“If you don’t love everybody, you can’t sell anybody.”

-Dicky Fox

“If you help enough people get what they want, you will get what you want.”

-Zig Ziglar

“We’re adding a little something to this month’s sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anybody want to see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.”

-Alec Baldwin as Blake in Glenn Gary Glenn Ross

“I know you’re not standing on your front porch with a bag of money waiting for me to call you. But I’m not some 18-year-old selling a cure for AIDS. I’m 46 years old, I have 22 years market experience, I know this business. So pick up your skirt, grab your balls, and lets go make some money.”

-Broker, Boiler Room

“Don’t wish it were easier, wish you were better.”

-Jim Rohn

“It’s easier to explain price once than to apologize for quality forever.”

-Zig Ziglar

“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”

-Sam Walton

“Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.”

-Ronald Osborn

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

-Mark Twain

“I do not think there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance. It overcomes almost everything, even nature.”

-John D. Rockefeller

You should call a lead the moment you receive it. This is so important I’m going to to repeat it—you should call a lead the moment you receive it. If they don’t answer, call again immediately. Three out of ten times the person you’re calling will think it’s an emergency and will pick up. This method works so be sure you use it. If no one answers on the second call then you should call back every hour for the rest of that day.

Slow Response to Leads

I recently had a conversation with a new client about the amount of time it takes for their reps to call a new lead and found that their reps were calling leads 20-60 minutes after they received them. Obviously they haven’t read our blog post here. Enough said.

Voicemail & Answering Machines

Some people may disagree, but it is foolish to leave a message on the first few attempts at calling a lead. As a general rule, you should call a lead 4-5 times the day you receive the lead and only leave a message on the 5th or 6th call. If you have a dialer or CRM that allows you to pre-record a voicemail, make sure you use that feature. If your dialer doesn’t have that feature then get rid of it. Consider this: If you call 20 people every day and leave a 1-minute message for each one then you’ve spent 20 minutes every day leaving messages. Multiply that over a year and you’ll spend 86 hours, or 3.6 days, leaving messages. If your current dialer can’t leave a message for you then get a new one!

Bad Lead Management

A CRM that automatically posts leads is essential in sales. If you are currently selling a product and don’t have a CRM you are seriously in need of some help. If you are buying leads from a lead provider or have a website that has a contact page, you need to have a programmer set up an http post or something like it. This is NOT optional. Create a process for each aspect of lead organization and management. Invest time in the process and money in the systems to leverage the ability to easily qualify and sort leads. Eventually this will lead to increases in productivity. It’s absolutely essential that you respond as fast as possible to Internet leads—try not to take more than 5 minutes when calling an Internet lead for the first time.

Lack of Preparation

Faxes, proposals, emails…a lot of these tasks should be automated or 90% complete before you need them. There are tons of ways to increase your preparation and productivity through the use of common tools like eFax, Excel, Gmail. One favorite that we use here at LeadBully.com is Boomerang for Gmail. You can read more about it and download it here.

Hopefully this will help some of you with your sales and organization efforts. Remember: You will get what you put into this. Perseverance will trump everything, no matter how smart and fast-talking you are. If you believe in what you are selling, so will your leads.

A simple feedback mechanism on a website invites visitors to connect with the company. On a product page, in the shopping cart, or elsewhere on the site, a consumer sees an option to start a conversation. One visitor might note that a specific price seems too high. Another might say he can’t find a certain item. Perhaps another writes that she had trouble with the website itself. All of these feedback items are fuel for sales, support and marketing teams. Their job is to respond quickly and fully to turn a conversation into a conversion.

Studies show that 65 percent of those who leave feedback on websites also leave contact information, indicating a willingness to extend a relationship with a company. Following up on those self-selecting leads can increase website traffic and average-order-per-visitor, while also strengthening customer loyalty for the brand.

