I recently read a great research paper on B2B lead management best practices by Laura Ramos at Forrester. I composed a letter to Laura regarding my thoughts on the subject and in particular the similarities between her research and Leads360’s philosophy on the topic.
You can read my letter on our Leads360 blog at: http://leads360.blogspot.com/2007/04/notes-to-laura-ramos-forrester-on.html
You might say it is the name of one of our competitors. That’s true, but this post isn’t about them, see my post on embracing your competition. This is about return on investment (ROI) on leads and lead management software. One of the common sales tactics you hear in selling software is “benefits, not features.” Unfortunately features are more common than benefits. The #1 benefit of lead management should be ROI on your leads and the use of the software. In 2007 Leads360 is focusing significantly more attention to this part of the business. Our goal is to demonstrate significant lead ROI in your first 3 months; including the first month!
Over the past 2 ½ years we have helped thousands of customers get significant return on their investment in using Leads360. We’re experts at it and we can do it for you. Check out our new ROI calculator on our website and speak to one of our sales associates to get a full ROI analysis using our compressive ROI calculator.
Contact ratios are the most fundamental metric in a lead tracking strategy and are the basis for other metrics such as application or conversion. For your mortgage guys it’s a simple equation:
Higher Contact Ratio = More Loans Funded
I’ve been pushing our professional services team to ask this question more frequently of our clients and have heard mixed results. Some customers know exactly how many leads are being contacted and how quickly. Others have no idea they can even track this. Wherever you fall on this scale, studying your contact ratio can have significant payback.
First, start to benchmark the percentage of leads are actually being contacted using the contact ratio summary report. Then contact your Leads360 account manager to help you strategize on ways to improve the contact percentage and speed to contact.
Remember, leads that are contacted in the firsts 15 minutes are 70% more likely to close than leads contacted after the first 15 minutes.
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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We’ve got some pretty incredible things in the pipe right now. Some of the features and functionality we are planning to release in the coming months will really take Sales Lead Management and Tracking to new heights. We are especially focusing our efforts in the area of lead distribution and metrics reporting. One of the keys to a successful lead program is increasing contact ratios. Some argue this is the single most important factor in converting sales leads into customers. The faster your sales people act on new leads and the more attempts they make to contact those leads, the more likely they will convert them into customers. And that’s the whole point of having a lead tracking program, convert more leads.
We will be releasing an enterprise version of our already powerful Lead Distribution system that will revolutionize the way leads are routed and re-routed to sales people. Additionally, we will be delivering powerful tools to monitor, measure and enforce contact ratios. These enhancements, in conjunction with the hundreds of other new products will solidify Leads360 as the premier provider of sales lead management solutions, above even Salesforce.com and Siebel.
One of the new buzz words in the CRM world is Customer Acquisition Management. Some of the big CRM companies are starting to recognize what we already know; that there is a whole world of customers that really don’t need an expensive CRM, but really need sophisticated lead management at the customer acquisition level. Customer Acquisition Monument (CAM) is basically a fancy word for lead management. When you are trying to turn a lead into a customer, you are in the acquisition phase. CAM is about the tools a company uses to maximize the likelihood that lead will become a customer.
Answer: Any business that thrives on sales. Small startups to large corporations can all benefit from an effective lead management strategy. For some companies this means building out a simple process on a white board, or creating an excel spreadsheet to keep track of prospects. For other companies it might require complex CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solutions to really nurture sales and customers. Wherever your needs lie, software can help.
That’s what has always excited me about software. As a business person I’ve had to deal with people and processes across many different dynamics. In an attempt to make these different pieces mesh together I’ve developed web based software applications to address every aspect of business automation.
I’ve been developing custom software applications for almost 6 years now. When I got out of college in 1996 I went to work for a product development company and loved the process of developing products; from concept to packaging and all the steps along the way. But what I realized was that there were so many steps along the way; big and small. At the time I worked for a medium size company, about 55 million in sales with about 100 employees. I struggled with trying to get each department and each step of the product development cycle to mesh and produce quality products in reasonable time frames. I stumbled a lot and I built a lot of Excel spreadsheets to try to deal with it. But I really couldn’t get widespread process adoption.
Eventually I left that company and began working in technology. That’s where is stumbled into the software world. I realized that I could address all the frustrations I’d seen in business with software. I soaked up as much as I could and eventually started my own software consulting firm, ThinkLogic, which has been mildly successful.
In the past year and half I’ve been CEO of Leads360, which has become a thriving technology company. Our Lead Manager application is growing very rapidly and I'm extremely proud of it.
This blog is intended to educate readers on lead management best practices and why having a lead management software is valuable for just about any business. Businesses cannot function without sales; this is an obvious fact. However, while many businesses have a sales force, they often do not have sales force management.
The term lead management is often heard in combination with sales force management, and it makes sense because they go hand in hand. A sales organization is only as effective as how well they are managed. Implementing a streamlined process in conjunction with a powerful software platform, can drastically improve your sales operation and most importantly your bottom line.
There is a lot more to be said, and I look forward to sharing the experience and knowledge I’ve gained as CEO of several software companies. Over the past two years I’ve posted as CEO of Leads360.com, a software company whose flagship product is an enterprise lead management and sales force automation application.
Don’t think of this blog as an advertisement for my company. Of course, I want you to use our product, but if nothing else, get some value out of my posts. If you learn one thing that positively affects your sales organization, then I’m satisfied.
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