March 15, 2012 — I often get asked, “How does Leads360 differ from a CRM solution?” The easiest, most immediately understood answer to this question is “We are the Salesforce.com for companies that sell to consumers.”

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.

Report Recognizes Top Performing Lead Providers in a Challenging Year

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.

February 14, 2012 — WANTED! Cupid! To help create sales chemistry between prospect and agents!

Companies spend a significant amount of money marketing their services or products to drive desired behaviors in prospects. They work hard to help the customer learn about a product or service, identify with the brand promise and finally to trust the company enough to reach out. The customer finally fills out a form requesting more information and receives a call back only to get a sales rep on the phone that lacks product expertise based on their unique needs, doesn’t understand specific local requirements, etc.

For many consumer sales organizations their one goal is to get leads into the hands of producers as fast as possible, the flaw in this is they aren’t able to definitively take into account skills or attributes possessed by leads or agents that may increase conversion. Many distribution models today simply rely on pure randomness, intuition, or structural and campaign-based guidelines.

Ask any salesperson, and they will tell you an instances where they seemed to “connect on a higher level” with a lead – a connection that more likely than not led to a closed sale. Maybe a bit of Cupid luck but what if you could ensure Cupid’s magic worked more often than not, proactively matching a lead to an agent based on this hidden chemistry?

Enter skill-based routing (SBR), rigorously analyzing a sales agent’s performance against lead attributes and then matching leads with a skilled sales representative who has historically converted leads with that attribute at a higher rate.

Leads360 recently partnered with a handful of clients to develop and test skill-based routing. The result of the test was a significant improvement in agent performance with skilled reps more than doubling their conversion performance. It is important to note too that these “skilled” reps are not necessarily the best reps in the organization; by and large, these are average reps with no special performance or remarkable talents. The key is leveraging data to identify the “chemistry” and to automatically match reps with leads they are most likely to close.

Learn more about skill-based routing and download the full study here.

February 10, 2012 — Are weekend leads worth the money?  More importantly, is it worth staffing weekends to take advantage of these leads?

A recent study suggests the answer to these questions is YES and YES. Leads generated over the weekend convert 20% better than weekday leads, even if you do nothing more than buy them and work them during the typical workweek. What’s more, if weekend leads are worked with the same intensity as their weekday counterparts they have an even higher chance of converting. This is according to a new study conducted jointly by Leads360 and QuinStreet that looked at the performance of nearly a quarter million leads over a one-year period.

Weekend Leads by the Numbers

Contrary to what some may think, the findings from our research suggest more serious consumers are using discretionary time on the weekend to get work done and expect a timely response from lenders.  Therefore, those lenders that staff up and more aggressively work weekend leads could gain an edge on competitors.

If a company works weekend leads with the same intensity as weekday leads, the weekend generated leads perform even better. If a weekend lead is contacted it converts 32% better, if it is quoted 51% better and if it is contacted in the first 5 minutes, it converts 100% better than weekday leads.

Despite the solid performance, fewer than 29% of lead purchasers in the study purchased more than 10 weekend leads per month and less than 4% had a significant weekend lead buying strategy purchasing more than 100 weekend leads per month.  What’s more, weekend leads aren’t getting worked as hard. Response times to weekend leads were an average of 71% slower than weekday leads.

To learn more, download the study here.

by Nick Hedges, CEO & President, Leads360 Inc

February 3, 2012 — As many of you may have seen, we just announced a significant milestone in Leads360’s evolution, a $15M series B round from Volition Capital and Rustic Canyon Partners. We are very excited about what this means for our customers and partners as well as Leads360’s future and wanted to share the back story on the B round.

Why we raised the money?
Simply put, we are seeing unprecedented demand for our software, and want to capitalize on this by investing in building out our team, our product and our marketing efforts over the next several years. That’s because as our product offering and the market has evolved, what we do adds value to a quickly expanding number of companies.

Back in 2004, when Leads360 started out, our software was designed to help companies efficiently manage leads that they were buying from companies like LowerMyBills and LendingTree. Over the past few years we have seen a few things occur:

1. Companies that were buying leads have realized they need a better approach to manage all of their sales opportunities, not just internet-bought leads. Now more than half the leads we help manage are generated by the customer organically. 
2. A large number of companies that sell to consumers have realized that CRMs like Salesforce, Oracle and SugarCRM are extremely poorly suited to their needs. We recruit companies on a daily basis who are better able to manage their sales process with our software either instead of or alongside their existing CRM systems. 
3. Consumer sales organizations are far more successful when their sales platform is tightly integrated with their telephony systems. Our sales telephony platform, Dial-IQ, has been exceptionally well received by the market.

What made Leads360 a good investment opportunity?

We were fortunate to have many highly-regarded investors interested in Leads360. Here are a few of the things that made Leads360 a very attractive growth company.

