Coffee for Closers | Leads360 Sales & Marketing Blog 

When your want to figure out the best way to close the most leads, it is important to keep track of what works. But if you haven’t done so, don’t despair. That type of knowledge is available. There are lead management solutions that have been built on best practices to help automate as much of the repetitive work as possible. When work is being automated, it’s important that the rules governing the automation were intelligently conceived. In light of this, it is important to select a lead management solution that has a strong emphasis on being a business partner, and not merely a software vendor. Using a lead management solution that conceives of its role as that of a partner has many benefits, particularly is the partnership comes in the shape of software as a service. First of all, there is an emphasis on service that won’t exist from a traditional software vendor. In the SaaS model, client success is as much in the interest of the vendor as it is in that of the client. Helping clients to get the maximum benefit from lead management SaaS is an ongoing process that involves close consulting with the client to understand their business needs and configure the software to work for them.

But this day to day client interface is only one side of the service that clients should expect when using SaaS LMS. Taking a step back and looking at it from a little further away, what is provided to SaaS clients as part of the partnership is of even greater value. Having so many clients and so many leads under active management, an LMS has a lot of strategy and intelligence built right into its features. When an LMS company analyzes what works for clients they can bake the results right into the software. Take for instance a lead prioritization feature. This is one of the best examples of SaaS getting smarter as it’s being used. Lead Prioritization is based on well researched best practices that dictate, among other things, that 1) speed to contact is the single most important factor in lead close rates and that 2) six calls attempts is the optimal number before contact rates drop to the point beyond which the results don’t justify the effort. These facts were learned by analyzing how leads closed, and how they didn’t. And the sample size is huge. Leveraging this type of intelligence with a lead dialer enables users to contact the right lead much more quickly than any competitor can.

A partnership with an SaaS LMS is hugely beneficial for a company looking to benefit from strategies gleaned from in depth analysis of a vast number of leads. If you’re not sure what works best, it’s not something you need to worry about. You have a partner waiting for you in Lead Management Software as a Service that will show you the best practices that have been proven to work over and over again. You still have your secret ingredient, the thing that differentiates you from your competitors. LMS doesn’t seek to replace that, it just bolsters your approach to selling with a set of tools and strategies that work extraordinarily well.

It seems so simple. Just keep the leads coming in, and keep the reps on the phone and deals will come down the pipeline. It’s a simple plan, but it’s a plan that doesn’t scale well. Until now.

Take for example a situation where there is only one sales rep who has a small number of leads. He or she may be able to keep tabs on where the ripest opportunities are and where each deal is in the pipeline. If this sales rep is doing his job well, he’s closing deals, so he’s probably being given more leads. The sales reps success can scale up only a finite amount. If he’s able to keep track of 10 leads, and he’s earning, then maybe you give him 20, and he continues to deliver. It may be tempting to give him thirty, but he just can’t keep up with that many without some tools designed specifically to help him scale his sales efforts. Lead Management Software is the type of tool that enables him to work more efficiently. Using lead management software, it’s become easier to stay organized, easier to know which lead to call when, easier to be the first person on the phone with a lead. Lead Management Software stretches an individual’s time and attention to help him get results beyond what he could get keeping track of leads by ordinary means.

With lead management software, sales reps can manage far more leads than they could using email, pen and paper, etc. Now, instead of being able to keep 20 leads straight, they are able to keep up on 500 leads. The reps effectiveness will go through the roof. And if they can handle 500 leads, it won’t be long before they’ll be asked to handle 1000. And then they’ll be back with same problem. Too much time will be spent hunting through all the leads that a rep owns to find the one that needs attention most. This is where it becomes important to make sure that your lead management system is intelligent and can identify opportunities. Some lead management systems are able to bring the leads most deserving of attention to the top of the pile, effectively prioritizing leads in real time.

