Starting a conference recap post is always painful and difficult for me. I find it similar to starting a forced grade school English paper. “What I did over summer break included….”.
I am going to use that complaint to get through the into and get right into the meat and bones of the fist day at the Targus Lead Quality Summit. Overall, great show with good content and great networking. The majority of the attendees appeared to be involved in the EDU vertical in one way or another, but there also was a nice group of attendees from the finance verticals. I am going to take this week to review the sessions I attended on post at a time.
The first session that I attended took place in the Financial Track and was titled “Best Practices in Online Lead Acquisition – The Lenders’ Perspective”. The session was moderated by Owen Raun, President of RMC Vanguard and the panelists included Timothy Skinner VP at Charter One/Citizens Bank, Phil Kneibert President at Mortgage Lenders of America, Jessica Manna VP & CMO at Residential Finance Corporation.
The first topic discussed how social media fits into their marketing plans. Jessica who was the most experienced with implementing SM into her marketing strategy opened up and discussed a few details. Her strategy was to assign the different channels, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, to specific members on her team. Each member is allotted an hour or two to maintain their given channel. While she said the implementation of SM in her marketing plan has opened a number of doors and has extended their brand visibility it will never likely take the place of their traditional lead generation channels.
Its not always easy to launch a SM strategy or to get the approval from the executive team, especially in the finance sector. Jessica performed a large amount of research, created and 20 page strategic plan and only then gained approval from legal and the rest of her team. According to Jessica evaluating the success of a Socia Media strategy is done by tracking the number of fans, posts, interactions, links, etc.
The group then discussed what criteria they used to evaluate a quality of a lead and lead source. Phil finds it difficult to determine the quality of a lead source right off the bat. This is probably the biggest challenge for most buyers, but he suggests acting like the a potential borrower and visiting the sources website and filling out their form. He suggests that the methods in which the leads are generated will also give a good idea of the quality of the leads. Leads from SEM typically convert better then others according to Phillip. He also claimed the longer the form the better the leads.
Timothy was asked how a large bank like Charter One efficiently integrate multiple channels. Tim suggests distributing similar leads to specific groups of CSR’s so that they don’t treat leads differently or get spoiled with higher quality leads and disregard those that don’t perform as high. He also mentioned that Charter One’s ability to cross sell different products have given them the ability to increase their ROI.
When asked what the average time it took their Loan Officers to respond to a lead the each had a different, but unfortunately similar answer.
Phil randomly takes snap shots and said they do measure but not has much as they would like.
Tim measures their speed to contact by the reviewing the time stamp of a lead and the time stamp on the first status update.
Jessica also tracks speed to contact by viewing the time stamps on the status updates. She also said the moving from the Push method to the Pull method has helped a great deal.
The unfortunately part in all this discuss was that none of the panelist actually knew the specific amount of time it takes their team to reach the leads. Speed to contact is the most important factor in achieving success with Internet leads and tracking this number should be a high priority.
Overall the session was good. I would have like to have heard more detailed information about the lead acquisition process, but I thought it was enlightening and helpful to the buyers in the room nonetheless.
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Thanks for the write up.
Just wanted to clarify one point. I think I mentioned our speed to contact was different in each channel we are in. I did not list them off but that does not mean we don’t know that particular metric well.
Thanks again for attending and recapping our session.
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Hi Tim,
You mentioned in the session that you looked at the time the statuses are updated in Leads360, as I said in the post above. Jessica said the same. So yes, it is clear you track speed to status update, which is far more then most companies, but it did get me thinking about that very important metric. I spoke with Nick at Leads360 about it as well and he mentioned that they are able to integrate with phone systems to actually track speed to contact. This may be in fact how you track this metric, I am only going off of what you said in the session.
I think when asked the same question in a perfect world buyers would be able to know off the top of their head what that number is and I think most have no clue. When I was buying leads years ago, I didn’t know either.
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Sorry I missed the nuance of your point. You are correct and it is an important point. We do not have a phone integration currently and therefore can only tell you when our LO’s update the lead. That is a limitation for sure as it is only as good as the LO updating the status.
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I asked that question regarding speed to contact for a reason guys…
Anyone who would like to guarantee that each lead will be called in under 30 seconds while having full tracking capabilities should look at http://www.consumertransfer.com and try the demo. They are integrated with Leads360, LeadMailbox, and able to integrate in minutes with custom CRM’s.
Regards~
Beau Bratton
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Speed to contact is something I have been living every day since 2004, the day we started DoublePositive. We call on internet leads (with a human) within 3 seconds of it hitting our server. I think Tim, Jessica and Phil would have given more detail on their answers but they were under the clock as the next session was ready to start. They get it. I think the more important question is not do you track how long it takes to get your first dial attempt; it’s do you have plans on improving your operations to ensure your organization’s best practices with speed to contact. In talking to closely with 2 out of the 3, they do.
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