What milestones do leads hit between brand new and closed? Having them mapped out is an important aspect of reproducing your success. A lead passes through several dispositions after it enters your funnel. What are they? Probably a lead goes from “New” to “Contacted”; from “Contacted” to “Qualified”; etc… How are you ensuring that leads follow your established best practices? Or can sales reps work leads as they see fit?

If your sales reps are free to work leads according to their own standards, by what means are you able find out if leads are being ignored.

If you are using lead management, you can define these stages of the sales cycle to ensure that none of them are missed. All of your leads are being worked according to your best practices. It is not only possible to make sure that leads pass through all of the required milestones but to see performance metrics that show at what percentages, and at what speed leads are reaching milestones.

Creating an enforceable, repeatable approach to working leads is the best way to make sure that you are getting the most ROI on your marketing spend.

Today is one of those days that we really take pride in at Leads360 because we were able to release new research into the wild.  Putting our latest study together took a lot of effort from many team members and required developing new proprietary processes just to collect highly accurate data.   After that comes all of the analysis, writing, design, and other associated hard work.  Today it’s available for you to read, use and enjoy. Download our new mortgage industry research.

Mortgage Lenders Fail to Respond to Customer Inquiries

New Leads360 Research Study Highlights Surprising Gaps in Responsiveness; 74% of Lenders Fail to Respond to Prospective Customers Promptly

LOS ANGELES, CA–(Marketwire – Aug 10, 2011) - Leads360, the industry leader in sales lead management software which serves over 2500 banks, brokers, and lending institutions, today announced the findings of new research into sales effectiveness in the competitive residential loan origination market. This new study, entitled “Leading Mortgage Lenders Keep Prospects Waiting,” outlines how major mortgage lenders are failing to promptly and persistently respond to valuable new loan inquiries.

Leads360 studied the inquiry response patterns of large lenders and compared their ability to promptly respond to new prospects by phone and email as well as the companies’ ability to thoroughly follow-up with leads over time. “Mortgage leads are valuable and extremely time-sensitive with hundreds of companies potentially competing to offer a very similar loan,” said Nick Hedges, President and CEO of Leads360. “We were shocked to find most lenders so cavalier about responding to loan inquiries. This research shows that there is a very clear opportunity for lenders to improve their customer responsiveness, originate more loans and better serve their customers, their communities and their shareholders.”

According to the study, 74% of lenders, including leading mortgage originators JPMorgan Chase, CitiMortgage, and GMAC Mortgage, failed to call prospective customers within 24 hours of their initial inquiry. In general, lenders averaged more than 6 days to call a new loan inquiry and more than 50% of lenders failed to make more than a single attempt to call the leads they received. “Lenders should measure response times in minutes or seconds, not hours or even days,” said Mr. Hedges. “Lenders that continue to ignore the basic tenets of sales and customer service in the internet era will be destined to underperform compared to peers and competitors that have implemented the appropriate technologies and processes to compete at the speed that consumers expect.”

The new study, “Leading Mortgage Lenders Keep Prospects Waiting,” is available for download at Leads360.com. See how each of the following companies performed across four key metrics and benchmarks:

• Ameriprise Financial, Inc.
• Branch Banking and Trust Company, a subsidiary of BB&T Corporation
• JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. a subsidiary of JP Morgan Chase & Co.
• CitiMortgage, a subsidiary of CitiGroup, Inc.
• Flagstar Bank, a subsidiary of Flagstar Bancorp, Inc.
• GMAC Mortgage, a subsidiary of Ally Financial Inc.
• HSBC Mortgage Services, a subsidiary of HSBC Holdings plc (ADR)
• Huntington National Bank, a subsidiary of Huntington Bancshares Inc.
• Key Bank, a subsidiary of KeyCorp
• MetLife Bank, N.A. a subsidiary of MetLife, Inc.
• OneWest Bank, FSB
• PNC Mortgage, a subsidiary of The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc.
• Provident Funding Associates, L.P.
• Quicken Loans Inc.
• Regions Mortgage, a subsidiary of Regions Financial Corp
• SunTrust Mortgage, Inc. a subsidiary of SunTrust Banks, Inc.
• U.S. Bank, a subsidiary of U.S. Bancorp
• Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, a subsidiary of Wells Fargo & Company

About Leads360
Founded in 2004 and headquartered in Los Angeles, Calif., Leads360 develops software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions for managing sales leads. Distinguished by its focus on solutions that address the unique needs of businesses who sell to consumers, Leads360 is recognized as a market and technology leader, managing more than 40 million leads for over 5,000 clients. With a suite of solutions scaled for enterprise sales organizations as well as small businesses, the company offers the industry’s most comprehensive and configurable lead management platform.

