There is a huge disparity between buyers who call leads to many times and buyers that don’t call leads enough and in this post I want to address this topic and give my two cents.
I have heard it too many times that buyers have not been able to succeed with the leads and to only find out that they called the leads on average 3 times. The fact is that succeeding with leads involves being respectfully persistent. Bettercloser has a post about call back periods and there is another one on the bettercloser blog that I couldn’t find that you should check out as well. (Bill maybe you can post the link in the comments if you can figure out what post I am talking about) The post talks about making broad strokes until you find the sweet spot where the consumer is usually available. This happens in the first 3 days or until you have contacted the consumer. You will want to make a phone call in the morning, noon and then once at night until you have reached the lead. I recommend leaving one message per day. There are guys out there that will tell their LO’s not to leave messages at all and I find this to be ridiculous. You clearly do not want to leave a message every time you call, that would be annoying.
Throughout my tests, I always remembered the companies that left a message every day. The guys that I only received an email from and that never left a message on my machine, of course I forgot about. At the least, this helps a bit with branding and the consumer will be more likely to remember your name and company. Heck they may even call you back down the road.
Back to the topic of how many times should you call a lead. There are companies out there that drive me CRAZY! These companies hand a single lead to multiple people in one office or redistribute the lead multiple times in one day. This hurts the company more than helps. Not only does it hurt the company practicing this tactic, but it also hurts the lead company and the other buyers. It it a lose lose for everyone. Once I received 6 emails from 6 different LO’s in one company within a period of 6 hours. They clearly must have had some type of redistribution rule that triggered every hour. How do you think this makes the consumer feel?? Not only did I receive 6 emails I received a huge number of calls. I can’t remember exactly how many calls I received, but it was ridiculous. This why I recommend that you are “respectfully persistent” . This company did not respect anyone, not their employees, not the lead company and not the consumer.
If you redistribute leads amongst your staff, which I recommend that you do, there is a point of diminishing returns. I am not going to give out specific numbers (maybe if you email me I will give them to you) but you should not redistribute a lead more than 4 times over a month period. After 4 weeks the return on your time becomes zero unless you are sending it through an auto dialer. I recommend throwing the leads into a email drip campaign for another 30 days and encourage them to opt into a newsletter.
The point I really want to get across here is that you must be persistent, but not without the respect for the consumer. Don’t complain that your leads suck if you are only calling them a few times and then giving up. Please, please don’t abuse redistribution rules in your LMS either, you are only hurting yourself. Along with hurting yourself, you are helping increase the criticisms of online lead-gen and rates/banks comparison model that we all live on.
Good luck.
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thats a great post ..
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Redistribution is often abused in LMS systems. The companies I see doing well with stable conversions are extremely conservative and do not use redistribution as a punitive measure hoping Loan Officers will somehow work leads more effectively if they know that they will loose it in X mins from the point it’s distributed to them. That is unrealistic and does not take the realities of ‘working the lead’ into consideration. Redistribution was designed to adequately allocate leads to resources who have quota and bandwidth to work them and to reintroduce future opportunities back into the active lead pool so they are not lost. This truly maximizes the value of each lead while not creating a panic mentality in your loan officers. I often tell my clients that leads should not be redistributed more than 2 times in one day, and even that is pretty aggressive. Hyper redistribution does not improve ones work ethic. Fortunately, we at LeadROI are working on a ‘work ethic’ module that connects through your USB port and clips to your LO’s earlobe. If an LO is not working their leads, we will send a 12v shock burst to them. This should solve all the problems associated with production once and for all.
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Lead Critic,
Call back periods are something that we talk a lot about in lead management. The ability to enforce that disciplined follow-up process is critical to closing Internet leads.
I use the analogy in this post http://tinyurl.com/ypm3ao of a submarine using sonar to find a moving target. It is about sweeping effectively with a consistent pattern until you find the target and then focusing that pattern.
I think this is the post you were referring to.
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Thanks Bill, that is the one.
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