Putting the right leads in front of reps at the right time is one way of keeping reps focused on the leads most likely to generate revenue. But that is really only part of the a truly intelligent lead management solution. It is also  necessary to get leads on the phone as soon as possible to catch them while their interest in your offering is highest. An intelligent lead management system also has dialer capabilities that can leverage the competitive nature of a sales team to ensure that leads are contacted as quickly as possible.

Inertia can be a powerful force.  Often times in business, the decision not to act and to stick with the same practices is the easiest one to make.  However, the ease of sticking with the same shouldn’t allow sales managers to accept the status quo.  Maximizing ROI and finding best practices are not the sort of goals that a sales team can expect to reach without stepping out and aggressively pursuing them.   In order to find the most efficient way to pursue leads and react to customer service, companies need to constantly question their practices, always seek out better methods, and embrace the use to software systems and emerging technology that help identify their practices.

The nature of business is changing rapidly and anyone standing still can expect to be left behind.  This is particularly true for customer relations and sales.  Many sales managers aren’t comfortable with the way the relationship with their customers has evolved in the last ten years.  More than ever, customers have more control over the nature of the relationship, and many sales managers haven’t been able to adjust to what it means.  However, inaction is an easy way to let your competitors streak past you, and getting the most out of your marketing spend involves action.  In many cases, the mistake is to ignore emerging technologies and not turning towards the new systems and software that can streamline the way you deal with customers.  Stodgy sales managers will insist on seeing immediate results in ROI and won’t venture into a new technology like Social CRM or a Lead Management System until the evidence is overwhelming.    Worse, any failure involving these new technologies, no matter how modest, will fuel the desire to stay away from any new methods that could be employed in pursuit of best practices.  What’s missing from these arguments is the realization that best practices are discovered not by waiting until there’s a sure thing, but exploring and testing in order to constantly stay ahead of the curve.  Any manager willing to wait until a technology is so successful that it’s a no brainer can probably count on being one of the last in their industry to adopt it.  LMS and CRM are both excellent systems that can not only automate the sales process and increase efficiency but are designed to record all relevant data and metrics in order to constantly seek out more ways to improve.

Another way that conservative managers can keep themselves from finding best practices is through the idea that it’s best to wait until the appropriate technology develops.  Once again, this is a recipe for failure that will allow your competition to pass you by with ease.  With the rate at which customer relations are evolving, waiting on taking action can be fatal.  In order to capitalize on a new trend or get a leg up on the competition, it’s essential that your company be adopting best practices before it’s clear to everyone that that’s what they are.  The most successful managers, in the end, are the ones who are opportunistic and aggressive enough to stay ahead of the trends and be the one developing new practices rather than simply copying their competitors.

On the whole, it’s a simple fact that best practices and maximum ROI are the sorts of things that can’t be waited on.  Best practices are not going to come to you, it’s up to the wise manager to seek them out and seize them when the opportunity arises.

It’s often said that failures are opportunities to learn.

The reason failure can be so instructive is because when all the pieces fall, and you’re left to sweep up the carnage of whatever enterprise that you tried so diligently to make succeed, you might only then, give your full attention to questions like: “What went wrong?” “What could have been done differently?” and “How can I do better next time?” Failure, it would seem, sharpens and focuses the mind around important questions of how and why we do what we do.

So, let’s examine the flipside of that phenomenon: Success. What if we’re all too busy high fiving each other after we close a deal that we don’t take time to ask the question; “What went right?” It’s a challenge for even the most dedicated sales rep to look back on successes to make an inventory of what was done right, and what could have been done better. It’s far too easy to store ones successes in the “I am great at my job” file and leave it at that. But choosing not to extract information from ones successes is nearly as negligent as not learning from ones failures.

What type of information, specifically, can be gleaned from ones successes? Most readily, there is a lot of quantifiable data that can be observed around your sales behaviors. What if you could look back at all of your past successes and get answers to questions like these “How quickly did I contact this person?” “How many times did I try to reach them and at what intervals?” “What time of day, and day of the week did I try to reach them?” and “How many emails did I send, and at what intervals?”

