How quickly and consistently are your agents following up with prospects? It’s well known that speed to contact is the single greatest contributor to successfully establishing a relationship with a new prospect. (For the unconvinced, check out this study on the effect of speed on lead conversion rates).

And that when it is not possible to reach a prospect immediately, following up with them via emails and phone calls strategically, (i.e., in accordance with proven best practices) is the next most important step that a sales rep or enrollment counselor can take to try to establish a relationship.

So are these things being done? Are calls being made immediately when leads are received? Are leads being followed up on? If you’re using a lead management system, it’s easy to take steps to ensure that every lead is called immediately, and followed up on appropriately. It’s automatic.

But if you are not using a lead management system, there is still a way to see how quickly leads are being called and how consistent is the follow up. Secret shop your reps. Get a Google voice number and submit a bogus lead with it. See how quickly it gets called and how often. I think the results might surprise you. Even in the biggest for profit schools, mortgage lenders, and insurance carriers sometimes earn failing grades when it comes to following up with leads.

That’s a good question. Who needs a call right now? Who has been called enough, who has not? Whom did I tell I would call back today at 2:15? These questions are simple enough, but answering them is not. Answering the question, “Who is the best lead to call at this exact moment?” requires knowledge of the following factors:

Is there a lead with whom I have scheduled an appointment?

Which lead is brand new?

Which lead came in today, but has only been called once?

Which lead is being ignored by a colleague and is available to be taken by way of shark tank distribution?

Answering these questions would give you a list of leads among which you would find the next best lead to call. But answering each of those questions takes time. And each step of the way there are opportunities for distraction and the temptation to quit researching and make the decision based on partial information.

The sales manager or small business owner may be inclined to say, “So what? This is the sales rep’s job, to keep track of their opportunities and do what it takes to close deals.” And this is true. Administrative drudgery is part of everyone’s job. But when there’s a simple shortcut to take to cut through all of that type of work and focus on selling, shouldn’t reps take that shortcut? Shouldn’t they spend more time selling and less time figuring out to whom they should be selling.

Demand Connect is a feature that is part of Dial-IQ, Leads360’s intelligent lead dialer. With it, it is possible to pull the next best lead with the click of a button. Let sales reps put an end to the endless estimating, reconnoitering, and prioritizing. Get them on the phone with the lead who most needs a call.

Leads360 released a study today evaluating the enrollment processes at the top private sector higher-education schools in the US. Unfortunately, many schools had a hard time earning a passing grade, you can download the full report here.

We thought we’d provide some practical advice on Coffee for Closers, providing a few tips for admissions departments at for-profit schools to improve their approach to recruiting high quality students.

Tip #1 – Don’t Underestimate the Power of an Email: Many prospective students do their research online, and make their first inquiry to a school by filling out and submitting an inquiry form. A simple way to instill candidate confidence in the professionalism of the school and provide additional information relevant to that particular candidate’s interest is through email. Remember to use each email touch-point effectively, with the optimal number of e-mails being two to four according to research.
Tip #2 – Be the First to Follow-up via Phone: Leads360 research has also demonstrated attempting to respond to an inquiry within one minute of its receipt increases the chances of enrolling the prospect by 391%. This dramatic increase is due to the fact that prospective students are most likely to engage with a school right after making their initial inquiry. Schools can also increase their success by not only being the first school to contact the student but also matching the candidate to the ideal admissions personnel through “skill-based routing.”
Tip #3 – Calling too much or too Infrequently can be Detrimental: Just as important as the ideal number of calls – six per previous research – is properly timing contact attempts. Calling three times during the first day, once on day three, again on day four, and a sixth and final time on day 11 or 12, is the optimal call attempt strategy according to research on building the optimal inquiry response strategy.

I was filling out a subscription form the other day that asked for my birthday. I accidentally entered December 2011 instead of the year of my birth and a prompt came up – “Are you really from the future?” I had to laugh, but at the same time, I thought to myself, if I knew what December 2011 had in store, what a powerful place to be.

To know what was going to happen with consumer spending this holiday season, mortgage rates, other trends that might impact the consumer sales market would give me insight and a competitive advantage. So that got me thinking, while we may not be able to see the future, why not use all the information at hand to make the best possible predictions?

In consumer sales the volume of leads and the time to close is so short that time is money, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to dump leads on sales reps and let them sort it out. More sophisticated consumer sales organizations use lead scoring based on predictive modeling, using a combination of information the consumer supplied, plus supplemental data provided by 3rd party services. That predictive score, along with data about sales rep performance, helps the system decide which leads get top priority and even which rep gets assigned. All designed to improve the close rate, of course.

So if you’re shopping around for a lead management solution, keep in mind there is more to the Lead360 solution than just distribution, and that difference might be just want you need to predict the future and edge out the competition.

Alec Baldwin’s legendary monologue in the movie Glengarry Glen Ross is concluded with the following sentences, “These are the new leads. These are the Glengarry leads. And to you, they’re gold. And you don’t get them. Because to give them to you is just throwing them away. They’re for closers.”

This oft-quoted monologue may or may not be your idea of motivational speaking. But putting aside the discussion of the virtues of tough love, this last part of the speech is a fundamental reality on many if not most sales teams. If you can close leads, you will be given leads. If you cannot, you will not. The incentive to succeed is more opportunities for success. The consequences of failure are fewer opportunities.

Given that this principal is so prevalent on sales teams; it stands to reason that any tool that aims to help sales managers and small business owners manage their funnel should have features that facilitate this doling out of opportunities.

One of the principal benefits of using a lead management system is the ability to quickly and intelligently distribute leads to sales reps. But truly intelligent lead distribution rewards successful sales reps by automatically increasing the number of leads they are eligible to receive based on their hitting performance goals.

