May 8, 2012 — Last month we rolled out a new and improved Dial-IQ, the market’s first, full-featured intelligent dialer solution, fully integrated with a comprehensive sales lead management platform.

One of the biggest challenges we faced with Dial-IQ was balancing between high-quality consumer experiences and added sales productivity from multi-line dialing. We believe we have created the right harmony between speed and positive customer experience, without crossing the line into predictive dialer territory and its associated negatives.

Predictive dialers are one of the most misunderstood dialing technologies, probably because different companies label different dialer software features as being predictive.

A predictive dialer is a type of list dialing technology that dials through a list of leads assigned to it. A predictive dialer relies on the fact that most outbound calls do not end up connecting with a live person and thus for every successful call, one predicts that a certain percentage will be unsuccessful. Call centers using predictive dialers typically want as little down time as possible, which means their dialers call more numbers than there are available reps – sometimes as many as 10 calls for each sales rep. This ensures reps are always busy but also frustrates consumers.

Pros and cons of a predictive dialer

There are many benefits and disadvantages of a predictive dialer. Determining whether predictive dialing is the right thing for your company will largely be determined by your answer to these questions:

• How big is your contact center, if less than 40, a predictive dialer might not be a good fit?
• How good do you want the experience of your customers and prospects to be?
• How costly are your leads and are you OK with abandoning 2-3% of your calls with every call attempt?

Leads360′s approach

Most of Leads360′s customers operate in a high velocity consumer sales environment and currently do not fall into the category of a good fit for predictive dialers. Usually our customers spend a considerable sum of money on leads, wish to drive as much value from each lead as possible, and sell products and services that typically require more than a one-call-close.

Leads360’s Dial-IQ brings dialing with intelligence into focus. Dial-IQ offers both a progressive dialer that calls one lead after another and a multi-line dialer that calls up to four lines per agent. Both solutions benefit from intelligent prioritization, lead distribution, contact strategy workflow, and scheduled follow-up capabilities, ensuring the highest level of efficiency in converting prospects into customers.

While traditional predictive dialers may increase call time, they also can cause drops when the statistical model used to calculate the number of outbound calls to make misfires. Usually this happens either as a operator error by loading incorrect seed data or jumbling together leads that are not similar to each other (different stages in the pipeline, timezones, etc.). Dial-IQ on the other hand allows administrators to tailor the dialing strategy to the leads they have in the pipeline. This ensures the highest level of real-time flexibility in tuning who you are going to call next, and how many calls you will be making at once. Dial-IQ in combination with Lead Manager ensures you are segmenting your leads according to the likelihood of them answering and reducing the number of concurrent calls made in accordance with how likely the lead is to pick up, thus reducing the number of dropped calls.

Bottom line –combining our prioritization and distribution engines in Lead Manager with our progressive dialer that never drops a call and our multi-line dialer that drives velocity; customers can maximize the hard-earned value of high quality leads, while also ensuring the highest level of efficiency with lower quality leads.

Leads360 will be exhibiting – booth #315. If you ask us about our Meme, you might hear from some that we make robots that kill other robots (interesting story, ask us about it) but what we really do is build software that helps insurance brokers and agents get more value out of the leads they buy or self-generate. Our intelligent sales automation solution is used by some of the most successful agents in the industry, helping them be the first to call high-value leads.

If you weren’t planning on attending, but are now inspired – it’s not too late to register, visit www.mybigins.com.

April 23 — For insurance marketers, even a small improvement to lead conversion rates will drive down operational costs, while significantly impacting sales. Hence our interest when we were offered a VIP tour of the inner workings of one of the top State Farm agents in California.  Northern California State Farm Agent and Business Owner, Mark Wong, graciously offered to take us behind the scenes to show us how he dialed up his sales velocity with Dial-IQ and Leads360 and increased purchased lead conversion rates from 10% to 20% in the first year.

Driving a Positive Consumer Experience One Call at a Time

When we first met Mark Wong, he was looking for a way to do a better job of differentiating his policies and services in an environment of growing competition from independent insurance agents pushing online quoting and comparison shopping. For Wong, superior customer service, including prompt response and follow-up to inquiries was absolutely critical. The challenge was managing the large volume of leads the company purchased and generated.

Wong identified early on that being the first to contact a new lead and being the one company to still be calling a few days later when others stopped following up was critical. “If you are the first to talk to a prospect, identify their insurance needs and develop a rapport, you have a huge advantage over competitors,” he said.