Sales automation for companies that sell to consumers is a large and under-served market -Leads360 is the market-leading solution

In 2010, US companies spent approximately $35B on advertising aimed at generating consumer leads according to the Direct Marketing Association. Leads360 has the market-leading solution designed specifically to help these companies to convert those leads into customers.

Companies that sell to consumers need software that helps them track, interact with and convert their prospects. Unfortunately there are very few software solutions designed to do this. While there are a lot of companies that provide “sales automation” software that provides this type of functionality very effectively for companies that sell to businesses (good examples are Salesforce, SugarCRM and Oracle/Siebel); selling to consumers is very different. Big CRM is a bad solution for consumer and small business sales teams. In a consumer sale, due to short sales cycles and a need to work a much larger volume of prospective customers per salesperson, speed of response, tight sales process definition and multi-channel prospect nurturing are much more important than they are in the business-to-business sale. Unfortunately we see a lot of companies misguidedly purchasing a CRM solution and then spending a huge amount of time and money customizing the solution to handle a consumer sales process; functionality the Leads360 has right “off-the-shelf”. With our new funding we intend to generate broader awareness among companies that sell to consumers about how our products help their sales teams be more successful at converting consumers into customers.

 Our telephony platform (Dial-IQ) has created a huge amount of value for both us and our customers
At the beginning of 2011 Leads360 released a comprehensive outbound telephony solution called Dial-IQ. We saw the opportunity to build a more intelligent dialing system than any that had previously existed using the data we had access to in the sales automation platform to place calls at the appropriate time and from the most “qualified” sales rep.

Dial-IQ has exceeded our wildest expectations in terms of the value it has had to our customers and the number of customers we have gained as a consequence of the platform.

Our average Dial-IQ customer achieves a 77% increase in conversion within 90 days of turning on Dial-IQ and about a third of our entire customer base has already opted to use Dial-IQ as their sales telephony platform.

Large enterprise customers are adopting the Leads360 platform at an unprecedented rate
We have seen a very significant increase in demand for our product among Fortune 1000 companies over the past 18 months. This is partly due to a significant re-engineering effort on our platform to deliver the functionality that very large, often highly dispersed sales teams need to be more effective. What we have built is deeply configurable, highly scalable and easily integrated into a complex enterprise-scale technology infrastructure. We wish to pursue large customers with even greater vigor on both a domestic and international stage going forward. To that end we will be expanding our enterprise marketing and sales efforts considerably and building out deeper channel relationships as a consequence of the funding.

How we chose our new investors
We’ve had an outstanding experience with Rustic Canyon Partners whom we raised our $5.25M A-round from in 2007 and were excited but not surprised they were keen to participate in our B-round. In looking for our lead in the B-round we had a pretty tight set of parameters about which investors we wanted to raise money from.

• They had to have a singular focus on growth stage Software as a Service companies and
• We were looking for a clear track record of helping businesses cross the $100M revenue mark.

Choosing Roger Hurwitz from Volition Capital was a very easy decision for us. He brings an amount of experience to the board about what it takes to build a world-class SaaS business that we have come to recognize as being exceptionally rare.

What all this means
We have a product that is in a league of its own at automating and accelerating sales for companies that sell to consumers by phone and email. We are very excited to have the capital necessary to make that fact common knowledge and to continue building out our world class product, team and strategic partnerships.

January 23, 2012 – Establishing a relationship with a prospect depends on a lot of things going right. One way of looking at it is to say that it is the craft of the salesman; whatever methods are employed by the salesperson are fine as long as they work. A salesperson, working on commission, will naturally hone their own best practices and deliver results. This is a self monitoring way of operating that makes sense. But what sales manager hasn’t wished that some of the skills belonging to their most effective sales person couldn’t rub off on their least effective. After all, it is towards this end that sales people undergo training.

But the establishment and adoption of best practices doesn’t have to be relegated to showing a new guy the ropes and then depending on him relying on himself beyond that. Best practices can be enforced across an entire sales organization by adopting a lead management system. Lead management differs from CRM in that it is laser focused on the task of turning prospects into customers. This being the case, it has different core functionality that is based less on tracking a customer relationship and more based on contacting leads converting a sale for the first time.

One of the real strengths of lead management software is that it enables sales managers to adapt their best practices in response to the needs of their sales staff and changes in market conditions. Best practices can take shape in a number of ways. Examples include; the number, timing, and content of automatically sent marketing emails; automatic contact schedules for leads, i.e., when uncontacted leads become ripe for another contact attempt; and content of sales scripts. Intelligent lead assignment strategies can also be tweaked to ensure that the right leads are being assigned to the right sales agents.

Leaving the establishment of customer relationships to the various strategies of individual sales reps isn’t necessary. Using lead management software, it is possible to enforce proven sales strategies that ensure that no leads are ignored, and every lead benefits from a sound contact strategy.

