Coffee for Closers | Leads360 Sales & Marketing Blog 

Find out how to maximize your weekend lead buys

Dec. 6, 2011 — In today’s competitive mortgage environment, working nontraditional work hours may give you a leg up on your competitors. A new study from Leads360 and QuinStreet found weekend leads perform better than weekday leads in certain key metrics.

As the mortgage industry evolves, lenders will need to adapt to meet the needs of busy consumers. Many consumers have more time on the weekend to catch up on their to-do lists and are less likely to be distracted by day-to-day responsibilities. So while it may seem like a hassle to work weekends, the opportunity may be worth it.

Are you maximizing your weekend lead buys? Attend our FREE webinar sponsored by Leads360 and QuinStreet to see how you stack up vs. your competitors on weekend leads purchased and how to properly contact and manage weekend leads based on research findings. Click here to register for this FREE webinar on Wednesday, December 14, 2011 from 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM PST!

Every sales manager needs to track performance of their sales and marketing efforts and when it comes to lead management, understanding how leads perform and why one lead converted over another is critical.

Numerous studies and our own research have shown that contacting new leads quickly can dramatically impact conversion rates. Therefore, number one and two on our list of “must track” key performance indicators (KPIs) are speed-to-contact attempt and speed-to-contact. The other three come in the order all leads must go through, and when used together, these KPIs can be powerful in helping to measure the performance of sales processes, campaigns, lead sources, and more.

Here are the top five KPI’s every sales manager should track:
1. Speed-to-Contact Attempt – How much time it takes to call a lead for the first time regardless of whether or not the call is connected.
2. Speed to Contact – How much time it takes to contact a lead for the first time.
3. Contact Rate – The percentage of leads that have been contacted (meaning a sales person actually spoke to a lead on the phone)
4. Qualification Rate – The percentage of leads that have been qualified (meaning the lead is a fit for your product and could buy within the next 90 days)
5. Conversion Rate – The percentage of leads that have been converted to customers.

Company #1:

Company #2:

Above are examples of two dashboards, from two separate companies, tracking the top five KPI’s. Let’s drill into these numbers a bit and see what we can learn.
As you can see, company #2 is performing much better than company #1. So what’s going on, for company #1 the qualification rate is low at 14.8%, while the contact rate is relatively high at 70.2%. This drives one to conclude the quality of the leads is poor. The sales manager in this instance may want to drill into this data to determine where the lower quality leads are coming from. For company #2, contact relative to qualification rate is where we’d expect.

Now, if we look at the conversion rate of 2.7% for company #1, again this isn’t a great conversion rate, a sales manager might be scratching their head wondering why. The lower conversion rate is likely tied to one of four things or a combination of these (1) the company is not competitive in the marketplace (2) their sales people may need more training (3) lead quality may be poor as noted above, or (4) the poor speed-to-contact may be factoring into the conversion rate.

Company #2 on the other hand is performing much better on their speed-to-contact metrics, which could ultimately be having a positive impact on their conversion rate.

As you can see, the power of these four KPIs together can provide valuable insights into your sales processes, campaigns and more. Leasd360′s innovative lead analytics and sales lead tracking software makes it easy to monitor key success metrics. We make critical data useful, simple and actionable.

The 2010 AdTech show in San Francisco was a hotbed of on and offline marketers primarily for B2C companies. Quite simply, there is no shortage of companies that will take your money and drive clicks and maybe even leads, but do they really care what happens after that? I’m not sure that they do. In speaking with nearly a dozen marketing service providers, that incidentally offered only a slightly varied product, I found a sharp lack of concern about conversion. Well, I shouldn’t be that harsh, they care, but not that much.

Obviously if you ask about how well traffic converts, of course you can’t beat it. But in my experience the real test of quality comes in how much effort the marketer is willing to put into conversion after the lead has been generated. That means they need to care about what their clients actually do with the clicks or leads. That means they need to care about a part of the process they don’t make money from. Of course, any shrewd lead generator knows that when clients get better at this part of the process, they buy more leads; just ask Matt Coffin from LMB. But everyone I spoke to at AdTech didn’t give a “#%!!@$&” about it. Some were even quite vocal about it.

It’s sad. For us it’s sad because we aren’t likely to get referrals for their clients to use our lead management software. I can pretty much guarantee they will convert more leads and subsequently spend more money, but why would they want that. Somehow the success of the lead generation industry, and it’s embracement of lead management software hasn’t quite permeated to online marketers at large. Maybe it’s no surprise that all the lead generators decided to stop participating in AdTech; maybe AdTech is still stuck in the 90’s.

