Coffee for Closers | Leads360 Sales & Marketing Blog 

If you are buying internet leads, you have probably experienced a feeling of not knowing which lead to call next. Where, with which lead, is your time best spent? This challenge becomes more and more pronounced the more leads you have assigned to you. You can end up spending a lot of time figuring out whom to sell to instead of actually selling. Maybe you have the top couple opportunities in your mind, and you are strategizing about how to close them. But beyond tending to those few deals, you’re not totally sure where your attention should go next.

There are many benefits of using Lead Management software for prioritizing leads. First, and most obvious, is that lead management software is a suite of tools designed to help you manage you sales pipeline. It equips you with tools to sort your leads and keep them organized in a way that suits you. But there is a whole other strength that some lead management software brings to the table that is sometimes overlooked. Leads360 is an intelligent lead management platform that analyses the data produced by all the leads under management.  Recently Leads360 has done studies that have shown that six call attempts is the optimal number, after which, returns drop off significantly. But these call attempts can’t happen all in the first day of a lead being assigned to an agent. Based on many records of successful qualifications and closes, Leads360 has created a baseline calling strategy that helps agents call leads based on a schedule that has shown results in the past. Leads360 research also shows that contacting a lead within one minute of its inquiry results in a 391% greater close rate.

Leads360 doesn’t just help you manage your leads from the standpoint of helping you schedule appointments and such; it helps you manage your leads by making the tools you use to manage your leads smarter.  One such smart tool that Leads360 has recently made available is Lead Prioritization. Leads360’s best practices research is published for the general edification of clients, but it would fail to deliver on its full value if that’s all that was done with it. Lead Prioritization takes all the information about how leads can most successfully be worked and turns it into a concrete tool. View your leads in Prioritized view and see them stacked in the order of exactly which lead most needs your attention at any given moment.  If a lead is being nurtured, hasn’t been contacted in three days, but needs that fifth contact attempt, it will appear on the list. If a brand new lead is assigned to you, it’s at the top of the list. The algorithm that roots through the leads to find those which need attention is continually being improved to ensure the best possible results. Lead Prioritization is just the latest way that smart companies are using smart tools to take the guesswork out of the sales process and close more deals.

A recent study from EduDirectResponse has shed some light on which people are interested in online education services and what they’re looking for.  With increased focus on marketing practices coming from the Government Accountability Office, enrollment teams need to learn how they can adapt.  In this effort, knowledge is power and understanding how to collect and organize demographic data about your inquiries is essential.  There are few if any better for this than an Enrollment Management System like Leads360.  By keeping better statistics on your enrollment process and then learning how to use them, an Enrollment Management System can help your institution become more metrics drive and see immediate results in your ability to close inquiries.

The EduDirectResponse study looked at 1000 inquiries who responded to a simple, straight forward ad reading “Take Online Classes Now” or “get an online degree,”  with no deception or offers for incentives.  There were some interesting results.  The data is broken down by several categories, asking the respondents about their gender, region, education level, subject they’re interested in studying, what additional information they would want, and how often students would be interested in receiving a news letter.  What’s more, the study also took note of how many inquiries provided invalid information and which information it was.  The results provided some clear results that were notable: over 60% of inquiries were female, 90% of potential students were interested in information about financial aid, 33.5% were interested in entering the field of Health and Human Services, 75% of students were interested in receiving a regular newsletter, and 69% of those people giving invalid information supplied a fake phone number.

The real question is: what does all this mean?  It’s clear that any of this information could be essential to closing in attracting a prospective student to your institution, but how can an enrollment team take data like this and use it to tailor their enrollment process to get the most students to select their service?  For an enrollment manager simply trying to wing it, attempts at changing their enrollment culture can be frustrating and chaotic.  However, with the help of an Enrollment Management System, enrollment teams can not only track data like this from their own, but they can immediately turn around and implement any changes that will help them become more data driven in their enrollment process.  Enrollment Management Systems like Leads360 are designed to help you automate your enrollment process so that demographic data is not only recorded but easily applied to future lead routing so that the appropriate shifts in your enrollment  process can be implemented at the speed of business.

With marketing practices utilized by for-profit education companies coming under scrutiny, the wisest course of action is to find ways to enroll inquiries by working hard and working smart.  In this pursuit, Enrollment Management is an invaluable tool in collecting and interpreting demographic data about your inquiries and then implementing the results of your analysis.

Recently, a case study on Leads360 was featured by Nucleus Research-see below for some interesting excerpts.

“Companies spending money to buy leads should have processes and tools
in place to ensure their money is well spent. Leads360 automates much of
the lead capture and management process and provides tools for
managers to track progress, so companies can maximize returns from
their lead investment.”

“Leads360 has enabled the insurance agent to double the average number of new
insurance applications it receives each month while eliminating approximately
$1400 a month in other marketing costs.”

Click here to download the full study.

Leads360 today announced that it has been named one of the 2010 Best Places to Work in Los Angeles by the Los Angeles Business Journal.  This honor follows after a string of recent awards in the past year, including the recent naming of Leads360 as a Top 100 North American company by Red Herring.

“When we founded Leads360, our goal was to not only provide companies with the industry’s best online tool for lead management, but also to foster a vibrant, constructive and creatively-friendly environment in which to work,” said Jeff Solomon, one of the founders of Leads360 and senior vice president of product and marketing.  “Our employees believe in what they’re doing, which is to make a positive impact on our clients through the use of our software and superb customer service.  We couldn’t be more pleased to be honored as one of the best places to work in Los Angeles.”

Congrats Leads360!