For Web-based feedback channels to fill sales funnels, e-businesses should keep several strategies in mind:

1. Make it easy for visitors to talk to you. Offer a feedback option on every important process on your website, and provide categorized quick-pick and sub-menus to simplify the process.
2. Don’t try to dominate the conversation. When companies rely on survey-style communications, customer voices get stifled. Let visitors steer the conversation with open-ended forms or easy-to-use ratings systems.
3. Use auto-reply e-mails to respond to feedback quickly. These should be specific, pre-defined, relevant messages that immediately speak to the issues raised by visitors. For unusual needs or hot prospects, have sales, support or marketing make the contact individually. Many websites fail to respond to visitor feedback at all; those who do make a strong impact on potential customers.
4. Use soft sales to draw in qualified leads. When a user takes the time to give feedback and contact details, don’t threaten that relationship with a hard sell. Thank people for their feedback, mention how valuable it is to the company, and provide a discount on a future purchase as a sign of gratitude. By doing so, you build a relationship that will likely yield a sale and a loyal customer.
5. Continue the relationship. Use your feedback mechanism to offer a newsletter opt-in so you can keep in touch with customers who have indicated an affinity for your brand by taking the time to talk with you.

It’s highly unlikely that psychologist Abraham Maslow, working in the 1940s, could have envisioned the ways in which humans would try to connect via virtual methods. Perhaps he would have questioned the validity of such relationships. However, for businesses that take full advantage of their websites to bond with customers, meeting a core human need inevitably leads to greater success in terms of customer loyalty and sales revenue.

Thank you, Gaddy Barchana Lorand, Director of Product Kampyle, for this guest post.

I still can’t believe I closed the first lead you gave me! In 10 year’s that’s never happened.

Mark Bruno | San Francisco, CA.

According to a study done by Omniture, if you contact a lead within the first hour, you are 6 times more likely to close it than if you had waited an hour. The study conducted by Omniture and InsideSales.com reveals the best strategies for businesses to practice when responding to online leads:

1. Email responses should be within the first hour.

2. Phone responses  should be within 3 minutes.

The study found that the average email response time for companies was 19 hours, 31 minutes and the average phone response time was 36 hours, 57 minutes. Clearly there are lots of companies who have bad strategies when it comes to following up on Internet leads.

How Soon Should I Call a Lead?

Another study done by M.I.T and InsideSales.com showed that delaying your first-dial response time from 5 minutes to 30 minutes decreases your chances of qualifying the lead by 21 times!

Is it Better to Follow Up on Leads on a Specific Day of the Week?

Another interesting finding is that Thursday is the best day to contact a lead in order to qualify that lead. Also, 4-5PM is the best time of day to contact the lead to qualify it but 8-9AM and 4-5PM are the best times to successfully get a hold of a lead. The worst time to get a hold of a lead was right before lunch.

The good news, according to Sirius Decisions, is that 80% of prospects who show an interest in your product/service will buy from either you or a competitor within 2 years. Having a prospect as a lead provides you with a great opportunity to show them why they should do business with you.

Omniture, InsideSales.com, M.I.T and Sirius Decisions just clearly proved this mathematically. Do you agree? Disagree? Why? Post a comment and let me know.

This is an exciting opportunity for any quality lead generation company to prove the quality of their leads and service. Finally there is a place where sales organizations can go and figure out quickly who has good leads and who doesn’t.

Cyclone is offering a free signup to whoever wants to see what it’s all about. Click here if you would like to sign up for a free demo, or call Jim Wade at (858) 822-7105. It only takes 45 seconds and you will easily be able to see what Cyclone is all about.

Click here to visit their website.

What Do We Do?

