You Cannot Be Serious – You Are Discarding Leads?
So, your milk in the fridge has just passed the expiration date. What do you do? Smell, then taste a tiny portion, or just pitch it on the spot – either way, you have a decision to make. In our industry, far too many people are treating non-performing leads like milk. Some keep and pursue leads as long as possible, while others are quick to purge ‘not performing now’ sales prospects.
There are a staggering number of lenders (and vendors) out there discarding leads from their database far too early. With an ever-changing industry, it is time to re-think the entire methodology of lead management, especially redefining when to prune.
Leads don’t come cheap. It can be quite expensive to procure them from the myriad of available sources, like some of these:
- Lead aggregators
- Google Ads, SEO
- Social media ads
- List sellers
- Radio and newspaper ads
- Referral consultants
- Co-marketing partnerships
Of course, some are better than others (e.g., exclusive), which you pay a premium for, while others are the equivalent of being sold on the courthouse steps for pennies on the dollar. You get what you pay for – and all are costing you money – so you should max-out efforts to nurture and convert.
Major expansions in Big Data continue to become available, as do new technologies to mine that data. This mash-up presents an ongoing view of WHAT and HOW MUCH you can learn about consumers and their behaviors, to the point of even predicting some next likely moves – Predictive Analytics.
With the right strategy and partner (like Sales Boomerang, of course!), you can extract yourself from being the fourth caller to the consumer that day. Instead, becoming the first – and possibly the only – lending professional to reach out.
All of us, as consumers, navigate through different lifestyle, financial and life events that prompt our actions and inactions. A completely uninterested or unqualified borrower today can experience changing circumstances or needs in an instant. The key is to be patient and let Big Data and technology simply alert you when pre-established conditions are triggered, putting you in striking position at the right time with the right message. ‘Timing’ is no longer everything – placement is paramount – as you must also be where your prospects are, hanging out in their ‘hangouts.’
Net Messages:
- Pause before you purge leads – assets that already cost you something
- Unless you are trying to reduce your CRM database costs by maintaining significantly fewer contacts, consider patiently keeping them
- Overlay new data sets, technology, and business rules to tell you the moment a prospect has a qualifying change to prompt you to engage them for a specific reason (e.g., rate trigger, home equity threshold, credit score improvement, and so many more)
Lastly, if you do ultimately feel the need to delete leads, you might consider those contacts that have physically unsubscribed from your messaging, as it is rare they will ever re-subscribe. However, do not take the same approach on unengaged contacts, as this is the crux of what we are talking about – alerts on events and behaviors (past or predicted) can pull them to the top of your funnel faster than you can wipe off that milk mustache.
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