Best practice guide to earning (much) more from your leads
All companies whose business involves constantly renewing their customer base (in the property, renovation or wealth management sectors, for example) need to generate or buy new leads on a daily basis, particularly on the Internet.
According to our findings, the majority of these companies complain that they have difficulty converting these new prospects, and that their ROI is too low. This problem is always analysed from the point of view of the intrinsic quality of the leads (the fault of webmarketing or the lead producer), rarely taking into account the conditions under which they are handled commercially. Yet these are a crucial factor in a company's ability to convert new leads, especially when they come from online media (website, blog, etc.).
Let's take a look at some good practices for effective lead management.
What is a lead?
On the Internet, a lead is a commercial contact who has qualified his or her profile and needs in order to initiate a sales process. If the lead is handled appropriately, it may become a qualified prospect and then a customer.
In the meantime, this first commercial contact remains fragile. As prospects are often defined by their needs, rather than by their interest in a product or brand that has been perfectly identified - particularly in the case of the millions of leads bought each year on the Internet, collected on white-label forms - they are still likely to continue their research and to multiply their requests to competitors.
Consequently, responsiveness is the most important quality for the effective handling of leads collected online. Automating this process, as proposed by the Leadvalue solution, appears to be the best approach to meeting this fundamental need for responsiveness.
Bad practices at the root of low ROI
Poorly-targeted acquisition campaigns, vague online content and other abusive incentives to convert produce insufficient levels of engagement, and therefore just as many bad leads.
But while a bad lead sooner or later becomes a disqualified prospect, a good lead can just as easily be lost if it is not handled in the right conditions. In this respect, the figures we have at our disposal bear witness to inappropriate practices, which are the source of a great deal of wastage:
- Around 20% of leads distributed by email to the sales team are never processed.
- 15% of leads are lost because no contact is made on the day they are requested.
- 25% of prospects do not respond 3 days after their request.
- On contact platforms, only 80% of prospects confirm that they have been called by the selected service providers (even though these service providers have paid to obtain their contact details!)
Although it is the first "work tool" designed to distribute new prospects, a simple e-mail inbox should not be used to receive leads (all the more so when their acquisition cost or volume is high): address errors, SPAM e-mails, e-mails lost in the middle of dozens of others, difficulties in prioritising an uninteresting e-mail over another.
A processing time that is too long can often be explained by referral errors, or difficulties in identifying the appropriate sales representative: A single person in charge of redistributing the leads received is not always able to control the entire flow of leads in real time, or to identify the best contact within the company for each prospect; and when leads are dispatched by Business Unit before being redirected to the right contact, it is often too late for the lead to be handled by the sales rep.
These data indicate that it is imperative to adopt a rigorous organisation for handling leads, as well as paying attention to the quality of the data collected online. However, the indicators needed to assess the responsiveness of lead handling - or indeed lead management at all - are not available without an integrated, centralised solution, as we offer with Leadvalue.
For efficient lead handling
In addition to best practice in lead generation (web marketing levers, source of traffic, quality of information provided, consistency of UX, incentive and commitment, etc.), we look here at the key points of an effective technical solution for optimising the conversion of leads received.
Scoring
Upstream analysis of the data received should enable you to prioritise leads with high added value, or even automatically disqualify certain leads (duplicates, wrong number, description of need containing certain "forbidden" words, etc.).
Provided you have a sufficient volume of data, this scoring should be automated by constantly analysing the performance of past leads: validation and conversion rates according to source, activity, geolocation and certain answers filled in online (form from which the lead originated). The score obtained may be used to disqualify leads below a minimum score, but more often it will determine a priority level for sales processing, while leaving the sales rep free to re-evaluate this score according to his or her own assessment.
Qualification or live distribution?
The decision to qualify leads by telephone or allocate them directly depends essentially on the volume of business. A team that is overloaded at certain times or undersized to absorb your flow of leads will delay the handling of each lead; in this case, telephone qualification, by a dedicated service, guarantees maximum responsiveness while filtering out the wrong leads, which are a source of fatigue for the team.
Whenever technically possible, direct assignment in real time is preferable, as it provides a faster, more complete response to each prospect while avoiding the need to receive two successive calls.
Responsiveness is paramount: on the intermediation platforms that distribute their leads, 70% of prospects contract with the service provider who called first.
Definition and automation of distribution rules
Live distribution requires the automatic application of pre-defined allocation rules. In response to this problem, the Leadvalue solution offers to set up an efficient algorithm that takes into account various assignment constraints: skills, lead geolocation and individual workload, so that each lead is handled by the sales person best able to respond to it.
Reactivity and reassurance
Whatever the responsiveness of your processes, a minimum of reassurance is necessary to avoid any loss of leads. Once their request has been validated online, your visitor should not be left waiting: will my request be processed? When will it be? By whom? The need to reassure prospects as soon as possible by reassuring them that you will be able to satisfy their needs is all the more vital for all leads purchased via intermediation platforms.
Reassuring a visitor is not limited to displaying an instant message indicating that their request has been received. The responses to be provided and automated, by email or preferably on a dedicated landing page such as Leadvalue's, must, as soon as the request has been validated, remind the user of the company's identity (public data).s identity (public data), its skills (positioning, expertise, key values), and the identity and full contact details of its dedicated sales representative. Finally, communicating reviews from former customers considerably strengthens the commitment of your new prospects: online ratings and reviews are the number one criterion for selecting a company online.
A response aimed at confirming your lead's choice should help to keep them sufficiently "warm" while they await your call, encouraging them to let you know their availability or contact the sales person in charge directly.
Lead follow-up and ROI
The rate at which leads are converted into customers inevitably depends on the qualities of the sales team. That being said, if we consider the constraints associated with processing the considerable flow of leads encountered in certain business sectors (eg: real estate, renovation work, asset management advice, etc.) the sales effort should also be facilitated by the use of an appropriate CRM: pre-written emails, automatic follow-ups of prospects, management of tasks to be carried out on a daily basis, alerts, etc.
The use of a CRM should make it possible to monitor and measure individual efforts by providing managers with KPIs designed to assess their team's compliance with best practice: lead processing time (first call), lead reporting rate (to combat excessive disqualification), rates of appointments, offers submitted and conversions.
Align marketing and sales
The ultimate aim of tracking conversion is to optimise acquisition costs by tailoring budgets to the best sources of leads. Which campaigns convert the most? Who are the best lead suppliers? Here again, an effective lead management solution needs to provide these answers, so that marketing and sales can be aligned on the basis of objective data: we need to go beyond what the sales team feels by measuring detailed performance.
Convert more leads!
By automating best practice: distribution, contact and reassurance, dedicated lead management interfaces (desktop + mobile application) and detailed reporting, the right technical solution can remove all the barriers to conversion and turn more leads into customers.
Sponsored article. The expert contributors are authors who are independent of the appvizer editorial team. Their comments and positions are their own.
Article translated from French