Don’t Waste Your Leads

This could be a “coffee is for closers, why would we waste the Glengarry leads on you” article about lead management or it could be something a bit more strategic in terms of operating a successful financial services firm. Hope there is no disappointment, it is the latter.?

So what good is a lead if it languishes in some sales limbo, improperly followed and under-nurtured like a withering desk plant denied water and fertilizer? That was rhetorical, but the actual answer is ‘not much.’?

And from a sales management perspective, whether that is an actual sales manager or the principals of a firm, the money spent to acquire that lead was wasted and the opportunity squandered.?

So often firms focus on lead generation, bringing new leads into the sales pipeline, that they don’t maximize the potential from the leads they already have. There is some logic here – you can’t maximize the potential of a lead you don’t yet have, so first the focus should be on acquisition. While we don’t totally disagree with that line of thinking, often we see lead management neglected while the focus is on the top of the funnel (acquisition) and the bottom of the funnel (closing or conversion) but not on the middle, where a lot of magic can happen. To the desk plant analogy, leads wither away without the nurturing they need.?

Extracting Value from Leads?

It helps to look at your lead program not a series of individual leads, but as a pool of potential sales where your task is to extract the maximum amount of value from the pool.?

The first thing you want to do is separate out the low value, low potential leads. No matter how well you’ve designed the lead generation process, there will be leads that just don’t qualify. By weeding or filtering out these low value leads, you’ll increase the value of the remaining pool.? It is at this point that you should ascertain the value and cost of the pool for calculating your sales ROI.??

While it is difficult to ignore the cost of all the leads as part of the sales ROI calculation, we’d argue that lead gen is a marketing function, not necessarily a sales function, and that calculation – or ownership of the effectiveness of the lead gen program – belongs to marketing.??

Sales and business development folks are supposed to generate their own leads, we agree, but that expectation shouldn’t exonerate marketing from flooding the top of the funnel with, uh, crappy leads.?

Filtering Leads or the Cold, Hard Truth of “Next”?

We usually think of the old sales saying “no means next” as a way to move past rejection, but we also apply that to lead qualification or lead filtering.??

When analyzing or qualifying leads, there needs to be a cold, hard discipline that determines whether a lead is worth keeping or not. Commercial fisherman do it with the fish they catch, and we can too. Fishermen will have a couple of variables to consider (length, weight maybe) and whether or not it is a fish with eggs.? Pretty cut and dry. Either it’s a keeper or you throw it back.?

We need to be just as ruthless. Either a lead has enough assets now, or they don’t. Either the lead is in the industry you specialize in, or it isn’t. You can’t be all things to all people, and as every marketer will tell you specializing in everything means you specialize in nothing. If “anyone” can be your client, then no one will be. What about maybe someday?? Just like an underweight fish, throw it back and maybe you’ll catch it again when it’s ready.?

In the calculus of costs and ROI, trying to work an unqualified lead is too expensive, and not worth sales time, the firm’s time, or the firm’s money.?

So how do you weed them out?? Simply. Like the fisherman, create a specific set of criteria for a qualified prospect. Be as specific as possible. These criteria then become a “persona.”? Sort your leads into the appropriate persona and throw back the rest.?

Can you have more than one persona? Yes, you can. Minimum AUM to invest and “qualified investor” or not are two that might span different demographics of your prospects. But don’t have too many, otherwise you’ll experience the diminishing returns as you approach “anybody can be a client.”?

When Does the Tech Stack Start Helping?

Now. Once your unqualified prospects are weeded out and the keepers assigned into personas, a CRM/marketing automation system can begin to do the tracking, following up, assisting sales/bd folks, content marketing, and surfacing leads that have become “hot” – ready for action.??

Email workflows can educate and nurture in general and help drive attendance to events or webinars. Campaigns can track ad and social post-click-throughs and form fills. The CRM function will track every bit of communication sent through your Outlook. And with the built-in calendaring function, the system will add an appointment to your calendar, update the prospect’s contact record, and even send out confirmation and reminder emails.?

Not only does your CRM/Marketing Automation platform handle the sales drudgery of follow-ups, it also does so with some baked-in intelligence – all of which is under your control, and which leads us to an important aspect of good lead management.?

The Discipline to Consistently Apply Best Practices?

There’s a reason many successful people in the financial services industry are what we used to call “A” type personalities. They are driven to find the best way, the formula that achieves their goals. They are disciplined and consistent. Success is both the measure that matters and validation of the formula. Successful protégés often have a similar personality and are intuitive enough to adopt and apply what already works.?

But what if there was a way to codify these sales practices? Rather than cloning your most successful producers (which is what many teams try to do, not literally, but by hiring look-alikes), what if you could embed the formula, the best practices into a tool that everyone uses to manage their business?? That’s also what the CRM/Marketing Automation system does – those follow-up rules, the language used to overcome objections, the attributes and characteristics of the firm’s best prospects – all in the system that everyone uses, like a mind meld from the best of the best.??

Of course, you have to recognize all those factors, take the time to think them through, and also take the time to put them into the system, to build the models that you want every salesperson to apply – because you know they work.?

The Lesson?

As you look back over this article, which is ostensibly about lead management, you’ll see that the most important parts of that function occur before the first lead ever enters the funnel. It’s the prep work that makes the difference, and if you’ve got some real talent to infuse into your systems, great. If you’d like to draw upon the expertise of those who have seen the models and know how to put them into your systems, contact us.?

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