Five Tips for More Effective Lead Management

26 Aug Five Tips for More Effective Lead Management

After you start working with a lead provider, the leads begin pouring in. Suddenly, you’ve got a funnel filled with qualified, interested prospects who are ready to talk with you seriously about your policies. It can be easy to start feeling over-confident when you know that your leads are solid, but agents must remember that their work has only just begun.

Even if your leads have confirmed interest in hearing your sales pitch, this in no way guarantees that you’ll make a sale. Without the assistance of a lead provider, your odds are even slimmer, for a large percentage of your run-of-the-mill leads will not even be qualified to buy your policies, and another large portion of them will be uninterested in becoming a customer. No matter how high-quality your leads are, you’re going to have to optimize your lead management strategy in order to convert those leads into paying clients. Lead management includes all the strategies and steps that make up this conversion process.

The process begins with qualification, which is a large part of what a lead provider will do for you. If you’re not using an external service, this step is of utmost importance. It does take a lot of time and energy, but is enormously helpful in eliminating leads that will go nowhere right off the bat. The second step is to make your first contact and give your prospect the information they’ll need to decide whether or not they are interested in hearing more. Lead providers will usually make this first contact for you and ensure that the prospect is engaged and interested before passing them on to the agent.

From here, the success or failure of the agent to make a sale is contingent upon how well they can manage their leads. There’s always room for improvement in this department, no matter how strong a sales team is. Here are a few key points to remember when assessing your own lead management strategy.

• Get everyone on the same page. Does your team understand the difference between a contact and a lead? It’s important to define when exactly a contact become a lead, what standards must be met in order for that lead to be considered as a qualified prospect, and when that prospect should be transferred to a closer. This helps teams optimize their workflow and ensure that they’re coming to the prospect with the right information and approach at the right time.

• Assign leads swiftly. Studies have shown that companies that contact leads within an hour of their expressing interest were 60 times more likely to get qualified leads than those who took over 24 hours. Experts attribute this to the “wow” factor, as in “Wow! That was fast!”. This can work to your enormous advantage, especially if you adopt a call transfer service that can make sure you are the first on the line. But make sure you’re prepared! The biggest reason more companies aren’t rushing to contact leads as soon as they can dial the number is a lack of a proper distribution schema. By distributing leads swiftly, your sales team will become far more efficient.

• Nurture, nurture, nurture. On average, about a quarter of new leads are sales-ready, and another quarter are probably never going to purchase a policy. These odds can be improved if you employ a lead provider, but you’ll still end up with a sizeable proportion of leads who will require many additional phone conversations, information, and attention before they’re ready to buy. Place a high priority on your lead nurturing if you want to ensure the highest possible return from your lead generation efforts. Patience is king!

• Scrub your data. Set up systems that can detect duplicate leads by email address, zip code, and phone number to avoid bothering the same person more than once (what could be worse for inspiring confidence in your prospect?). A lead provider will ensure zero lead duplication, but if you’re not working with one,, this process is crucial to your leads’ functionality.

• Pay attention to analytics. A good sale team will keep careful record of their processes, from lead generation to sales closure. Measure everything and you’ll be rewarded with helpful metrics like the amount of resources dedicated to procuring each lead, the most reliable sources for leads, the magnitude of each sales opportunity, the average time needed to nurture a lead and so on. Doing so will help you understand how many leads you need to bring in, what the best types of leads are for your team, and what your budget for acquiring and nurturing them should be. 

Without a thoughtful lead management strategy, the leads that you’re paying a lead provider to provide for you (or pouring your own time and energy into sniffing out) will be far more likely to go to waste. Give your team their best chances at successful sales by bringing your approach to the table and considering carefully how your management strategies can be refined and improved – your agents will have a far easier job, and their ability to close on sales will only improve.