Leads360 enables companies to distribute, track, analyze and convert sales leads using a customizable lead management workflow. Professional services, including training and sales process consulting, are also offered to deliver a highly effective solution for converting sales leads. Businesses look to Leads360 for solutions that allow them to maximize their investment in leads generated both online and from traditional sources, and ultimately increase sales closure rates for greater revenue. To learn more about Leads360, please visit www.leads360.com.

Follow Leads360 on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Leads360.

Here’s a post about lead management best practices in Salesforce.  It has some good suggestions for how to manage leads using the Salesforce CRM. But the problem with using a CRM to manage leads, of course, is that leads and customers are not the same thing and should be treated as different entities with different needs. Customer Relationship Management may offer some tools for managing leads, but the fact of the matter is that CRM is developed to accomplish the task of managing customer relationships, not establishing them. Devotees of CRM can think of lead management software as CRE, Customer Relationship Establishment. Lead management is built to achieve a few certain results better than any other solution; e.g., be the first to get a prospect on the phone and stay in regular contact with the prospect until it closes. If those simple truths sound obvious, like foregone conclusions, consider this new research on lead response in the mortgage industry which found that in general, lenders averaged more than six days to call a new loan inquiry and more than half of lenders failed to make more than a single attempt to call the leads they received.

The value of lead management software is that it distributes leads immediately to eligible sales reps by ringing their phone. When a prospect submits an online inquiry, that prospect will get a call from a rep in under a minute. That rep has the first opportunity to build a relationship with the lead, and is reaching the lead while the leads mind is focused on wanting to know more about the product or service the rep is offering.

The post linked at the top of this page talks about customizing statuses of leads in Salesforce to track leads through the sales cycle. Lead management software ships with a best practices workflow as well as lead prioritization to ensure that all leads are contacted quickly and followed up on in accordance with best practices and company policy.

Salesforce is great at helping companies manage customer relationships, but trying to convert leads with any CRM equals a decision to be slower and more inconsistent than any competitor who is using LMS.

Last week there was an interesting post on the SLMA blog. The SLMA asked all of their new members what were the biggest problems they were facing. There were five answers that generated the most responses. The problems break down 55%/32%/13% into three main categories: Generating Leads, Working Leads, and Calculating ROI. Click here for the full breakdown.

Each of these problems can be helped by lead management software. The first category of issues, Generating Leads, coming in with 55% of responses is not the primary focus of lead management software. There are some tools and solutions that can be leveraged to generate more leads, but this is not the core feature set of lead management software. What LMS can provide as a way of generating more leads is a custom form generator that enables you to create web forms that can be easily embedded on different landing pages on your website. Admittedly, this is only one piece of the puzzle when it comes to generating new leads. The purpose of this feature is really to ensure that leads captured on your website are followed up on in accordance with best practices. So it pre-supposes that you have a search marketing strategies in place.

The other two categories, Working Leads and Calculating ROI are problems that lead management software was developed to solve. Together, these two received 32% of the responses. The two answers that were listed under the rubric of working leads were “Managing Inquiries” and “Working with Sales Management on Follow-up.” Managing Inquires includes ensuring that leads are contacted quickly and followed up on consistently. Lead management achieves these goals with an intelligent distribution engine that works in conjunction with a lead dialer to make get sales reps on the phone with leads within minutes of leads inquiry. Automated Drip Marketing Emails and Lead Prioritization make sure that prospects are followed up on appropriately both via email and on the phone.

The third category, Calculating ROI, received 13%  of the responses. Lead management software offers you a clear view of the performance of all of your lead sources and sales reps. The reporting features are easy to use and comprehensive in their scope. If you want to review the efficacy of any aspect of your lead management strategy, it is easy to create a custom report to do so. You don’t have to stop at questions like, “How well are my lead sources performing?”  You can drill down to view performance data on every aspect of your business and answer questions like: “How well are my lead distribution strategies working?” or “What percentage of leads from a given lead source are qualified by one sales rep versus another?” Running reports helps you gain insights that can help you manage your sales team better and get better results.