If you could observe trends in the data revealed by these questions you could maximize your advantage by adopting these best practices that led to successful sales. You could maximize your advantage if you knew for instance, that calling a lead as quickly as possible was the best way to ensure that you made the sale ahead of your competitors; and further if you knew that six call attempts was the optimal number, after which the chance of connecting with a lead diminishes to the point that it no longer justifies the effort. If you had access to all of this information, you could work in a way that would lead to even more success. And you could use tools that help you leverage the advantage that the analysis of all these successes had given you.

The good news is that you don’t have to go through all your past successes and failures to find a set of best practices. Lead management software is designed around insights garnered from the analysis of more than 20 million leads. It is built to help you be the first to contact a lead and to stay in contact until the lead closes. If you were too busy high-fiving to learn from your successes, don’t despair. Help is on the way. Lead management software has learned from millions of successes and built a solution around the findings.

Here’s a good article that delves into the problem of C-level executive fear when it comes to adopting CRM solutions. Many of the points in the article are applicable to lead management software, as well. The problem boils down to ROI paralysis, which can be understood as the unwillingness to invest in new projects that have fuzzy ROI projections. The article points out that as executives wait for their competitors to prove that CRM adoption has a measurably good effect on revenue, what they are in effect doing is giving their competition a head start in terms of developing best practices for success with these enterprise software solutions. If the C-level executives knew what their people on the front line already knew, is that these tools work. They are easy to adopt, and they yield results.

Here’s an example. A hypothetical case study of the types of best practices your competitors might be developing by using a lead management solution.

Speed to Contact

Using lead management software, your competitors could be structuring their workflow around doing everything within their power to be the first sales rep on the phone with a lead. By virtue of the LMS’s integrations with online lead providers, it is possible for Companies using this technology to have leads posted to their system within seconds of the lead filling out an online form. A good LMS also has robust distribution functionality that can route leads intelligently to the right rep based on configurable rules. The size of the opportunity, Any applicable licensure issues, geographical criteria, any of these factors can be used to customize your flow of leads to the reps most equipped to handle them. Finally, a lead management platform that has a built-in lead dialer can connect lead to rep by phone automatically faster than any other available method.

Standardized Sales Process

Using lead management software, your competitors are benefiting from standardized workflow that makes sure every lead is followed up on according to established best practices. Lead follow-up has been baked into LMS to ensure that each lead receives contact attempts in accordance with an optimized strategic pattern that has been proven to yield results.

Campaign Management

Using lead management software, your competitors can be using built in analytics to constantly monitor lead generation campaign ROI. Which of your lead sources is performing? At what rate to leads from your website convert? How about online leads from different vendors? It is possible to access this information in real time to see where your marketing spend is performing best.

Lead management software is a suite of tools that makes it easy to standardize your workflow, measure the results, and make adjustments as necessary; in other words, to establish best practices. You can leave this work to your competitors and try to duplicate their results, but duplicating their results will include using the tools their using. So if you’re in a business that works a lot of leads, your choice is really to buy lead management now, or to buy it later. The only real question is, how much market share will be left by the time you decide to buy a lead management solution?

An earlier post this week began explaining why the new Leads360 dialer product earned the name Dial-IQ, the Intelligent Dialer Suite. The short answer is that Dial-IQ leverages all of the research and established best practices around which Leads360 is designed. This is perhaps nowhere more evident in the feature called IntelliDial. IntelliDial is part of the PowerPlus feature set. PowerPlus is the list dialer, meaning it is designed to optimize results when calling lists of leads, as opposed to individual leads. IntelliDial calls a list of leads that are queued up by the Lead Prioritization feature. To really fully appreciate how IntelliDial can improve close rates, it is necessary to review first what Lead Prioritization does.  Lead Prioritization is a feature that leverages all of our research based on the ongoing analysis of over 20 million leads.