January 19, 2012 — Ah, the New Year.  January always offers a chance to move forward with a clean slate and an eye for the future.  In that spirit, here are some blog posts that offer a look forward to 2012 and some predictions and previews for what the year has to offer in private-sector higher education, mortgage and insurance.

#1 – Five reasons why for-profit schools are here to stay via @washingtonpost – In this column, Jay Mathew’s begins his look at the future of for-profit education with a clear and definite bias against the institutions, and initial reluctance to review the book titled “Change.edu: Rebooting for the New Talent Economy” written by Kaplan’s Chairman, Andrew S. Rosen. While the book didn’t shake Mathew’s feeling completely, he noted “Rosen convinced me that for-profit educational ventures are here to stay.” He went on to detail five reasons why. http://wapo.st/sSAwCQ

#2 – The Mortgage Battlefield of 2012 via @NatlMortgagePro – John Walsh offers up his predictions for the embattled mortgage industry from the frontlines of the struggle, including continued low rates and the reemergence of innovative products. http://dlvr.it/12P29W”

#3 – Experts 2012 Rate Outlook via @MortgageNewsMND – Rob Chrisman gives an overview of mortgage rates and industry predictions based on outlooks from industry experts Freddie, Fannie and others. Predictions anticipate a similar year to 2011, with HARP 2.0 and expected low interest rates throughout the year likely to have a positive impact. http://tinyurl.com/cwl8zfe

#4 – Three Ways Insurers Will Compete on Data in 2012 via @insurancetech –  highlights how analytics is likely to change insurers approach to underwriting, claims, and risk management in 2012 http://ow.ly/87ZXG

#5 – Health care reform you can expect in 2012 via @Bankrate – The piece looks at what patients, doctors, and insurers should expect from the pieces of the affordable care act going into law in 2012. http://bit.ly/zuUE7U

#6 – Insurance Veterans’ Forecasts for 2012 via @ijournal – The piece discusses the future of the industry in the coming year with nine different industry leaders to get a better grasp on what to expect. http://bit.ly/yjGcS0

#7 – 3 Key Challenges Facing Agents in 2012 via @ijournal – In this podcast with Bob Rusbuldt, CEO of Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America, Bob articulates what he believes are the three biggest challenges facing independent agents and brokers in 2012. http://bit.ly/z6gNSb

It’s a new year. If you’ve made any resolutions about growing your business, i.e., providing better service to your prospects, working more efficiently, or even just making more money there’s a quick way you can lock in all three. Lead Management software is a software solution which helps you get in contact with leads more quickly than by any other means.

Contacting leads quickly involves several steps being taken at a high speed:

1. Receive the lead from the lead source

2. Distribute the lead to a sales rep who is best suited to do business with them

3. Ensure that a Sales Rep acts contacts the lead immediately

Using Lead Management Software guarantees that these steps are taken as quickly as is possible. There is no better way to improve your prospect service than by using the right tools for the job. In this case, the right tool for the job is a lead management solution with an integrated lead dialer. Using a CRM for lead management will yield substandard results. Prospect Service is an art and science all its own. Being the first on the phone with a prospect is an important first step in changing the prospect into a customer. Speed to contact is important, but it’s not the total solution. Intelligent lead distribution that pairs sales rep to prospect based on expertise, licensure, or other criteria helps make sure meaningful connections are made.

If you have resolved to grow your business this year, Lead Management should be on your radar.

December 29, 2011 — Motivation and inspiration for selling can come from many places. To give you some fresh material for the “inspirational” section of your sales portal or even better, your Leads360 homepage message (hint, hint :-)), we conducted a poll of our sales team asking them for motivational sayings, quotes, movie lines, or whatever else they could think of that might inspire them. So from our sales team to yours – happy New Year and happy selling in 2012!!!

• “We’re adding a little something to this month’s sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.” -Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross
• “Chance favors the prepared mind.” – Louis Pasteur
• “Whether You Think You Can or Can’t, You’re Right”–Henry Ford
• “What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight – it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower
• “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” – Wayne Gretzky
• “Big team little me.” – author unknown
• “Forecheck, Backcheck, Paycheck!” – Gil Perreault
• “Patience; this is the greatest business asset. Wait for the right time to make your moves.” – J. Paul Getty
• “Only one thing counts in this world: get them to sign on the line which is dotted.” -Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross
• “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
• “Show me the money” – Jerry Maguire
• “Sell, sell, sell, my kids need money for college.” – David Villarama
• “The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.” – Steven Wright
• “Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.” – James Baldwin
• “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” – Albert Einstein
• “If it don’t make dollars, it don’t make sense” – Matt Wolcott @Leads360!
• “Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s about learning how to dance in the rain.” — Author Unknown
• “Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.”- William Jennings Bryan
• “The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward.” – Amelia Earhart