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Everything we know about the lead business from everyone at the Leads360 family. From online lead providers like LowerMyBills.com to Mortgage Lead Management best practices. We'll tell you what we know and what we've learned.  

The Long View

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Some time ago, at the beginning of the poker craze I read a book about the game and the people who play it. The book was Poker Nation by Andy Bellin. It was an entertaining read: a survey of a subculture that at the time was still outside of the mainstream. The book only dealt briefly with how to play poker, but it was that section of the book that yielded an enduring insight.

The principle that the author espouses is to consider all the poker games that you play in a given year as one long game. Don’t get too worked up about any individual game because isolated from the greater trend, a single game is really pretty meaningless. Meaningless not because it can’t be learned from, but meaningless because the events of one day are too small of a sample size to make any worthwhile judgment about a players overall ability.

Instead the author suggests, take the long view. Ask the question, “Are you up or down for the year?” This is a much better way to measure your success than the outcome of the game you played today. Because today, no matter who you are, you could have won or you could have lost. Elite players have bad days, and losers get lucky.

This advice is so obvious, it’s common sense. So I wonder, why did it even need to be said? And why did it stick with me after the rest of the anecdotes in this book passed from my memory? I think the reason is partly because it is human nature to celebrate a victory and bemoan a loss. Further, any particular win or loss is a potent emotional experience because playing poker, like sales, is a short view activity. To succeed in poker or in sales, you must bring your entire focus to what is happening in this hand, in this moment, on this sales call. Not feeling victorious after winning, or feeling defeated after losing requires making an immediate mental shift from short view to long view.

So taking the long view is a way to get better results in poker and sales? Yes. Well partially yes. I think in a certain respect it’s more of a matter of “First do no harm.” Because poker, like sales, is a game of confidence. No matter how steely your nerves, your confidence simply will not benefit from the roller coaster ride of “Today I’m up! Today I’m down!” It is important to not be too affected by short term successes and failures because they can lead to changes in your behavior, and changes in your confidence. Changes that are inherently impulsive and not strategic.

Taking the long view allows for incremental improvements and more strategic thinking. And here is just one area where sales is a much better enterprise than poker. In sales and marketing it’s easy to take the long view.  Taking the long view means measuring results of marketing campaigns, sales reps, lead sources, lead distribution strategies, etc. Find out what works and repeat it. Add up all the successes and failures to find the trends in your strategies that are yielding results.

Using a lead management system that has robust reporting capabilities enables you to see what works in terms of marketing campaigns, lead contact strategies, email nurturing campaigns, agent performance, etc. Moreover, it’s possible to leverage your winning strategy as an enforceable sales process for all of your reps. The benefits of using a lead management solution are many, but one of the best benefits of all is that adopting an intelligent lead management system doesn’t require you to start at zero and begin a program of trial and error. Lead management software comes with baked in best practices that have been proven to increase contact and close rates.

So if you have in your hand a lead management SaaS provider that continuously researches and analyzes what patterns of behavior lead to higher close rates, and then optimizes the software to encourage or require those behaviors, you should go all in.

Pass the Beans!

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