Our findings have been that speed is the single most crucial component to closing a deal. Being the first one to get a lead on the phone is the difference between the deal closing and disappearing. With that in mind, any lead that is new to the system will be thrust to the top of your prioritized queue. You may have 500 leads in various stages of the sales cycle assigned to you, but when a new lead enters the system, it is the single most important lead you have. That’s why it’s at the top of your queue. Leads360 research has also found that a six call strategy is the most effective for reaching leads the first time. There is an optimal call response strategy that is built into the Lead Prioritization feature so that leads receive contact attempts at prescribed intervals after entering the system.

IntelliDial places helps you quickly place calls to your leads in order of their priority. When users create a prioritized call queue, it is re-prioritized in real time. So when a new lead comes in, it lands at the top of the queue. When a lead receives a call attempt, it drops off of the call queue until it is due another call attempt as determined by the prioritization rules. IntelliDial can be summed up like this: It quickly places calls to your leads in order of their importance. Nearly every aspect of Leads360 is fully configurable, so it is possible to sort and filter your leads to find opportunities based on whatever information or hunch you have. But for when you want a plug and play solution that will have your users connecting quickly to the ripest opportunities, you have IntelliDial.

And Dial-IQ has a feature for when you do want to take control of the group leads you are working at a given moment. It is called Speed Dial. If you wanted to target all your leads that had a certain common characteristic, you would use Speed Dial. Let’s say there has been a regulatory change in a certain state that may incentivize leads in that state to buy what you sell. You can filter and sort your leads to return only the desired leads. Then create a call queue that will enable you to call through them quickly and accurately.

IntelliDial and Speed Dial are two features that are part of Dial-IQ, the Intelligent Dialer Suite. Dialer’s are quick. That’s the main reason why they give so much value to companies that use them. But being quick and smart is a challenge that can only be met by a dialer that is fully integrated with a lead management solution that is built around proven best practices. Dial-IQ is such a dialer.

Leads360 is proud to announce that we are the proud recipient of multiple LeadsCouncil LEADER awards. The awards include:Best Lead Management in the Lending category, Tech MVP is the Lending category, and Tech MVP in the Technology category.

Presented by LeadCouncil, the program is designed to showcase the leading companies involved with the online lead generation space. The LEADER awards were awarded in three categories — lending, education, and lead gen technology partners.

“The main goal of the LeadsCouncil is to establish industry benchmarks and to make it easier for our members to find trusted partners,” said Dave Wengel, co-founder, LeadsCouncil. “We spent several months conducting surveys of lead buyers and lead sellers to determine the LEADER award winners — the best partners in the lead gen industry as selected by their peers, colleagues, clients, and partners.”

Click here to read the full press release.

Leads360 has just released Dial-IQ, the Intelligent Dialer Suite. Dialers are not new, and Dial-IQ contains some features and functions that are similar to existing dialer options. The reason why Dial-IQ is called the Intelligent Dialer Suite is mostly because it is integrated with the industry leading lead management solution, Leads360. Dial-IQ leverages all of Leads360’s distribution, follow-up, and reporting capabilities to work with the new dialer functionality. Leads360 is built on best practices developed from ongoing research and analysis of over 20 million leads. Leveraging this research and best practices, Dial-IQ is inherently smart, even if it only contained features familiar to other dialer products, but in fact, Dial-IQ has a couple of brand new features that make it the fastest way to get in touch with new leads. The benefits of having a dialer built within an intelligent lead management platform are many. This article is one of many that will delve into the challenges faced by sales reps and managers and how they are solved by Dial-IQ.

Dial-IQ is a dialer solution that offers many features. Some of the features are twists on existing dialer functionalities such as progressive dialing. But one feature that Dial-IQ has that is new is called Shotgun Connect. It takes it’s name from the practice of ‘calling shotgun’ when to claim the front seat of a car. And makes contacting new leads quicker than ever. The way it works is when a new lead enters the system that is eligible to be distributed by the Shotgun Connect method, all eligible users are notified in real time. The first one to either pick up the phone, or click an on-screen alert will claim the lead, and be connected by Dial-IQ. This approach leverages the competitive dynamic on your sales team to quickly distribute new leads and connect them to sales reps.

