This upshot of this article for insurance agents is the following: Use technology, but don’t rely on it to the extent that it stands in the way of you making the calls you know you need to make.

Technology is becoming a bigger part of all of our work lives. The point of view of the article by Nathan Jamail is one that certainly makes sense. It’s not uncommon for sales agents to make some missteps as they integrate technology into their workflow. He’s right to warn agents that relying too heavily on email, or social media, as a way of communicating with prospects is unwise. It’s too easy to convince ourselves that we’ve made an effort to make contact with a prospect when we send an email. And as we send more emails we get the feeling we’re working more diligently at communicating with prospects. This sense of our own diligence may not be as accurate as we think it is. Unless we’re sending emails strategically and coupling them with phone calls, we’re just not doing everything we can to reach prospects.

But what advocates of traditional hit-the-phones selling may not have considered is that there are ways that the telephone can be integrated into your technological solution. Lead Management Software can be used in conjunction with a dialer to automatically call prospects and connect them with agents according to smart lead assignment rules. When agents send emails to prospects they can schedule a call to that lead at a later time so that their attempts to contact prospects are varied and consistent. This enables agents to maintain a thread throughout their communication that builds trust by establishing the agent as dedicated and serious.

Some pieces of technology fall short on their promise. Email is one good example. ‘Social Media’ is another. You may not get the results you’re expecting when you incorporate these technologies into your business.

On the other hand, embracing technology is critical to the survival of a business. But adopting it halfway can create a whole host of new problems. The best way to leverage the latest technology in lead management is to use Leads360. Leads360 is Software as a Service that is continually being refined based on ongoing analysis and feedback from industry experts. This is living technology, paired with strategy, built and rebuilt around getting measurable results.

It’s worth revisiting this question from time to time. As this article on LeadCritic points out, the industry is growing quickly and to not know exactly what we are talking about when we talk about a lead is a mistake.  The article differentiates a lead from an impression and a click. Specifically, a lead is an individual who takes a required action, usually a mailer, a web form, or a phone call towards an advertiser to express interest in an offer. This definition reminds me of a definition of lead that I heard in a partner interview where he visualized a lead like this, “You walk into a room full of people, you ask, ‘Who’s interested in this widget?’ The people who raise their hands are leads. Buying a lead is not buying a sale.”

It is tempting for buyers of leads to further define what a lead is. Lead buyers, faced with a close rate that they wish were higher, look everywhere to improve their results; motiviating their sales staff on one hand, and seeking ‘better’ leads on the other. It is their hope, or even expectation that leads they buy meet some additional set of criteria beyond just having an interest in your offering.  This is understandable. How could a salesperson be expected to want anything other than great leads, leads that lead to deals? Of course they do. Given that demand, there is of course someone to fill it. Some companies are providing ‘transfers’ which differ from normal leads, in that they are pre-qualified. Buying ‘transfers’ separates the wheat from the chaff and puts hot opportunities into the hands of sales agents.

Whether the leads you are buying are traditional, unqualified leads or prequalified transfers, you will need lead management software to make sure that the leads you acquire are worked with the highest degree of efficiency, insuring the highest possible ROI.

Yesterday, Leads360 founder Jeff Solomon was quoted in The Wall Street Journal about some of Leads360′s recent research regarding Lead Management best practices. The article which you can read here, talks about the three best ways to convert online prospects into clients. Our friends over at Leadcritic expanded upon this, and wrote a great piece about how Lead Management Solutions are finally getting the recognition they deserve, drifting away from the the common attitude of Lead Management being in the shadow of the almighty CRM. LeadCritic puts it best, “Customer Relationship Management platforms have been fooling performance marketers for years now claiming they are the best way to convert sales, when in fact they fall way short. In the true lead generation and performance marketing era, lead management companies have started where CRM’s have left off and have provided huge benefits to companies that made the smart choice of focusing on the intricacies of converting leads into sales.” While we concede that CRM’s are a great tool for some companies, it is nice to see a greater understanding in the marketplace of the vast benefits of placing a Lead Management solution on the front end, or in other words, putting “the horse before the cart.”

Click here to read  “Lead Management Hits the Mainstream” on LeadCritic, or to here to read “Three Best Ways to Convert Online Prospects Into Clients” over at The Wall Street Journal.

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!

Earlier this week, Leads360 released a study to shed even more light on the best methods for working leads in the most efficient way possible.  Our previous studies have pointed to two primary drivers in increasing the ROI on your leads.  The first of these is speed to contact, with calling in the first five minutes proving to be essential to closing any lead.  The second was making six total follow up calls for each lead, the optimal number of call attempts to ensure that you have the best chance to make contact without overtaxing your sales staff.  This most recent study, now demonstrates that the timing of each follow up call is also important to converting your leads at the best possible rate.

By further analyzing over 20 million customer inquiries, we determined that not only was it important to get in all six call attempts, but also making each call attempt at the right time is also crucially important.  The first three attempts should all come on the first day, striking while the iron is hot and the lead is fresh.  The first call should take place within five minutes of receiving the lead as this makes it 22 times more likely that you’ll close that lead.  The second attempt should then follow at between 30 minutes to two hours later while the third attempt should come at two to four hours after receiving the lead.  The fourth attempt should fall on at some point on day three, the fifth attempt on day four, and the sixth attempt should be made on either day 11 or day 12.  Drawing from the data in the study, making your calls inside the prescribed windows can improve your conversion rates by anywhere from 94% to 500% for each call verses calls attempted outside of the prescribed times.

Check out this study and all of our previous research by going here and here.

Leads360 is attending the eduWEB conference in Chicago this week. The conference has been a great opportunity to learn about some of the challenges facing schools in terms of making the most out of their enrollment opportunities.

We’ve been able to share information about how Leads360 Lead Management Software is helping all kinds of schools improve their enrollment. As people stop by the table we’re getting the opportunity to address the challenges facing admissions managers form both proprietary and traditional schools. These challenges include:

• “We have no way of tracking lead and admission counselor performance”
• “We use many systems for following up on prospective student inquiries. i.e., Different departments use different programs”
• “We use a legacy system that has been cobbled together over time with no plan”
• “We don’t know which lead providers sell the best leads”

It’s great to see people perk up when we tell them we offer our solution for these concerns.

Jeff Solomon, Founder and Senior VP, hosted a Topic Table called “E-Recruiting in Good Times and Bad: Strategies to Avoid Costly Pitfalls and Yield Measurable Results in Uncertain Times”. It was a good opportunity to speak to some of these and other common issues facing schools who struggle to manage their admission process with a failing set of tools.

Another common concern among schools is that they may start to struggle keeping their enrollment numbers up as the economy begins to improve. Leads360 provides admissions counselors with a best practice enforceable workflow to make sure that no lead falls through the cracks. At the same time it provides managers with analytics that display in real time the performance of enrollment counselors and lead sources. Leads360 has been helping companies maximize ROI through all kinds of economic conditions.