By Martin Lind

May 30, 2021 — As I write this, I’m on a plane flying to the popular annual conference of one of our partners, Jenzabar. I thought it would be an ideal time to take a closer look at how some of our education industry partnerships work and the role alliances play in the enrollment management software ecosystem.

At the 30,000 foot level (yes, pun intended - I am on a plane after all), Leads360 helps get the right student candidates connected to and engaged with the right people in the school’s admissions department. Jenzabar software helps keep those student engaged and successful while attending school and supports the student’s transition to a career once they graduate.

Positive interactions at each touch point
We’ve teamed up with Jenzabar to help meet the growing need for schools to quickly engage prospective students at the point of initial inquiry and effectively support them through the registration fulfillment process. This need has become much more critical with the proliferation of online, adult, professional, and continuing education programs in higher education. Leads360 is integrated with Jenzabar’s continuing education platform, Higher Reach, to help track and manage large volumes of prospects for certificate, workforce development and other continuing education programs whether online or campus-based. Colleges and universities are seeking proven solutions such as Leads360 to reach prospective students quickly and ensure positive interactions at each touch point.

Building a better mousetrap - together
Why are industry alliances like these so important? The tech sector is no different from any other industry – our products are based on intellectual property (IP) and the company that succeeds is the one that correctly anticipates what the market will need next, and then creates the IP and software solution to meet that need. In the enrollment management world, the winners are those who enable admission departments to successfully identify and enroll the right students. So, by partnering with complementary solution providers, we all can provide school decision makers with best-of-breed software.

At Leads360, we’ve always operated under the philosophy that the sum truly can be greater than the parts and that goes for alliances and intelligence. That is why we continually share with the industry our research based on a quantitative analysis of millions of records in our platform and a qualitative info that we learn from partners and customers about evolving trends each year. A good example is our annual Lead Industry Report [link].

Is your product a best-of-breed solution for EDU? Want to talk to us about how an alliance might be mutually beneficial or meet for an idea exchange on trends we’re seeing in enrollment management? I’ll be at JAM this week and at booth 519 at the APSCU conference. Let’s connect. education@leads360.com.

By Alyssa Trenkamp

May 21, 2021 — Leads360 released new research validating the effectiveness of its Dial-IQ users to reach more prospects in the optimal 5 minute window – when customer interest is at its peak. The research found that Dial-IQ and multi-line customers contact 92% more customers in the optimal five minute window, increase user productivity by as much as 106% and most impressive, and counter intuitive to predictive dialer beliefs, using multi-line actually decreased the number of calls made per conversion by 18%.

To download the study, click here.

By Alyssa Trenkamp

May 18, 2021 — Is your sales organization making too many calls or giving up on a prospect too easily? Or are your sales reps trying to engage after a consumer has made their decision? These are some of the most common mistakes sales organizations make.

A phone call can indeed be a sales associate’s most powerful tool. When a sales call is timed just right and the associate is skilled to engage the prospect by providing relevant and helpful information, the consumer may even view the call similarly to getting a hand written letter instead of an email; however, creating the perfect harmony in call sequencing and timing is easier said than done.

Leads360’s approach to sales automation centers on speed and intelligence – our SaaS-based sales automation platform helps customer sales organizations optimize their processes, accelerate engagement, increase user productivity and maximize conversion rates. We do this through intelligent prioritization and distribution, skill-based routing and other intelligent tools that ensure you manage your sales pipeline with the highest level of effectiveness.

Below is an infographic based on Leads360 research. We benchmark much of our research off of the optimal call flow, which was derived by  analyzing more than 40 million leads managed through our system. With the recent introduction of multline we wanted to see how our customers improved performance against the optimal contact strategy and the results were staggering. See infographic below and download our new Dial-IQ research for more detail

By Nick Hedges

May 8, 2021 — Last month we rolled out a new and improved Dial-IQ, the market’s first, full-featured intelligent dialer solution, fully integrated with a comprehensive sales lead management platform.

One of the biggest challenges we faced with Dial-IQ was balancing between high-quality consumer experiences and added sales productivity from multi-line dialing. We believe we have created the right harmony between speed and positive customer experience, without crossing the line into predictive dialer territory and its associated negatives.

Predictive dialers are one of the most misunderstood dialing technologies, probably because different companies label different dialer software features as being predictive.

A predictive dialer is a type of list dialing technology that dials through a list of leads assigned to it. A predictive dialer relies on the fact that most outbound calls do not end up connecting with a live person and thus for every successful call, one predicts that a certain percentage will be unsuccessful. Call centers using predictive dialers typically want as little down time as possible, which means their dialers call more numbers than there are available reps – sometimes as many as 10 calls for each sales rep. This ensures reps are always busy but also frustrates consumers.

