Buying leads should be a strategic business decision and it takes a lot of planning to make sure that when the first leads are delivered you have done everything possible to make sure you can convert as many of them as possible.
The first challenges are to find a reputable lead provider, choose your lead products, filters, volumes and agree lead prices, but even when you have done all this, there are many other things to consider. The biggest factor that determines lead buying success and failure is not lead quality – it is lead management. Leads do not convert themselves, and often lead buyers make a judgment on the quality of leads, when it is actually the processes which they have in place for working the leads that affects the results of the campaign the most.
Most lead buyers in the UK still use spreadsheets to manage their leads, but in the US, where lead generation is a few years ahead, there are more than ten companies that provide sophisticated online systems for financial advisers to manage their leads. There are only a few in the UK and a quick search for “lead management system” (LMS) should help you to find a few companies worth contacting.
Using an LMS is the simplest and most effective way to manage leads. This applies equally to small firms buying one lead a day up to the largest national brands buying hundreds of leads a week. It is important to note that an LMS is not the same as a customer relationship management (CRM) system. An LMS is the piece that goes in-between the lead source and the case or client management systems. Remember that a lead is not a customer that has walked into your office or has been referred from one of your existing clients. A lead is a piece of data about a consumer who has responded to some form of online marketing and has expressed an interest in a product or service and submitted their information to be contacted. The fundamental challenge for lead buyers is to make contact with as many of the leads as quickly as possible and qualify whether these consumers are genuine prospects that will turn into business. Only at this stage can they move out of the LMS and into your client bank.
It is important to remember that although the ultimate metric for lead generation is return on investment (ROI), the more leads you contact, the more you can convert into business and the higher your ROI will be. At the same time, even if you can accurately predict conversion rates for any lead category, what nobody can predict is which leads will convert. What this means is that if you buy 100 leads, you may convert 10 into business but it is impossible to predict whether these will be the first 10 leads you receive, the last 10 or somewhere in the middle. So you have to buy a decent volume of leads to get these average conversion rates. For most categories, a minimum of 30-50 leads over the period of a month will give you a good idea of lead quality as you are more likely to get closer to the predicted conversion rates. The more leads you buy, the harder it is to manage a manual process to contact the leads and this is where an LMS really comes into its own.
Even though all leads are generated and delivered in real-time, it might still take quite a few tries to make contact with the consumer. If you think about what the consumer is doing online then this becomes clearer. A typical scenario would be consumers searching online for mortgage advice. They might use their lunch break at work to search online for advice, fill in a form to speak to an adviser, but then not answer the phone when the lead buyer follows up. This might be because they cannot take personal calls at work or they are not allowed to use their mobile at work, or they may have only left their home number. As a lead buyer receiving this type of genuine lead, if you cannot make contact immediately, then you need to schedule another time to try again. It might take a further three or four calls over the next few days to get through to this consumer. If you multiply this scenario by 30 leads over a month, then it becomes a very hard process to manage. However, a good LMS automates the whole process for you and can remind you when a lead needs to be contacted. Ultimately, improved contact rates will increase conversions and improve return on investment from buying leads.
In addition, an LMS will allow you to measure more accurately the success or failure of your lead buying activity. As well as being able to calculate ROI in a matter of minutes, they also let you drill down further into other performance metrics. For example, if a firm has five advisers and each receives leads, it might usually just calculate ROI for all its lead generation spend, but an LMS allows a deeper look. Perhaps one adviser is better at making contact with consumers; perhaps another is better at cross-selling into other products. If you know this kind of information, then you can refine your process to improve your ROI.
It is undeniable that lead management systems are an invaluable tool for anybody considering buying leads and can dramatically improve ROI. Some lead buyers might question whether they can afford to use these systems, but really the question should be: can lead buyers afford not to use these systems? n