Lead management software solves a lot of the most common problems.

We are again proud to sponsor Leadscon New York and are looking forward to seeing all of our partners and many of our clients on site. If you have not yet gotten your tickets please visit this link for a special discount: http://www.leadscon.com/special-discount-leads360.html

The virtues of Software as a Service are many. When people think about Software as a Service, it’s not uncommon for them to think about the ‘Service’ element in terms of technical support. And to be sure, customer service is a critical component of successful SaaS; but a less obvious part of this service is the speed and intelligence with which the software can develop in response to client needs. In the case of lead management software, data is generated whenever the software is used by clients. With software as a service it is possible to continue developing the software in response to how it is being used. When it is discovered that lead close rates are dramatically better when the prospect is contacted in under a minute, a solution is developed to ensure that you’ll be the first on the phone with the prospect. When it is discovered that the effectiveness of contact attempts drops off after the sixth contact attempt, leads are prioritized to be contacted six times by phone and only by email thereafter.

Companies using lead management software are able to create a winning workflow and maximize ROI for their company. It’s fully configurable, but out of the box it is set up to leverage the analysis of the massive amount of accumulated data. The accumulated data, its analysis, and the product features that are added are an often overlooked but major part of the service. And it should go without saying, that the more clients a SaaS provider has, the more data, the better the conclusions drawn about best practices.

The part of the service that contributes most directly to client success is one that most people rarely consider; that a SaaS platform is developed directly in response client use and client need.

Lead Management Software has some common elements with Customer Relationship Management software. So companies that are looking at SaaS solutions for the first time sometimes ask, “Which one do I need? Which one will work for me?” It is a question that should be answered by looking at what each solution does best, making an honest and realistic appraisal of your business needs and capabilities, and finding what fits. And if you are scratching your head and asking, what’s with the honesty and realism? This is business, not couples counseling; I understand and I’ll speak to that briefly. The reason why it is called out explicitly to be honest and realistic about your business needs is because there is a tendency for prospective CRM buyers to get caught up in all of the possibilities of what CRM can do. In short, the promise of CRM is that it fully revolutionizes the way you work and delivers better results throughout your business. The reality of CRM is that it fully revolutionizes the way you work, but it’s a top down revolution that hits significant obstacles in terms of acceptance and use by rank and file employees.

What lead management does best, in a nutshell, is get sales reps on the phone with the leads more intelligently and more quickly than any other solution. What is meant here by “more intelligently” is that Lead Management Software distributes leads based on configurable rules that match sales rep to lead according to criteria of your choosing. Is licensure and issue? Do you want the biggest opportunities to go to your most effective rep? Leads are sorted automatically according to your rules. Lead Management Software can even help you identify soft skills in your reps that make them more likely to close leads based on lead information; as in, “Oh you’re from Missouri? So am I! Great to meet you!” As far as “more quickly” goes, with Lead Management Software, the moment a prospect submits his online inquiry it is posted to the lead management system and all the phones of eligible sales reps ring. The quickest rep wins the lead. There is no faster way to contact a prospect and the effect of speed to contact on close rates is well known.

Lead Management Software also prioritizes leads and automates follow up, making it easy for reps to reach out to the right lead at the right time. Lead Management Software also has simple but powerful reporting capabilities to make it easy to see what’s working and what isn’t. Which lead sources, marketing efforts, sales reps, sales messaging are making you money and which aren’t.

What CRM does best is manage customer relationships. If you need to manage ongoing orders and keep track of your all the interactions an existing customer has with your company, than CRM is the right solution.

If your business needs are that you are trying to gain more customers, grow your business, close more deals, then Lead Management Software fits the bill. When weighing your options between LMS and CRM, Your North Star should be this question: “Do I want a solution that helps me get new customers or manage existing customers?”

In case you’re not familiar with it, the 80/20 rule states that 80% of the work on your sales team is done by 20% of your sales reps. This rule is not hard and fast, and the quantities may shift a bit over the months. But the point of the 80/20 rule isn’t to be a substantive analysis of the division of labor as much as it is to be a reminder for managers and small business owners that not all agents are created equal.

