Carpool Confessions are conversations that take place with Lead Generation professionals on the way to and from work.

I don’t know how many times lead buyers need to see this information, frankly not enough and why I say that because it finally clicked for me too. Maybe it clicks every time I see these types of studies. In fact, I recommend that every Lead Buyer or manager print this white paper up and pin it to your office wall. You should base your companies mantra or mission of this report. Speed is key!

LeadQual put together an excellent white paper that reiterates an older MIT study. It again proves how important it is to call leads within 5 minutes. Stop for a moment, open the white paper here and look at the chart. Notice how your chances of success decrease DRAMATICALLY after the first 5 minutes. People, 5 minutes goes by very fast! Calling leads within 10 minutes will not cut it! Do you even know the average speed to contact is at your company? If not, it should be priority number one to figure out how you are going to find this data and then benchmark it and improve it. I am certain that it is not as fast as you think.

I really liked the chart that showed the success rates by day! It backs up all the times have I had told people to buy leads on the weekend. Weekend leads perform better, period, enough said.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Glenn Houck, Co-Founder of LeadQual on the way to work yesterday and we discussed the white paper and more. If you have buyers struggling with leads, that you don’t think are getting the point, as much as you have told them, have them listen to this call.

Take a listen

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We have sporadically discussed lead management benchmarks here for the past few weeks and have an ongoing survey running that continues to be very tight race. I want to bring it up again and source an 8 month old study performed by MIT. The study has been out for sometime, as I just mentioned, and I have been putting off discussing it for a while now. Not because I think it is unimportant, because it is very important for people to read. I simply just had more time sensitive topics that arose and continued to put it off.

The study is probably the most complete and detailed report on the topic. Its goal was to find the best time of the day, week and time from creation is the most optimal in terms of contact and qualification of a lead. This report literally gives everyone many of the benchmarks we have been discussing.

I want to point out a few interesting findings:

• The odds of contacting a lead in the first 5 minutes is 100 times more likely then in 30 minutes. 5 times more likely then in 10 minutes.

I hear every day, “I call the leads minutes after I received the email, but I still am never the first to contact the lead”. First, notice that they say email. Usually people complaining about be last to contact a lead receive them by email and do not use a lead management system. There our no excuse for not having a lead management system these days! Well, I guess stupidity will always be an excuse, so you do have one.  Based on those statements we began monitoring email open rates of all our clients and found that on average, during working hours, it took 30 minutes for buyers to open the email and read the lead data. THIRTY MINUTES!! This leaves me speechless every time I mention the time.

• The likely hood of contacting the lead after the first hour decrease by ten times.
• Regarding the time of day that is best to contact a lead: “4 to 6pm is the best time to call to make contact with a lead.  It is 114% better than calling at 11 to 12am, right before lunch.  (We did not feel 7-8am was a standard work hour.)”

The study leaves out some really good opportunities and this is the first. They did not take into account off hours in their study which I think leaves out really good opportunities. During my time of managing leads we had a few guys that would come in very early, before 7:30 am and called leads and had great success. One actually got most of deals and work done before 9:00 am. Yes, he called people at 7:30 am and people were fine with it. It takes guts, but if you consider the norm they will too.

• The study found that Wednesday and Thursday were the best days to contact a lead. Thursday being the best out of the two.
• Thursdays were also the best day for a lead to convert from a contact to a qualified lead and Fridays were reported as the worst.

This brings up another short coming of the report. It does not take into count weekends. Yes, Thursdays are good days,but through my own 3 month study weekends out performed weekdays for contactability and application rates. I have mentioned this before, but this takes into count leads that were generated on the weekend, not necessarily called on the weekend. Many of the leads in my study were not even called until Monday, but still performed better. It would have been nice to have a little MIT validation for my findings, but for some reason they thought that sales people worked typical 9-5 Monday – Friday hours. Obviously not the case.

In September I will be joining Chris Meerschaert on a panel at the TargusInfo Lead Quality Summit to discuss our experiences from both sides of the table. One surprising find, after transferring over to the sell side of the business is the disparity between people who work leads fundamentally correct and those that don’t. It gets even worse for other verticals, especially insurance verticals and one of the last statements from the study encapsulated my sentiment and experiences.

Our president signed up with the top lead provider to get quotes on his mortgage.

1-      He received a total of 7 calls.
2-      The first one called in only 30 minutes.
3-      The last one called on the lead 3 days later.

Does that last one who called realize that the odds of qualifying this lead are several thousand times less than if they had called in five minutes?

Not only that, what about the fact that he only received 7 calls TOTAL? Good companies that succeed with leads will call the lead 7 times the first week alone. I know it sounds brutal, but work the leads and continue to call until they get a hold of the client.

Our Sales Manager and several of our sales reps filled out web-based health insurance questionnaires with several of the top lead providers we partner with in the insurance industry:

1-      Our Sales Manager filled his lead out at 4pm, (the optimal time for someone to reach him according to our data.)  He didn’t get a single call that day.  He got his first of 5 calls at noon the next day (almost the worst time to call), and the last one two days later.
2-      One rep filled his lead form out with another top lead provider at 8:30am (the second best time for someone to call), and had his first call in 1 minute, his second in 3 minutes, his 3rd in an hour and 45 minutes.
3-      Another rep also at 8:30am, and he got one call in 2 minutes, and 2 more calls the next day.
4-      Another rep filled theirs out at 10am and got the first call in 2 hours and never noticed any additional calls.

What a big difference between experiences of each lead. How about the #4? He received one call, that was it. Now it could have been because is filter was in low demand, but you must continue to call the lead until you get a contact. I spoke to a gentlemen the other day that stopped calling the lead after two days of trying. Please do not give up on a lead after one or two days of calling. You can lengthen the frequency of the calls if you wish, but continue to call the lead for a month.

Read this report, study it, remember it and of course apply it. This is an MIT report, not just some “dumb anecdotal advice from a critical ex-lead buyer”, so take it seriously and start working your leads like they should be.

Anyone want to add their two cents??

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