Control Connect is a method of distributing leads to sales reps that leverages the Leads360 distribution engine. Use reports to see which of your reps are skilled at closing certain types of leads, and use control connect to rep to lead. Call reports complete the picture of how quickly and how regularly leads are being called by members of your sales team. This feature gives you control of how leads move onto your sales floor and visibility into how well they are being worked. Having every Dial-IQ call recorded gives you unprecedented visibility into how your reps are working the phones.

The two features described above are only two of many more features available as part of the Dial-IQ suite. These two features, as well as Demand Connect comprise the IntelliConnect feature set. IntelliConnect features are designed to improve results when calling individual leads, as opposed to lists of leads. That’s why the IntelliConnect feature set is referred to as “The Intelligent Lead Dialer.” Another feature set, PowerPlus, is designed to optimize calling list of leads.

Internet leads have become an essential element of doing business for insurance companies in this day and age.  However, despite working hard and spending considerable amounts of money on marketing to pull in these leads, most insurance companies don’t do enough of the basic legwork to ensure that they close as many of these leads as possible.  Leads360 recently commissioned a secret shopper study where they tested ten different insurance companies on how their sales teams responded to leads in four Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs.  The results showed that even the best of these companies were failing to follow optimal practices while many were simply letting money slip away through shoddy sales techniques.

The study commissioned by Leads360 collected data on the consumer response strategies of ten different insurance companies via secret shoppers.  Based on this data, the study graded each of these companies on how their responses compared to established best practices in four KPIs: speed-to-contact call, speed-to-contact e-mail, number of call attempts, and the sending of nurturing e-mails.  The results were surprising.  Only one company managed an overall grade higher than a B, six received an overall grade of C+ or lower, and all ten companies got a grade of C or lower on at least one of the four KPIs.  Simply put, even the best of these ten companies is leaving money on the table by failing to adhere to best practices with their consumer response while the worst performers are letting business slip away because of their sales practices.

The primary focus of this study was to examine the response strategy of companies during the pre-contact period between when a lead makes an online inquiry and when they are contacted.  Leads360’s data shows that this is a critical period for closing any lead and strong sales teams know not to lose a moment in jumping into action.  Leads360’s data has demonstrated that contacting a lead in the first minute after receiving a lead improves conversion rates by 391%, so there are few better ways to maximize ROI on a lead.  Despite this simple way to get a jump on the competition and stand out in the mind of a potential customer, many companies spent hours and even days before making any attempt to contact their potential lead.

The number of contact attempts is also crucial to closing leads.  Leads360’s data indicates that calling a lead 6 times improves the chances of contact to 93% and that between two and four nurturing e-mails garners a 350% improvement in lead conversion rates.  However, despite all this compelling data, most of the ten companies surveyed in the study weren’t following best practices.  Once again, the secret shoppers revealed that none of these industry leaders was averaging five call attempts, let alone the optimal six, and the majority of them only sent a single e-mail.

It’s very clear that simply putting in a more focused, more meticulous effort from a sales perspective can bring in more business and ensure that your company is getting the most out of its marketing dollar.  Leads close at a much faster rate for companies that contact leads sooner and make sure that they’re keeping after a lead until they make contact.  However, despite all this, every single one of the ten companies in this study failed to meet best practices in at least one category with many companies failing in all four KPIs.  Simply put, these companies are throwing money away.  When it comes to sales, no one, no matter how big, can afford to be doing too-little-too-late.  Is your company doing enough to close its leads? Based on this study, it’s clear that most of the industry has at least one major area where they could significantly improve and see immediate results in their lead conversion rate and ROI.

Click here to download the free study!