Similarly, in order to really make sure your leads are winding up in the most capable hands, it must be necessary to be able to temporarily halt the flow of leads to sales reps whose pipelines are experiencing a bottleneck.

When one sales rep is exceeding his performance goals and another is overwhelmed by all the leads coming into his funnel, it should be possible to re-route new leads so they land in the most fertile soil. With lead management software, it is.

When a process breaks down, there are many different approaches to finding the cause and repairing it. But if diagnostic efforts could be distilled into three words, they might be: Identify, Isolate, and Eliminate. This approach is a good guide regardless of if you are fixing a pinball machine, treating a patient, or trying to patch holes in a sales process. Identify the problem, isolate its root cause, and eliminate it. It’s a sound strategy but it is easier said than done.

In the example of a sales process that is failing to perform as needed, it is necessary to have a system that benchmarks and keeps track of work performed by sales reps. Lead Management Software is the best fit for this case. The reason for this is that Lead Management Software, more than CRM, more than Marketing Automation solutions directly addresses the question of “How effectively are my sales leads being worked?”

Benchmarking and tracking the work of sales reps is handled easily by a lead management system that has a robust reporting engine. Small business owners and sales managers who use a lead management solution see ROI data served up in an actionable, easy to read format. Having access to performance data on every stage of your sales process enables you to make real time decisions that help you course correct when lead sources or sales reps are underperforming.

In recent years, an increasing number of regulations have been put in place prevent businesses from operating in bad faith. Whether or not you agree with the efficacy of these regulations, they have become part of what it means to do business. This is especially true if you do business in an industry where a pattern of abuse has been discerned by regulators. Two examples of this would be mortgage lending and for profit education.

There are many reputable businesses trying to stay afloat in both mortgage lending and for-profit education. Remaining in compliance with current regulations is part of the equation for these businesses. It’s not enough to be competitive; there is the added work of not just remaining compliant, but remaining demonstrably compliant.

In the event of a compliance audit, two of the main ways that organizations can demonstrate their compliance with regulations are by being able to provide scripts that their reps used when speaking to prospects and by recording phone calls. When using a lead management system with an integrated lead dialer it is easy to create and maintain sales scripts and keep audio recordings of all phone calls.

Being sensitive to the needs of your prospects is the way to turn them into customers. It’s always important when talking about prospects or leads to remember that they are not the same thing as customers. Everyone knows that providing quality customer service is a critical component to the success of every business. Customer service should be thought of as a set of best practices for satisfying customers to maximize the chances that they become or remain repeat customers. Similarly, prospect service should be thought of as a set of best practices the goal of which is to maximize the chance that a prospect becomes a customer.

From a sales reps perspective, being sensitive to the needs of prospects involves contacting the prospect quickly and following up with them consistently. Establishing the kind of relationship with a prospect that leads to the prospect becoming a customer depends on nothing more heavily than prompt professional communication.

From the perspective of the sales manager or small business owner, being sensitive to the needs of prospects means quickly assigning the right lead to the right sales rep. When one sales rep has expertise that equips him to provide better service to a certain segment of prospects, that rep should be given the opportunity to provide service to those leads.

Sales managers must also be able to spot trends in performance metrics that indicate which campaigns, agents, and lead routing strategies are performing. Matching prospect to rep quickly and intelligently is work that must be done continuously and automatically in order to make sure that sales reps can provide the best possible service to prospects.

Using a lead management system, all of the pieces of prospect service fall into place and more prospects become customers.

Email Marketing is important. It’s a good way to keep your name in front of prospects, letting them know that they are still on your mind. It enables you to affordably target different segments of your prospect base with relevant messaging. Providing you are careful to avoid spamming; receiving regular, relevant content from your company builds trust and strengthens your brand.

But as prospects are becoming more tech savvy, and their email inboxes are becoming increasingly populated with marketing emails, the tendency to skip over emails that contain marketing messages is gradually becoming more entrenched.

When prospects receive emails at regular intervals, they will either conclude, “I am on Your Company’s mailing list.” Or, “Mike Jones at Your Company is trying to reach me.” There is a big difference between these two conclusions in terms of customer experience.  And whichever conclusion they draw says a lot about how they regard your company and what kind of service they will expect to receive.

So how can Email Marketing be executed most effectively? Without being perceived as spam? Without giving prospects the sense that they are just a name on a mailing list? Assuming first that your Email Marketing practices are sound, (e.g., not too many emails, always containing relevant communication) the next best thing you can do to make sure that your emails penetrate the spam barrier is to follow up on emails with phone calls.

So using a Lead Management system that can automatically send out targeted relevant emails is only half the battle. To leverage this technology while effectively providing a human touch, the Lead Management system must also have Lead Prioritization and User Scripting capabilities. Using Lead Prioritization it is possible to put a lead at the top of a sales reps lead queue the same day that an automated email has been sent. And with User Scripting, the sales rep will have easy access to verbiage that references the automated marketing email. As in, “Hi Ms. Wilson, This is Mike Jones, I sent you an email today about some opportunities that have come up as a result of current market conditions. I wanted to check in and see if you had a chance to look it over, and if you have a couple minutes to talk through some scenarios.”

Lead Management software automates the following:

• 1. Sending of Marketing Emails
• 2. Prioritization of Leads
• 3. Putting Scripts in front of sales reps that are relevant to that leads unique history

Taken alone any one of these features is powerful. Used in a coordinated way, in an integrated Lead Management system, they are able to successfully leverage the benefits of technology (speed, automation, etc.) without losing the human touch.