With Leads360 and Dial-IQ, Wong and his team were able to increase efficiency with their leads, making the right calls at the right time, ensuring they get to top prospects first. “We have purchased fewer leads and increased our conversion rates on leads purchased from 10% to 20% in the first year of using Leads360 and Dial-IQ,” said Wong.

Competing Effectively with an Intelligent Dialer

Using Dial-IQ Multi-line and Leads360 features like scripting, Wong and his team were able to double production without adding staff and see a dramatic 250% increase in calls per agent in only six weeks. For the complete story on how he did it, click here.

Clearly, Wong and his State Farm team have put together the right ingredients for success. And Wong’s drive for success hasn’t gone unnoticed. His agency has been recognized as the number one State Farm agent in Northern California for new auto insurance sales.

When making business decisions, there is often a tug of war between acting fast and acting smart. To be effective one has to both be well informed and act decisively. We always want to make the best decision possible, and that means examining the facts.

But in practice, examining facts takes time. The longer it takes, the greater the risk that the time spent making decisions will introduce delays that result in rising opportunity costs.

This type of tension between analysis paralysis and hasty decision making is usually thought of in terms of larger, strategic decisions. But it is just as true for small decisions. Even simple decisions that don’t require a lot of brainpower or time can still add up to significant delays, not to mention result in costly errors. Take for instance the decision of whom to call next.

Determining whom to call next is a decision that may be made dozens of times a day. Making that decision slowly amounts to a lot of wasted time. Making it unwisely amounts to a lot of wasted opportunities.

Leads360 has always been focused on providing solutions that are fast. Getting in touch with prospects quickly is one of the most important aspects of nurturing successful relationships. But since speed is only half the story, a quick solution is only half the solution. The Leads360 distribution engine distributes leads intelligently so that the prospects are connected only with the sales rep who is most suited to help them.

Lead follow-up is prioritized in accordance with established best practices to make sure that contact attempts are made at intervals that are most likely to yield results.

Dial-IQ, Leads360s fully integrated lead dialer, leverages all the speed and intelligence of best-in-class lead management tools to make calling leads quicker and smarter. There is no more effective way to establish and maintain contact with prospects than Leads360 and Dial-IQ.

April 10, 2012 — I’m fortunate in my position at Leads360 to meet with a lot of smart sales executives — many of them Leads360 customers. I find these discussions invaluable for learning from executives experiencing the consumer sales revolution first hand.

What I hear and observe is consumer behavior is continuously evolving, influenced by the web, mobile and social. This evolution is creating a demand for flexibility and ongoing optimization of sales processes. In this Sales 2.0 world, it is no longer good enough to respond quickly. In order to compete for consumers, companies need to respond with a high level of intelligence.

Our approach – Intelligent sales velocity – for companies that compete for consumers

At Leads360 we are laser focused on optimizing high velocity consumer sales environments. By their nature, these are very data rich environments that lend themselves to continuous optimization. In such a fast moving environment, we deliver a flexible, cloud-based sales automation solution to help them keep up with consumer demand and expectation for a timely, high-quality experience.

As our customers continue to innovate and evolve their sales processes to meet demand, we are committed to supporting them with ongoing innovation of Leads360 and Dial-IQ. Today we are proud to announce a big leap forward in the innovation of our sales automation suite – introducing the markets first, full-featured intelligent dialer solution, fully integrated with a comprehensive sales lead management platform.

Our dialer solution, Dial-IQ, now boasts Dial-IQ Inbound and Dial-IQ Multi-line. Dial-IQ Inbound ensures sales makes the most of every call opportunity, routing calls to the right rep and ensuring every inbound call is tracked and followed-up on based on an optimal contact strategy. Dial-IQ Multi-line helps sales teams reach prospects faster, prioritizing the right lead to call at the right time, while also intelligently scaling the number of lines used based on sophisticated business logic.

The addition of Dial-IQ Inbound and Multi-Line ensures business logic is built into the entire sales process. We’ve left no stone unturned in solving the problem of how sales teams handle and track every sales opportunity and we encourage you to take a look – on us.  To celebrate the launch, we’re offering a free 30-day trial. You can find out more by clicking leads360.com/dialer. Click here for today’s press release.

#1 — Ongoing two-way dialogue between sales and marketing: You have your campaign ID’s and phone numbers set up in the system. Push reports going to the marketing team like clockwork, and marketing is tracking campaign effectiveness in generating qualified leads and increasing/decreasing spend accordingly.

