Lead management is a crucial aspect of outbound dialing. The quality of your leads list will directly impact your agent and campaign performance. As such, it is important to have a list management strategy in place. This will ensure that the agent’s time is spent targeting quality leads and providing the right information to each type of lead.
Scrubbing Your Leads List
Scrubbing your lists is not only essential for compliance, but this improves the efficiency of your agents. List scrubbing should is a process that should take effect before beginning a campaign and anytime new leads enter the system.
Delete out-of-date, redundant, incomplete or outdated leads. Business contacts are constantly changing and getting rid of old leads should occur regularly to eliminate wasting time on old leads.
Do Not Call List
Many people formally request register on the national Do Not Call list (DNC). The DNC registry is the nation’s consumer protection agency which is managed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Compliance with the registry is enforced by the FTC, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and state officials. Therefore, to abide by federal compliance laws, your outbound calling list needs to be scrubbed against the DNC.
The Do Not Call provisions of the registry cover any plan, program or campaign to sell goods or services with outbound interstate phone calls. This includes sellers providing offers, goods and services in return for payment as part of the telemarketing transaction.
Reassign Numbers Database
Every year, 35 million numbers are disconnected and reassigned to new users. Consequently, this leads to calls meant for people at the other number. Because consumers often change their phone numbers, the leads on your list may not match up to the appropriate number anymore.
The Federal Communications Commission created a database to track the reassigned numbers and end confusing phone calls to reassigned numbers. The FCC has required that the voice service providers maintain this data since the end of July 2020. The Reassign Numbers Database (RND) scrubs numbers that have recently changed.
Scrubbing your call list against the RND reduces wrong numbers and allows sales representatives to focus on qualified leads. The process is simple. Companies scrub any new numbers they may have purchased against the RND list to make sure they are not contacting a reassigned number during their campaign.
Internal Do Not Call Lists
Keeping an internal list of leads that express they do not wish to be contacted by your company is good for ethical dialing. Pestering uninterested leads is not only a huge waste of time, but it also could damage your business reputation. As such, you should make a note of the leads that request an opt out and create an internal do not call list.
Periodically you should scrub your existing list against those that expressed disinterest in the past just in case their information found its way onto your call list.
Organizing Your Leads List
After scrubbing your lists, organizing them can help your agents achieve success. Qualifying your leads and organizing your lead list by their qualification status can help your agents pitch your product or services more successfully. Agents will know which leads are close to buying, which ones need more pre-selling and which ones may never convert to a sale. Additionally, a good CRM can help keep your list organized and provide agents with the essential information for their conversations.
Organize your lists into categories, such as cold, warm and hot leads. This lets the sales agent know what type of questions and conversations to prepare for when calling the lead. Leads that are close to buying don’t want to waste time listening to agents review basic information about a product or service, while some leads may just be learning the first thing about the product.
Cold Leads
A cold lead has no previous interaction with your company. Typically, these come from “cold calling” lists and do not traditionally have high conversion rates. Cold leads are at the beginning of the sales cycle. As such, they may not even be aware that they have a problem that your product or service can solve, so they will need a lot of nurturing before they convert to a sale.
Warm Leads
A warm lead has expressed interest in your business in the past. They may have found you through word of mouth, social media, newsletters or mailing lists. Warm leads will periodically engage with your company’s marketing channels. They may follow your organization on social media and comment on the posts. Furthermore, warm leads are the ones that tend to sign up for emails and newsletters.
You can start to nurture warm leads by addressing their needs and issues as well as discussing how you can solve their problems.
Hot Leads (Qualified leads)
A hot lead, or sometimes called a qualified lead, is one that is searching specifically for your product or similar services. These can come through ads, organic search or previous interactions with your company or sales agents.
Hot leads are the closest to buying your product. These leads are the people who are now seeking a specific service or product that your business offers. Managing hot leads is imperative for closing the final transaction.
Implementing a Lead Management Process
Your lead management process should create a fair and equal environment for your sales reps. This helps to ensure that lead distribution is equal and one agent doesn’t receive unfair treatment. If one sales agent received all the hot leads and the rest spent their time nurturing cold leads, you would be faced with high turn-over and possibly a bad reputation among sales agents in the industry.
The lead management process typically entails:
- Lead Capture
- Enrichment and Tracking
- Lead Distribution
- Qualification
- Nurturing
Once you have captured the lead, it is important to gather data and insights about the lead. This will help you determine the value of the lead to the company. Lead tracking helps you to nurture the lead through the sales process. Additionally, it helps you understand where the lead is in the sales funnel and provide them with pertinent information for their needs.
If your organization has multiple agents, lead distribution is essential to creating a fair environment. A CRM can help you keep track of which agents have received qualified leads and which ones have received unqualified leads. The sales agents can then effectively nurture the leads and provide them with the product information, testimonials and reviews that they need to make a sale.
The right lead management tools can help you achieve call center success. Click here to learn more about how CallTools Connect can help you achieve better call outcomes and sales success.