Pros and cons of a predictive dialer

There are many benefits and disadvantages of a predictive dialer. Determining whether predictive dialing is the right thing for your company will largely be determined by your answer to these questions:

• How big is your contact center, if less than 40, a predictive dialer might not be a good fit?
• How good do you want the experience of your customers and prospects to be?
• How costly are your leads and are you OK with abandoning 2-3% of your calls with every call attempt?

Leads360′s approach

Most of Leads360′s customers operate in a high velocity consumer sales environment and currently do not fall into the category of a good fit for predictive dialers. Usually our customers spend a considerable sum of money on leads, wish to drive as much value from each lead as possible, and sell products and services that typically require more than a one-call-close.

Leads360’s Dial-IQ brings dialing with intelligence into focus. Dial-IQ offers both a progressive dialer that calls one lead after another and a multi-line dialer that calls up to four lines per agent. Both solutions benefit from intelligent prioritization, lead distribution, contact strategy workflow, and scheduled follow-up capabilities, ensuring the highest level of efficiency in converting prospects into customers.

While traditional predictive dialers may increase call time, they also can cause drops when the statistical model used to calculate the number of outbound calls to make misfires. Usually this happens either as a operator error by loading incorrect seed data or jumbling together leads that are not similar to each other (different stages in the pipeline, timezones, etc.). Dial-IQ on the other hand allows administrators to tailor the dialing strategy to the leads they have in the pipeline. This ensures the highest level of real-time flexibility in tuning who you are going to call next, and how many calls you will be making at once. Dial-IQ in combination with Lead Manager ensures you are segmenting your leads according to the likelihood of them answering and reducing the number of concurrent calls made in accordance with how likely the lead is to pick up, thus reducing the number of dropped calls.

Bottom line –combining our prioritization and distribution engines in Lead Manager with our progressive dialer that never drops a call and our multi-line dialer that drives velocity; customers can maximize the hard-earned value of high quality leads, while also ensuring the highest level of efficiency with lower quality leads.

April 25, 2021 – Attending the Brokers Insurance Group’s Third Annual Convention and Trade Show next week in Riverside, CA? Get to know your meme:

Leads360 will be exhibiting – booth #315. If you ask us about our Meme, you might hear from some that we make robots that kill other robots (interesting story, ask us about it) but what we really do is build software that helps insurance brokers and agents get more value out of the leads they buy or self-generate. Our intelligent sales automation solution is used by some of the most successful agents in the industry, helping them be the first to call high-value leads.

If you weren’t planning on attending, but are now inspired – it’s not too late to register, visit www.mybigins.com.

By Alyssa Trenkamp

April 23 — For insurance marketers, even a small improvement to lead conversion rates will drive down operational costs, while significantly impacting sales. Hence our interest when we were offered a VIP tour of the inner workings of one of the top State Farm agents in California.  Northern California State Farm Agent and Business Owner, Mark Wong, graciously offered to take us behind the scenes to show us how he dialed up his sales velocity with Dial-IQ and Leads360 and increased purchased lead conversion rates from 10% to 20% in the first year.

Driving a Positive Consumer Experience One Call at a Time

When we first met Mark Wong, he was looking for a way to do a better job of differentiating his policies and services in an environment of growing competition from independent insurance agents pushing online quoting and comparison shopping. For Wong, superior customer service, including prompt response and follow-up to inquiries was absolutely critical. The challenge was managing the large volume of leads the company purchased and generated.

Wong identified early on that being the first to contact a new lead and being the one company to still be calling a few days later when others stopped following up was critical. “If you are the first to talk to a prospect, identify their insurance needs and develop a rapport, you have a huge advantage over competitors,” he said.

With Leads360 and Dial-IQ, Wong and his team were able to increase efficiency with their leads, making the right calls at the right time, ensuring they get to top prospects first. “We have purchased fewer leads and increased our conversion rates on leads purchased from 10% to 20% in the first year of using Leads360 and Dial-IQ,” said Wong.

Competing Effectively with an Intelligent Dialer

Using Dial-IQ Multi-line and Leads360 features like scripting, Wong and his team were able to double production without adding staff and see a dramatic 250% increase in calls per agent in only six weeks. For the complete story on how he did it, click here.

Clearly, Wong and his State Farm team have put together the right ingredients for success. And Wong’s drive for success hasn’t gone unnoticed. His agency has been recognized as the number one State Farm agent in Northern California for new auto insurance sales.

April 17, 2021 - Good decisions are good business. But so are quick decisions.

When making business decisions, there is often a tug of war between acting fast and acting smart. To be effective one has to both be well informed and act decisively. We always want to make the best decision possible, and that means examining the facts.

But in practice, examining facts takes time. The longer it takes, the greater the risk that the time spent making decisions will introduce delays that result in rising opportunity costs.

This type of tension between analysis paralysis and hasty decision making is usually thought of in terms of larger, strategic decisions. But it is just as true for small decisions. Even simple decisions that don’t require a lot of brainpower or time can still add up to significant delays, not to mention result in costly errors. Take for instance the decision of whom to call next.

