The answer is YES, YOU ARE!
You are probably dismissing good leads in ways you never thought possible. The purpose of this two part article (part two coming next week) is to turn the spotlight on some of the most common problem areas for you to inspect and provide a solution to improve your lead quality.
Here’s what I recommend:
1) Double check your most basic lead filter processes
Many folks that buy or sell leads use very basic techniques to try to weed out what they feel are the most “embarrassing” leads. They typically do a few things: (1) create proprietary filters that check if a lead’s name is fake or a dirty word, (2) check to see if the address exists and (3) check to see if the area code matches the zip code. They likely selected this process for one main reason. It’s cheap to do.
True. It is cheap to do, but the results can do more harm than good. Here is a quick example — a leading ‘for-profit’ online school told me last summer that they had been only buying leads that provided (1) USPS standardized addresses and (2) a phone number with an area code that could be paired with their provided zip code. They estimated that they spent $20,000 per year to maintain this type of basic quality control.
What they didn’t realize was that they were losing $20,000 per week in enrollment revenue because they were rejecting good leads.
How did this happen?
Well, if a lead entered a good name and phone number, but used an address of “123Don’tMailMe, Anywhere, USA”, they were automatically rejecting the lead because the address didn’t exist — even though the name and phone number were good.
But the larger problem had to do with cell phone data. Potential students were frequently entering a cell phone number as their main point of contact. However, the area code of the cell phone was not being recognized as matching their home zip code. These leads were also being rejected, despite their good quality.
Solution: The school chose to invest more in an advanced verification solution that looked at the data quality of the entire lead…instead of isolated pieces of the lead. They re-ran some recent lead files through the new solution and confirmed their worst suspicions — they had been rejecting a number of good leads for months. Once implemented, the new solution was able to quickly capture an additional $20,000 per week in new enrollment revenue, which all tied back to the new lead quality process.
I recommend you doing a little investigation on your lead review process and see what turns up.
Part two coming next week:
Is your sales force really following-up on all the leads that you buy?
We’ll review this issue and also how warm-transfer lead qualifiers and lead management platform providers are helping out.
Best,
Dave
Dave Wengel is General Manager of Interactive Markets for TARGUSinfo. He helped create the On-Demand Lead Verification solution now used by many in the online marketing community to improve the data quality of leads being purchased and sold. He is also DM Confidential’s newest columnist focusing on lead quality issues facing the industry. Feel free to email Dave any of your thoughts on the current state of lead quality in the industry, and solutions that may improve it for potential inclusion in future DM Confidential articles to davidwengel@targusinfo.com.
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