There are currently thousands of advisers up and down the country buying leads and making a very healthy return on investment but there are probably as many advisers that have tried lead generation and ended up losing money. What makes this dichotomy even more pronounced is that more often than then not the experience of these advisers has got nothing to do with the lead provider they have chosen. So the question is, how could advisers buying the same types of leads from the same suppliers have such dramatically different  experiences? The answer to this question lies at the heart of what every prospective lead buyer needs to know before they even consider buying a single lead.

A good starting point is to recall a classic lead generation anecdote that may sound counter intuitive but will ring true to many lead generation veterans and this is that to a large extent “lead quality is irrelevant”. What this means in practical terms is that a company that knows how to handle leads properly will most likely have more success with “poor quality” leads then an inexperienced lead buyer with “high quality” leads. This has significant implications for lead buyers of all sizes as often the focus is on price and lead quality to the detriment of
other variables that are more important to achieving a good return on investment.

One of the biggest mistakes that advisers make is that they will start buying leads before they have considered how lead generation fits into their current business model. For example, a small adviser firm might want to start with a fairly modest lead buying campaign of two life insurance leads per day for five days a week and run a trial for a month. That’s a total of about forty leads. Although this seems like a relatively small number of leads it can still be a large drain on resources to process these leads efficiently. Remember it might take a few days to make first contact with the leads and best practice is that each lead is called as a bare minimum four times a day for four days before the lead is actioned. This equates to up to sixteen contact attempts per lead which for a forty lead trial is over six hundred possible
attempts at contact. This effort can be very time consuming and this is only the start. There might also be call backs to schedule, feedback needs to be submitted and then of course the sale might take a while! Much of this effort will be administrative but for a lead buying campaign to be successful, all of the processes need to be in place to manage these things efficiently. If they are ignored then lead generation will not be successful.

The most important part of all of these administrative processes is the contact plan. A study conducted in 2007 by MIT in the US on effective lead management showed how important the contact plan is to any lead generation campaign. Using thousands of pieces of data the study
found that for contacting leads the odds of making contact with the consumer drop by ten times if the lead buyer waited over an hour to make contact. Even more surprising was that the research found that the odds of contacting a lead within the first five minutes of receiving the lead were 100 times greater than making contactafter thirty minutes. What this shows is
that successful lead buying is not only down to having a good contact plan but the success of the entire lead buying campaign can pivot on the exact minute every lead is contacted.

For lead buyers the practical implications are that is it absolutely vital to have the resources and staff in place to make sure every lead can be contacted within those crucial first few minutes. For a small adviser firm there might not be any spare capacity which creates a dilemma for any would-be lead buyers. But should advisers be buying leads if they can’t follow them up efficiently? The two options for any adviser firm in this position are either a) employ somebody to contact and qualify the leads b) divert somebody’s time to be focused on contacting and qualifying leads. Although in the current climate, option a) might seem a step too far, is it a constructive use of an advisers time to be following up the leads themselves? Should a professional adviser be sitting at their desk making those six hundred calls a month? There is a phrase used in the US that goes “callers aren’t closers”. What this means is that where possible, lead buyers should divide their efforts into those that dial out
to make contact with the consumers and perhaps do some minimal qualification and those that close the business. Some of the most successful lead buying firms (even those with only a few employees) have set up pseudo call centre type operations where they effectively have two teams working the leads. One team contacts and qualifies and then calls are transferred to the advisers in another team. This is a much better use of time and resources.

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For any adviser considering using lead generation for the first time, remember that finding a good lead provider is only step one and it takes a lot of planning to make sure that you hit the ground running from the time you receive your first lead.