Determining whom to call next is a decision that may be made dozens of times a day. Making that decision slowly amounts to a lot of wasted time. Making it unwisely amounts to a lot of wasted opportunities.

Leads360 has always been focused on providing solutions that are fast. Getting in touch with prospects quickly is one of the most important aspects of nurturing successful relationships. But since speed is only half the story, a quick solution is only half the solution. The Leads360 distribution engine distributes leads intelligently so that the prospects are connected only with the sales rep who is most suited to help them.

Lead follow-up is prioritized in accordance with established best practices to make sure that contact attempts are made at intervals that are most likely to yield results.

Dial-IQ, Leads360s fully integrated lead dialer, leverages all the speed and intelligence of best-in-class lead management tools to make calling leads quicker and smarter. There is no more effective way to establish and maintain contact with prospects than Leads360 and Dial-IQ.

By Nick Hedges

April 10, 2021 — I’m fortunate in my position at Leads360 to meet with a lot of smart sales executives — many of them Leads360 customers. I find these discussions invaluable for learning from executives experiencing the consumer sales revolution first hand.

What I hear and observe is consumer behavior is continuously evolving, influenced by the web, mobile and social. This evolution is creating a demand for flexibility and ongoing optimization of sales processes. In this Sales 2.0 world, it is no longer good enough to respond quickly. In order to compete for consumers, companies need to respond with a high level of intelligence.

Our approach – Intelligent sales velocity – for companies that compete for consumers

At Leads360 we are laser focused on optimizing high velocity consumer sales environments. By their nature, these are very data rich environments that lend themselves to continuous optimization. In such a fast moving environment, we deliver a flexible, cloud-based sales automation solution to help them keep up with consumer demand and expectation for a timely, high-quality experience.

As our customers continue to innovate and evolve their sales processes to meet demand, we are committed to supporting them with ongoing innovation of Leads360 and Dial-IQ. Today we are proud to announce a big leap forward in the innovation of our sales automation suite – introducing the markets first, full-featured intelligent dialer solution, fully integrated with a comprehensive sales lead management platform.

Our dialer solution, Dial-IQ, now boasts Dial-IQ Inbound and Dial-IQ Multi-line. Dial-IQ Inbound ensures sales makes the most of every call opportunity, routing calls to the right rep and ensuring every inbound call is tracked and followed-up on based on an optimal contact strategy. Dial-IQ Multi-line helps sales teams reach prospects faster, prioritizing the right lead to call at the right time, while also intelligently scaling the number of lines used based on sophisticated business logic.

The addition of Dial-IQ Inbound and Multi-Line ensures business logic is built into the entire sales process. We’ve left no stone unturned in solving the problem of how sales teams handle and track every sales opportunity and we encourage you to take a look – on us.  To celebrate the launch, we’re offering a free 30-day trial. You can find out more by clicking leads360.com/dialer. Click here for today’s press release.

March 20, 2021 – It’s the first day of spring, so what better way to start the new season of sales than with a fresh eye toward supporting your marketing team’s efforts to help you create more leads that convert. When sales and marketing work together, they are far more effective in tracking and measuring what works. Here are three tips to spring your sales team into action this season.

#1 — Ongoing two-way dialogue between sales and marketing: You have your campaign ID’s and phone numbers set up in the system. Push reports going to the marketing team like clockwork, and marketing is tracking campaign effectiveness in generating qualified leads and increasing/decreasing spend accordingly.

So what’s missing? A conversation, the sales manager and marketing manager should be sitting down weekly to discuss the lead flow, lead quality and campaign effectiveness.   By analyzing lead flow from both the sales manager and marketing manager’s perspective much can be gained in tuning both processes on the sales side and targeted campaign efforts on the marketing side. Rather than just decreasing spend of campaigns that have been less effective, maybe it is about retargeting, trying a different tactic that might not be clear without an ongoing two way dialogue.

#2 — Refresh your definition of the ideal customer persona:  it’s been several months since your marketing team’s big branding / messaging refresh project. It was great, they interviewed a handful of sales associates to understand common buyers’ traits, but since then your companies introduced a few new products and services and your buyer persona has changed slightly.

The sales team holds some valuable cards, they talk to prospects day in and day out and have a strong pulse on the needs and wants of customers. Consider prompting your marketing team to conduct a regular sales check-in to discuss changing customer personas and targeted marketing efforts.

#3 — Monitor lead qualification and conversion rates closely: if all is going well with #1 and #2 and marketing is doing its job in sending qualified leads but you’re still not seeing an increase in conversion rates, it’s time to drill into the data. If qualified leads aren’t converting there is usually one of three things amiss (1) you’re products or services are competitive on price or quality (2) your sales associates need training and/or (3) your sales processes need tweaking. Good reporting and analytics are critical to track sales effectiveness, and it all starts with a good sales automation solution that tracks leads from click to close.

Happy spring cleaning! To learn more about Leads360′s sales automation platform, visit www.leads360.com