I wanted to discuss a few issues that have continued to come up in the last few weeks for me in my daily discussion.
The first is the topic of returning leads or negotiating a flat rate. We discussed this topic last week and I posed the opinion that negotiating a flat rate of return with your lead providers will save you time formating the returns in the numerous different formats that each provider requests, however it does not let you off the hook for returning the bad data to the provider.
Case in point: I came a across a company that practiced the strategy of negotiating a flat return rate. This company claimed to have a high bogus rate with their providers and was concerned that they would need to renegotiate the flat rate. I encouraged them to investigate the leads within their bogus bucket. Looking closer at the leads within that bogus bucket the company found that their were a ton of leads that should not have been in that bucket. The loan officers were dispositioning leads as bogus even though the leads had valid information. Because there was no oversight, either by the company itself or by the lead providers reviewing the returns and rejecting them, the LO’s were enabled to through away leads that could have possibly been worked further or by a different LO and closed. My recommendation again is to negotiate flat rates, but do not lose oversight over how your LO’s are dispositioning the leads you pay top dollar for.
Second, I have had numerous conversations about day parting lead delivery. Should I buy leads on the weekend? Should I buy leads only during working hours? Should I buy leads only Monday, Wednesday and Thursday? Maybe this is a question the Sparkroom guys can help with, but I will tell you what I found through my own research. I have stated this on this blog before, but I think it is worth repeating.
While buying leads , about 300-400 per day, I took a look at 3 months worth of data and compared every day of the week against each other to determine which day is the best day to buy leads. Not which day is best to call leads, but which day is the best day to buy leads. I guess I need to premise and recognize that all companies are different and may have different results and that is the reason for bring the topic back up. I want to know whether or not others have performed a similar analysis and whether or not is was similar to mine.
I found that leads purchased on the weekends, not called, but purchased on the weekends converted at a higher rate then leads purchased during the week. In 85% of the cases the leads were not even called until the following Monday.
I have discussion with buyers that want to filter out these days and I ask them why. The answers usually include, “we don’t work on the weekends”. My follow up question is usually, “okay, then can you tell me what day is the best day, in regards to performance, for you to buy leads?” The never have an answer. This leads to importance of having proper analytics on your lead buying.
My question to you is: Have you performed an analysis on what days perform best for you and if so was it in line with my analysis?
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Good article Critic, a few additional notes about purchasing weekend leads.
1.) They are less expensive because most people dont buy them.
2.) Most people still don’t work on the weekends, you can get a great converstion from these leads.
3.) It increases your buying footprint with your lead provider.
There are unseen benefits to being a buyer with a good buyer profile. Lead providers are willing to compromise in area’s they normally wouldn’t when you buy leads all week long.
I did find in our analytics that leads purchased during business hours converted better due to our response time.
We responded to new leads an average of 24 seconds after lead delivery. According to most lead providers our firm had the best lead converstion and data to support response time conversions.
I often wondered why most shops didn’t buy weekend leads — it always seemed crazy to me. Restaurant owners work Tuesday through Sunday, why can’t mortgage brokers ? Glad to see that I wasn’t crazy Noel, I always figured that the buyers of the weekend leads would get the above mentioned advantages, it tended to be a head-scratcher for me that people wouldn’t buy these leads and work them on Sunday and take another day of the week off.
All business owners should implement best practices with regards to lead buying, calling and analyzing performance.
Critic’s posts provide the tools to run a “Best Practice” shop regardless of the lead type, vertical or management style.
In addressing the point on weekend leads – yes everyone should work 7 days a week but also dial leads from 6am to 8pm.
Extend the hours and days your company is working to maximize returns from marketing expenses.
Extended hours and days also provides employees the flexibility to pick and work shift/days that meets their needs.
My employees always loved working when it made sense for them or their families; some were early birds and others needed to work later in the day.
In an analysis I did about 1 1/2 years ago I noticed that there was no material difference in the time of day or the days in which we bought leads in terms of conversion ratios. I also noticed that my LO’s were twice as efficient in taking applications on the weekends per hour spent on the job as they were from Monday through Thursday (Friday was terrible).
In my current smaller environment we are cranking it up nicely as a result of Leads360’s pull distribution.
Lastly, I don’t return leads for credit. I just negotiate hard on price up front and pay attention to trends where campaigns may run into a higher % of leads being put into our “Return for Credit” status. If trending is bad I’ll talk to the vendor and work something out, still not returning leads for credit, however. In our office we push the LO’s to make at least 50 calls per day or take 2 applications.
Jay, ahhh love the terminology. How do you define an application?
Credit pulled no deal, credit pulled potential deal, taking enough information to move forward and/or kill the deal.
Details please, all the analytics guys will go crazy not knowing what your LO’s are doing that constitutes “2 applications”.
“In an analysis I did about 1 1/2 years ago I noticed that there was no material difference in the time of day or the days in which we bought leads in terms of conversion ratios. I also noticed that my LO’s were twice as efficient in taking applications on the weekends per hour spent on the job as they were from Monday through Thursday (Friday was terrible).”
Seems somewhat contradictory, no?
Assuming all leads are delivered in real time and you don’t have many days where leads didn’t get called until the following day, I would conclude that leads purchased on weekends had applications taken more efficiently then any other day.
Maybe a clarification is needed. All my leads are delivered in real time. Leads delivered on a Saturday called on that same Saturday converted at a higher rate to application as fewer companies buy on the weekends and certainly fewer companies work weekends. Conversely, leads delivered on a Saturday not first called until Monday converted at a rate similar to a lead delivered after 7:00 PM weekdays not called until the next morning. To summarize I have always bought leads 7 days a week and about 355 days a year (take away holidays). Stated even differently (and contrary to what my anecdotal opinion was prior to the study) a lead delivered at 2:00 AM CST time converted to an application the same as a lead delivered at 2:00 PM CST.
Did I help you more or confuse you more?
Understood, good info. It is always good to hear others results. We saw a difference between the days of the week a lead was purchased on, no matter when the lead was called.
Good stuff.
Everyone should buy leads on the weekends and staff for weekends as well. in my former life as a Branch manager we would take about 150 leads per day 6 days a week(no friday) and we found that those who worked weekends funded, 20% more per month then those who elected the 5 day work week. Im not a fan of returns as it takes up to much time the best is to negotiate a solid deal and understand there will be some fall out for bad leads. If your deal is good enough per lead it works out better because your time is spent working deals instead of fussing with returns and paying more for your leads. All in all the more time on the phone the more deals period.
This is great information. Great insight on times to buy leads. Often we put so much effort into the best strategies for gaining leads but day of the week is often overlooked.