You hire a sales team to do one thing, Sell. All too often, managers frustrated with their ROI, tend to go to what they think is the root of their problem, their sales department. Who could blame them though? Going through their checklist they think they are doing everything they can to convert the most sales. Adequate lead generation quantity? Check. Quality Leads? Check. Target market Research? Check. So it must be the sales team’s lack of effort right? WRONG. In today’s market, ensuring those items on the list only takes you half way there. Your company needs to maximize the potential it already possesses by creating an environment that is conducive to selling. Lead management technology in conjunction with tools like predictive dialing, create the best environment possible for your sales team to SELL. Think about how much time is wasted dialing people, waiting for them to pick, leaving a message, and then hanging up. With tools like predictive dialing, hundreds of numbers are automatically called and then routed to sales people once a lead answers the phone. This allows more time for sales people to properly engage the lead and make the most of it.  With all the extra time saved from the predictive dialer, an environment is created that maximizes performance and encourages success. Click to view  Leads360 and Five9’s whitepaper. 1+1=3

If you haven’t read the recent press release about Leads360’s integration with TargusInfo which enables on-demand lead verification from within Leads360 you should. Lead scoring and verification is relied on heavily by some of the bigger lead buyers in mortgage and education, but until recently smaller organizations were not utilizing this capability primarily due to cost. The new lead verification offering from Leads360 and Targus may change that. New leads can be automatically and instantly scored when they arrive based on phone number and address verification. Once you have this score, you can use Leads360’s lead distribution engine to prioritize follow-up.

Here’s what our own Nisheeth Singh had to say about the study:

As you may have read on Lead Critic today, we released our newest research regarding the impact of call frequency on sales lead conversion.

To misquote a famous author: “Elementary, my dear Watson”. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s written works never actually saw this phrase although the first and second parts of the phrase were seen in close association during conversations. But I digress.

As many of you opined above and is the central premise of the paper (found here), sometimes the most obvious and logical actions are never taken by lead buyers. I don’t necessarily understand why they don’t but I do revel in the fact that it means significant upside for those that choose to engage with their leads smartly.

We conducted the study based on several million leads that our clients tried contacting over a period of many months to have as diverse a data set as possible. We studied the effects of multiple call attempts all the way to 20 and I’ve published the entire results of our study below just to whet your intellectual curiosity. Some explanation is in order:

* Column 1 denotes the call attempt

* Column 2 denotes the percentage of ‘Contactable leads’ contacted – this is key to understanding the study and is NOT the same as Contact Rate. This means that the data set excludes any leads that were never contacted. This metric is a percent of the remaining leads in our study which we define as ‘contactable leads’

* Column 3 denotes the percent improvement in the ‘% of Contactable leads contacted’ metric for each successive attempt over the very 1^st call attempt

* Column 4 denotes the percent improvement in the ‘% of Contactable leads contacted’ metric for each successive attempt over the preceding call attempt

Contact    % of Contactable   Improvement       Improvement over

Attempt   leads contacted    over 1st attempt    preceding attempt

——————————————————————————

1                              39%

2                              72%                        87%                        87%

3                              83%                        114%                     15%

4                              88%                        128%                     6.5%

5                              91%                        136%                     3.4%

6                              93%                        141%                     2.1%

7                              95%                        145%                     1.5%

8                              96%                        148%                     1.1%

9                              96%                        150%                     0.8%

10                           97%                        151%                     0.6%

11                           97%                        152%                     0.5%

12                           98%                        153%                     0.3%

13                           98%                        154%                     0.3%

14                           98%                        154%                     0.3%

15                           98%                        155%                     0.2%

16                           99%                        155%                     0.2%

17                           99%                        156%                     0.2%

18                           99%                        156%                     0.1%

19                           99%                        156%                     0.1%

20                           99%                        157%                     0.1%

As you can see, the benefits of calling start trailing off pretty steeply after the 5^th or 6^th attempt, we chose to prescribe 6 attempts as the cut-off. I beg to defer with LeadCritic in that this is a very statistically relevant study with a data set this size and of this heterogeneity, at least at a high level. I do agree though that to get maximum benefit from a study like this, one should conduct the same study but specifically for their own sales team to understand the effect of call attempts on their contact rate.

Cheers!

Nisheeth Singh

Director of Strategic Intelligence, Leads360

DoublePositive has announced a bevy of new products aimed at providing increasingly customized hot-transfer leads for their clients.  The new products include:

PositiveExpress ARM – Hot leads facing an ARM reset.

