Perhaps the most famous movie for lead generation is Glengarry Glen Ross. In this epic movie featuring an all-star cast of Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin, Alan Arkin, Ed Harris and Kevin Spacey, the word leads is used over 100 times in the 100 minute movie. And most of the dialogue around the leads is around how weak the leads are or how the sales reps want the “good leads” or the Glengarry leads.
How do your sales reps feel about the leads you are giving to them, driving into your call centers or branches, or worse yet, that you are purchasing from lead generators? Are you giving them weak leads? Or are you giving them premium leads? Glengarry leads?
Many companies have a hard-time answering this question as they don’t know if their leads are good or not. Sure, you can measure the close rate after the fact, but are the leads closing because you have Al Pacino selling them (he is the top producer in the movie) or are they failing because you have a weak sales effort by a Jack Lemmon? You can answer these questions by implementing an effective lead-scoring system.
In a good lead-scoring system, there are 3 key components: 1. Accuracy, 2. Timeliness, and 3. Simplicity. Let’s take a look at each:
Accuracy: Make sure you are getting accurate information. For lending or insurance leads, use credit data to qualify the leads for your offers. For other offers, use analytics and modeling to build scoring models that can accurately predict the best leads based on their need for your product or service and for their likelihood to qualify and to close.
Timeliness: Use real-time, where possible and score your leads as quickly as you can, certainly within the same day of receipt. Timeliness is critical so you can respond to your best leads as soon as possbile.
Simplicity: A simple system that rank orders from 0 to 100 or even a grading system of A, B, C or F is preferable to a complicated, burdensome system. You want something that everyone can easily understand and that you can easily measure on the back-end.
By implementing an effective lead-scoring system, your sales will increase as your sales reps will work the “good leads” harder and they will have confidence in who they are selling to. You can also use these to negotiate with your lead aggregators and to determine which leads that you are buying are worth more than others.
Altair (www.altairdata.com) has been a leader in the Financial Marketing industry since its inception in 2001 helping lenders to acquire, retain and maximize customers through direct mail, email and digital channels. With access to credit bureau data and the nation’s largest demographic database, Altair combines superior data with innovative strategy and analytics to achieve maximum results for mortgage lenders, banks, consumer lenders, and auto lenders. In addition to financial marketing, the Altair team also works extensively in Healthcare through it’s Braintree Health Marketing division (www.braintreehealthmarketing.com) to develop custom patient-targeting models for the nation’s top veterinary, dental, and hospital marketing teams. Altair is located in Brentwood, Tennessee.