• Lead Generation
• Marketing Management
• SEO/SEM (Search Engine Optimization & Search Engine Management)
• Wholesale Data Supply (Aged lead lists from 1,000 to 10,000,000)
• Web Design
• Graphic Design

Whether you want to revamp your website and get within the top ranks of major search engines or are looking for more prospects to sell to, we can help. 59% of our client base purchases leads from us and the other 41% have us manage their websites and marketing budgets. We advertise heavily on Google, and in most cases only on Google. While Yahoo and Bing are great sources for business, many studies have shown that Google users are simply more savvy. Here is a Google vs. Bing study we like. More often than not, we only advertise on Yahoo or Bing when Google’s not able to provide  the necessary volume on its own. In many cases, we will even use publishers like AdKnowledge, Facebook and Doubleclick. We also offer web and graphic design services. Whether you are a Fortune 500 company with a need for a website redesign or are just starting out and don’t even have a company name yet, we can help. Most of our clients are service-based and have 20-30 employees. At the time of writing, the majority of our clients are in the mortgage refinance market. From smaller-sized mortgage brokers like California Loan Associates to larger-sized outfits like Quicken Loans, we help our clients grow their business, and we can do the same for you.

How Do We Do It?

Lead Generation:

1. Where is the traffic coming from?
   It all starts with the traffic. The single most important aspect of lead generation is your source of traffic. Some critics say the most important factor is your landing page and website graphics, while others point to the ad copy and call to action. While these are all important, traffic quality trumps them all. The quality of traffic to your websites and landing pages is so important that almost no other aspect matters. You can completely waste your efforts or have astronomical success based solely upon the right source of traffic. Once we establish a solid source of traffic, the next area of focus is our client.
2. Who receives prospective clients’ information?
   Is it a mortgage broker? A lender? Do they have the lowest fees? The lowest rates? Is there brand recognition or not? All of these questions are imperative. Why? Because if you are sending prospects that just saw an ad for a 3.75% fixed interest rate and one of your clients doesn’t have access to those rates, guess how many of those prospects that client is going to close? Unless you have a salesperson with technique better than Ari from Entourage, odds are your client isn’t going to close any of them.
3. Ad copy & landing pages
   i) There are so many variables and topics that we could discuss this for years and still have things to talk about. This is an ever-evolving subject and nobody knows what’s going to work 100% of the time so I’ll leave this for a later blog post where I will expand on how we look at the different aspects of each part of the lead generation process. But for now, let’s just say that this is one of the more important factors and we don’t take it lightly. A few of the essential rules are that you should never, EVER, EVER use one landing page and one set of ad copy because it “works”. Always A/B test your pages and ads. Use different combinations, try different colors and experiment with different plays on words. This is a never-ending battle. You can’t win…but you can lose!
   ii) There are several companies out there like BriteVerify.com (who we use) and Targus.com that can dramatically clean up the quality of your leads by verifying the information that’s entered into your form before it hits your lead distribution station and/or CRM.  This helps ensure that when our clients receive a prospect, the data they receive (phone number, address, email) is accurate. There’s nothing worse than having a client receive bad phone numbers and email addresses.
4. Lead deliverability
   How fast and how often we send our clients leads is imperative to the success of a marketing campaign. The odds of turning a new prospect into a client dramatically decrease when you don’t contact that prospect within fifteen to twenty minutes of their expression of interest. Our lead distribution software Lead Exec helps us stay ahead of the competition by automating this process and keeping the data that’s shared with our clients secure. There are a few other options out there like Boberdoo.com (one we personally like) and LeadDistribution.org that esentially do the same thing. We have a secure and stable process in place for our clients to receive leads in less than seconds from submission to delivery so that their odds of success are maximized.

I’ll discuss web design, graphic design and search engine management in another post, but for now I think you have a good idea of what we do for lead generation.

I hope this gives you a little insight into what we do and how we do it. If you’re looking for further information on any aspect of what we do, I’ll go into more detail in another article sometime in the near future. Stay tuned!

By the way, if you are in need of assistance with marketing and would like to know more about how LeadBully.com can help expand and grow your business, feel free to email info@leadbully.com or contact us on our website at leadbully.com/contact. We hope to hear from you soon!

Joseph Reyes | New York, NY.