So the 80/20 rule reminds us that achievement is uneven on the sales team. But what can be done with that information? In what way is it actionable? How are high-performing sales reps rewarded? Clearly, the built in reward for high achieving sales agents is a higher income. That is no small motivation. Other prizes and accolades may incentivize the team to try harder, and reward those who are high performers.

But since these high performers are boosting company income, not just their own, it really makes sense to reward them with more opportunities. More chances to make connections with prospects and make deals. It makes sense to reward them with more leads. This does add a layer of complexity to lead distribution if you are distributing your leads by manually. It becomes necessary to monitor agent performance pretty closely and reward those who hit exceed defined goals with more opportunities.

But for sales teams using lead management software, this can be done automatically. Lead management has features that route leads based not only characteristics of the lead, but based on the performance of the sales reps. Two such features that reward high performing reps are Performance Based Lead Maximum Adjustments and Pipeline Thresholds.

Performance Based Lead Maximum Adjustments – This works by dynamically increasing or decreasing maximum lead allotments based on agent performance. Let’s say a sales rep is normally assigned three new leads a day. It is possible to increase his allotment based on a number of different performance measurements, for example, Speed to Contact Attempt or Conversion Rate. Here’s how Performance Based Lead Maximum Adjustment work.

Pipeline Thresholds – This works by temporarily pausing the flow of new leads to an agent whose pipeline is experiencing a bottleneck. The most common example of how this is used is when a user has too many leads that are New” and “Uncontacted.” If a threshold is reached, then the agent should become temporarily ineligible to receive new leads. Here’s how Pipeline Thresholds work.

So one feature looks at how the particulars of how a sales rep is working her leads. Is she fast? Is she successful? While the other feature looks at the state of her lead pipeline. Does she have too many leads backed up in a given status?

With these features, it is possible to reward your top achievers with more opportunities while reducing the load for reps who are underperforming. There really is no better way to motivate a sales team and reward top performers.

What’s the point of having sophisticated technology if it’s too difficult for your people to use? The age of the iPhone is upon us and people are used to the iPhone experience. It is an experience where you point at what you like to select it. You make it bigger by moving your fingers apart. You dismiss it with a swipe. It’s easy. And this way of interacting with computers is everywhere. People have this intuitive experience with their phones dozens or hundreds of times a day.

Then they get to work and log into their computers at work and, well, business software isn’t quite on the level of usability Angry Birds. Managing your sales funnel just isn’t quite as easy.

But it’s not really realistic to compare the experience of a smart phone to the experience of a desktop computer where a person is expected to do real work, and achieve real results. Closing all the sales in your pipeline is a task that is suitably complex that a smart phone cannot achieve it alone. A smart phone can help, but it’s a supporting player.

So when a smart phone can’t handle all of your business needs, we don’t hold it against it. It’s just a phone, after all. The computer, however, doesn’t get a free pass when compared to a smart phone from a usability standpoint. Why can’t computers and business applications be as easy as smart phones? Why can’t they be intuitive like a smart phone?

The reason for that is that computers have bigger more complex jobs to do. Smart phone to Computer is, strange as it may seem, not an ‘apples to apples’ comparison. So that’s the short answer to the question of why the computer and business applications can’t be as easy as the smart phone and it’s battery of apps.

But that’s not the whole story. The smart phone has set a high water mark for usability that business applications are striving to match. One such example exists in lead management software. Lead management software is highly configurable to allow sales managers and small business owners to create rules that govern the distribution of leads.  This creates a pipeline of leads for the sales rep that they are best suited to work with and most likely to close. Really useful, but by itself, not super usable.

But when a sales rep is ready for a new lead, that has been handpicked for him, what steps does he have to take to get it? If there is navigation, multiple pages, decisions, etc, involved in getting a lead, each obstacle will see more sales reps distracted or obstructed. When a sales rep wants a lead, she should be able to click a single button to be connected to the best available lead, as determined by lead prioritization and distribution rules. With a feature called Demand Connect offered by Leads360, leveraging all the business intelligence that goes into making the quickest and most strategic matchups between lead and rep is as easy as clicking a button.