Name-Your-Filters – Hot leads can now be filtered on the fly just as you would filter traditional leads in Leads360.

Name-Your-Script – This is certainly the most premium hot transfer lead availible.  DoublePositive will customize the leads as well as the contact and qualification process, just for your company!

Visit DoublePositive to learn more.

When dealing with internet generated mortgage leads, the typical agreed upon conversion rate is between 1.5% – 2%. At this rate you can and should be profitable. Of course we’ve seen many clients that are converting much lower and we’ve seen some that convert quite a bit higher. One of the unique aspects of internet leads, in particular mortgage, is that they are often generated once and sold 3-4 times. This is pretty typical and widely accepted by the market. This practice however is the root of what I call the conversion conundrum. That is, even though the industry average for a mortgage lender to convert an internet lead is 1.5% – 2%, the actual average conversion rate of an internet consumer is actually 4.5% – 4.75%. That’s a 2-3% spread in the conversion rate. The reason for that is if a consumer goes online and submits their information as a lead to LowerMyBills.com for example. That lead is then sold to 4 mortgage lenders. Only one of those four companies can actually close that lead and if you calculate the conversion rate across all four lenders, it comes out to about 1.5% – 2%. But, when you calculate the actual conversion rate of that consumer, not taking into account which lender they chose, the internet consumer actually converts at about 4.5% – 4.75%. Interesting right?

Let me put it another way. If there is a 3% gap between conversion rates as I described above, what does a lender have to do to access that increase in conversion? That 3% is won purely by the behavior of the lender. In other words, the difference between the 1.5% and the 4.5% is the activity that a lender does when they get a lead. It’s about how fast they call that lead and how many times they follow-up.  It’s about what offers they give, what the loan officer says on the phone and so on. It’s all about the behavior of the lender after the lead has been given to them. That’s 100% controlled by the lender, not by the quality of the lead. So if a lender wants to reap the spread, they need to improve the behavior. That’s where we come in. We give our clients the tools and the training to get that extra 3% conversion and squeeze out the competition.

So, when we talk to mortgage lenders about conversion, and that’s really all they care about, we typically say shoot for 1.5% – 2%. But now, we tell them there is a 3% conversion spread just waiting to be grabbed. It’s all about what they do with the lead and we’re here to help them do it.

The Lead Critic made a very good post earlier this week about sharing data with your lead providers. As a lead management system company, obviously we have a good idea of overall performance. I say overall performance because it would be unfair of me to say lead performance, because a lead is only one ingredient in the mix. More on that some other time…

From 2004 – 2006 I spent my week days selling mortgage leads to loan officers, brokers, and lenders from coast to coast. I sold leads to the mom and pops shop around the corner, and to a handful of the largest direct lenders in the nation. Out of well over 100 clients, only a few of them would share data with me. How many loans have you closed out of the leads I sent you? What is your contact rate? What is your application rate? How about speed to contact, how long does it take you to respond to a lead on average? Getting an answer was like pulling teeth. I think it was a mix of “I don’t want to tell you I’m doing great because you’ll jack my prices up” and “I don’t want to tell you my metrics because I am afraid others are doing way better and I don’t want to hurt my ego.” Whatever the reason, my intention for asking was simple: With your information, I can make my product better.

It’s almost 2008, advertising online is pretty mature, and it is easy to tell what campaigns are producing quality leads, and what campaigns are not. But the only way for a lead provider to know what campaigns to target is to tell them what is working, and what is not. Just so you understand how this works, most lead providers that I know of can target a specific lead back to it’s specific source. Let’s say that a lead provider has 250 campaigns running at any time online. If you send them a list of leads that were pure crap, they can track them back to where they originated. If most of them came from a specific campaign, they can pull the plug on that campaign and end your misery.

Let’s go out on a limb and say that if you do share this information, and the product gets better, your prices DO go up. So what? You’ll be closing more loans, you’ll keep your loan officers happier and more amped to get on the phone with a lead faster, and at the end of the day your life will be easier. So you spend a few bucks extra per lead, it’s not the end of the world. When a lead provider is able to produce better leads, you’re going to win in the end, but if you do not share this information, you’re only going to shoot yourself in the foot chasing not so great leads around. The rewards severely outweigh the risks in this scenario. Do yourself a favor and tell your lead provider how you are doing. If you’ve ever filled out a survey after buying a car, a large TV, or even called one of those “How Am I Driving?” 800 numbers, you’ll know why…