Lead Distribution and the POWER of the now and the Next-Gen system

One of the most valuable enhancements to Leads360’s Mortgage Lead Manager was the addition of our powerful lead distribution system. This improvement came early on, over a year ago, and has not been enhanced much since then. We spent a lot of time architecting the original system, taking into account advice from our early customers, our partners like LowerMyBills and LendingTree, and our own experience from a combined 50 years of custom software development and sales enterprise management. What we came up with at the time was revolutionary. The key capability in our lead distribution system is the ability to have unlimited custom business rules based on the unique meta data of our clients. Let me rephrase that. We allow our customers to create specialize rules to properly route leads to users. These rules can be based on any data in the lead. For example. If you have a sales person that is very successful with leads from Orange County, CA and another sales person that is equally successful with leads from San Francisco, CA, you can appropriately route those leads based on geographic. This example is only the tip of the iceberg.

Over the last year we’ve learned a lot about lead distribution, and specifically how our solution is, and is not, working for our clients. We’ve spent the last year documenting those successes and failures and working toward the release of a new lead distribution system; a “Next-Gen” version that will set the sales lead management business on fire.

I do not want to get into specifics about how our new lead routing and distribution engine will work; we’re only about 2 months away from releasing it; but I will let you in on some of the issues we are successfully now addressing!

What is the most important factor for a sales person that deals with leads? Simple, contact ratio. The better the contact ratio, the better the close ratio. And the most effective way to increase the contact ratio for a sales person is to get him or her the right lead right away. That means, first figuring out what leads a sales person is best at (Salesman Metrics), then figuring out which leads match that criteria (Lead Criteria), combined with quantity and performance algorithms, and finally putting the lead into the hands of the sales person. All this needs to happen quickly. Quickly means in minutes, not in hours or days. That is where Leads360’s Next-Gen lead distribution system comes into play.

We allow administrators and managers to control which leads actually get distributed, when they get distributed and to whom. That includes new leads, old leads, leads that didn’t get contacted fast enough, leads that never got contacted, leads that couldn’t be sold for this that or the other reason, leads that became customers and those that didn’t. Basically, any lead that ever came into the system or will come into the system can be distributed appropriately based on independently created rules.

The big question is, how complicated is it? Well, the simple answer is it is as complicated as you make it. If you are a big organization, like a Lending Tree Mortgage Loans Division, with hundreds of Loan Officers, you probably will have a very complicated distribution system. If you are a smaller organization, it may not be as complicated. The key is that complication is in the eye of the beholder. Just because your lead distribution system is sophisticated, and maybe complicated to a sales person, it is something that you build once and fine tune it as you go. A sales person probably won’t even know what’s going on in the background. Really, you don’t want them to. If the right leads are getting to them, and they’re closing more deals, they’ll be happy not to know how it works. Similarly, I have a BMW, I love how drives, but I don’t care to look under the hood and figure out how the engine works.

Until now, whether you’re a small company or a huge mortgage shop like Lending Tree Loans, you had to build this internally; that is if you have the resources and the expertise. Leads360 is a software company. Always has been, always will be. We have the combined experience of great software creators and hundreds of mortgage companies to leverage in developing this system.

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