customer service is critical, the end goal being to create a lender-for-life relationship, and it all starts with that first touch point.

If a customer is on hold for 10 minutes or pressing buttons to try to get on the line with a loan officer, the experience could lead to an abandoned call. Or if the call connects a customer looking for a Veteran Loan with a loan officer lacking product expertise, again the customer may lose confidence in doing business with your organization.

In any consumer industry, achieving call-back times of less than one minute and connecting incoming calls to the right customer service rep quickly is easier said than done, and requires sophisticated business rules and automation to help take the guess work out of the equation.

Leads360 and Dial-IQ intelligently routes calls based on attributes assigned to the customer service agent and the incoming lead to make sure when a customer is contacted by a loan officer it’s a good match. Leads360 and Dial-IQ together offer an intelligent way to handle leads with sophisticated skill-based routing, lead prioritization, lead nurturing, scripting and more built right into the system. To learn more visit www.leads360.com.

December 8, 2011 — How do sales organizations get their message out to prospects? There are a lot of ways to get the message out these days. Clearly, the best way to reach a prospect is on the phone. That’s where the real work of understanding a prospects needs begins. The first phone call is where the real conversation starts and all of the other ways we communicate with prospects are really just ways to add value and build trust so the prospect will want to get on the phone. These other ways of communicating include Twitter, Facebook, email, SMS, direct mail, and more.

Sending emails has the benefit of keeping your name in front of prospects. But increasingly, emails that seek to do nothing more than maintain brand visibility are having the opposite effect in the prospects inbox. Indiscriminant email blasts that offer no valuable information are rightly viewed by prospects as spam. Marketing emails must be sent at strategic intervals and contain useful information.

The same is true of SMS messages. Since marketing SMS messages are less common than marketing emails they are more likely to be read.  But they are also more likely to be seen as an intrusion, so it is even more critical that they contain something useful. And at 160 characters, that can be a challenge.

But the real challenge is to coordinate all of your attempts to reach a prospect into a single strategy that is based on proven best practices. Emails and text messages need to be sent at strategic intervals. Phone contact attempts and voicemails need to be executed at a schedule in accordance with proven best practices. Using a lead management solution it is possible to weave all of your communication attempts into a single contact program. And the best part is that all emails and SMS messages are sent automatically. Prioritization of calls is also done automatically and can be configured to work in conjunction with the emails and SMS messages.

Leads are automatically prioritized to the top of the call list when they are due for a call. Lead logs give the sales reps a heads up that an email or SMS has been recently sent and user scripts can reference specific content in the emails. This cross-channel communication approach enables sales reps to convey to prospects that they are being contacted by someone who is paying attention to their individual case. Not being spammed and randomly receiving phone calls.

December 8, 2011 — Building trust as a go-to lender for all a customer’s finance needs is of utmost importance in the mortgage and banking industry. What is more, buyers today proactively educate themselves on what is available to them, so if a seller is not visible to them during these critical decision making moments they risk losing existing and new customers. One of the most effective ways our more successful clients build trust is by providing timely news and information on laws passed, current interest rates, or any bit of information to demonstrate they have their customer’s best interest in mind.

The expanded Home Affordable Refinance Program (HARP 2.0) is a powerful opportunity for lenders to demonstrate their value and build or earn customer trust. With a well managed marketing, nurture campaign, lenders can attract and retain customers.

Fool-Proof Your HARP 2.0 Sales Effort
Qualify and focus on the right opportunities: Start with the first critical phase of sales, quickly identify, qualify and focus on the right opportunities. This might include mining your Loan Origination Software for existing customers that may qualify for refinance under HARP 2.0, you’ll also want to mine your Leads360 database for aged leads that may not have qualified before but are eligible under HARP 2.0.

Stay top of mind: With a potential three plus months between December 1st and when lenders will begin processing HARP 2.0 applications, it is important to stay top-of-mind. Lenders will need to capture, track and nurture a large number of direct mail leads, web leads and sourced leads, with fool proof automation. With Leads360, administrators can include drip emails and even text messaging to go out based on the status of the lead so the lead is never left untouched for too long.

Prioritize and close loans: In addition to nurturing, sales-process workflow is critical to ensure priority leads are called first and new leads don’t go un-touched for too long. Leads360 enterprise edition has built in sales process workflow that can be customized to meet specific needs.

Today Leads360 published a toolkit based on best practices of some of our largest customers in the mortgage industry. You can download the toolkit here.

December 7, 2011 — Recent Noel Levitz research found a growing number of students are beginning their school search via their mobile device and express a desire to be reached about enrollment and admissions via text messaging. The willingness to engage via text message only increases once the student has applied and deposited, according to a 2011 Bob Johnson Consulting study which found the following among high interest students (1) inquiries opting for text updates grew 35.8% between 2010 and 2011 and (2) deposits opting for text updates grew 43.1% between 2010 and 2011

These findings point to the importance of effective text messaging in the recruitment and enrollment process. To learn more about how early adaptors are using text messaging, we posted this question to a few higher education message boards: “Do you use text messaging in the enrollment process, if so how, and are prospective students receptive?” The post generated a lively discussion, below are a few of the key takeaways.

It is clear SMS has potential to change the way post-secondary schools approach prospects. Leads360 automated text messaging is designed to send automated texts during the enrollment phase, nurturing prospects without any specific effort from the admission counselor or enrollment manager. To learn more click here.