So what’s missing? A conversation, the sales manager and marketing manager should be sitting down weekly to discuss the lead flow, lead quality and campaign effectiveness.   By analyzing lead flow from both the sales manager and marketing manager’s perspective much can be gained in tuning both processes on the sales side and targeted campaign efforts on the marketing side. Rather than just decreasing spend of campaigns that have been less effective, maybe it is about retargeting, trying a different tactic that might not be clear without an ongoing two way dialogue.

#2 — Refresh your definition of the ideal customer persona:  it’s been several months since your marketing team’s big branding / messaging refresh project. It was great, they interviewed a handful of sales associates to understand common buyers’ traits, but since then your companies introduced a few new products and services and your buyer persona has changed slightly.

The sales team holds some valuable cards, they talk to prospects day in and day out and have a strong pulse on the needs and wants of customers. Consider prompting your marketing team to conduct a regular sales check-in to discuss changing customer personas and targeted marketing efforts.

#3 — Monitor lead qualification and conversion rates closely: if all is going well with #1 and #2 and marketing is doing its job in sending qualified leads but you’re still not seeing an increase in conversion rates, it’s time to drill into the data. If qualified leads aren’t converting there is usually one of three things amiss (1) you’re products or services are competitive on price or quality (2) your sales associates need training and/or (3) your sales processes need tweaking. Good reporting and analytics are critical to track sales effectiveness, and it all starts with a good sales automation solution that tracks leads from click to close.

Happy spring cleaning! To learn more about Leads360′s sales automation platform, visit www.leads360.com

This often generates discussion on the difference between the two, how they complement one another and use cases for when you’d use sales automation versus a CRM or both together. The issue for some with CRM is it’s too focused on keeping current customers and not focused enough on taking advantage of opportunities to snag new ones.  

A good sales automation solution is laser focused on turning leads into customers, closing the gap in functionality in a typical CRM solution.  Leads360 offers serious upgrades in lead distribution, lead prioritizations, and intelligent dialing.  Taken together, Leads360’s services will allow any sales team already using Salesforce.com a chance to fine tune their process and turn into a lean, mean, lead-closing machine by addressing the three key drivers to lead conversion: speed, process, and persistence.

Salesforce customers are already chiming in about the benefits of Leads360 here on the Salesforce.com app exchange.  Jonathan Ruchman wrote: “The lead management capabilities are rich with critical functionality, but are also very easy for smaller organizations to adopt. Their solution is turnkey which makes it easy for our Allstate Agency Owners, many of whom are not tech-savvy.”

Ron Beach also highlighted the way the Leads360 app could be beneficial to smaller businesses: “While we like the versatility of Salesforce.com, setup can be somewhat daunting for a smaller company. We found that we could immediately start using the application in a productive manner and yet retain the ability to make changes later once we had production experience. Leads360 reduced the time required to achieve the benefits we were looking for with minimal effort.”

Finally, Marjorie Gilberg appeared to be more than a little enthusiastic about the services Leads360 can provide: “Leads360 is an essential tool for us because it allows us to manage all the leads that we buy and generate far more effectively than Salesforce can on it’s own. Leads360 allows us to route our leads precisely within our sales team, enforce a sales workflow, conduct email nurturing, and report in detail on everything that happens during the sales process. I strongly believe that Leads360 allows us to run a best-in-class sales organization”

To learn more visit the Salesforce.com App Exchange or watch this video on YouTube “Leads360: Lead Management for Salesforce” explaining the differences.

By Nick Hedges

February 29, 2012 — This week at LeadsCon we proudly unveiled the Leads360 Lead Industry Report (LIR), our second annual study on the state of our industry.  The report covers how our industry performed in 2011, which lead gen firms successfully navigated last year’s challenges and what to expect in 2012.

The Leads360 LIR study involved analysis of 23 million leads and their outcomes across almost 1,500 lead buyer databases and nearly 90 surveys and in-depth interviews with lead buyers and sellers.

We often get asked why we invest so much of our time completing and sharing this data-rich annual analysis. Quite simply, research is in our company’s DNA.  We hope that sharing insight from our data can serve to help businesses improve their processes, increase ROI on their marketing investments and improve overall business performance.

We encourage you to download a complimentary copy of the report here to get the full analysis and finding, including the Lead Industry Award winners in mortgage, insurance and private sector education.