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Most salespeople tend to focus on the high-probability “hot leads” that recently came in the door. They don’t have time to stop and sweep through a list of aged leads on a regular basis.
SoftVu recently completed a “meta study” compiling four years worth of data across 38 clients to quantify what we already knew—when you ignore aged leads, you’re throwing away money. Here’s a quick look at results for a typical lender. In general, our findings show that:
- 58% to 76% of aged leads remain viable for a significant period of time after initial contact.
- The typical sales team misses somewhere between 600 to 800 aged lead opportunities for every 1,000 initial leads.
- Most respondents still want to be contacted with follow up information, offers, etc.
The simple message is, “Stop ignoring aged leads!” But, how you go about doing that is not quite so simple. There are three primary takeaways here . . .
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The vast majority of aged leads are still viable (and most sales teams ignore them).
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Staying in front of your potentials results in significantly more closed deals.
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Your sales staff is doing a good job if they’re just keeping up with new leads (someone else needs to qualify and nurture leads after the initial contact).
One solution to this problem is a consistent lead nurturing campaign that can be automated to…
- Identify which aged leads are still viable
- Stay connected with viable aged leads with relevant, timely messages, and
- Route “new” leads and recycle viable “aged” leads back to your sales team in a timely fashion, so they can stay focused on high probability leads.
7 Comments
“Identify which aged leads are still viable”
–Just curious as to which criteria/formula you might use to make this determination.
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Maybe Jason can answer this, but I think determining viable aged leads is a fairly simple process. It also involves setting up your LMS and its dispositions or actions properly to filter and place the leads in different buckets. Leads that have been contacted and completely worked would possibly be considered dead leads. Leads that have not been contacted, told to call back, open ended leads that may be past a typical work flow time period could be and are most likely floating in the system and and forgotten about. I think it takes a little effort if you do not have your LMS set up to catch these leads, but each person could find these leads. The criterion’s maybe different each shop, but I guarantee most brokers or banks can find these types of leads in their system.
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We used aggregated data from the last 100,000 aged lead survey responses for 38 SoftVu clients. In order to qualify the consumer had to select the “still looking for a loan” option in the survey.
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good stuff! would agree with this 100%
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[...] Kort, of SoftVu, does a very interesting LeadCritic guest post on "The Truth about Aged Leads." Turns out in their 4 year market study that 58% to 76% of borrowers are still looking for a [...]
How long after the leads first came in did the followup study contact them? That would have a lot of bearing on the answers received.
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In order to qualify as an ‘Aged Lead’ the lead had to be not active (i.e., they didn’t apply for a loan) for over 30 days.
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Aged mortgage and debt leads definitely work and usually at a lower cost per closed deal than fresher leads. Our numerous clients for aged leads just keep increasing their weekly orders and we rarely ever lose a client.
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