Insurance Case Study: Larry and Ted

The insurance industry is changing more and more every day, and, in this day and age, any sales manager who is serious about keeping up with the changing nature of the industry and maximizing the ROI on his marketing spend will be ready to invest in a Lead Management System. Lead Management Systems like Leads360 provide sales teams with a metrics driven, analytical approach to their leads that will helps them with everything from speed to contact to properly following up on every lead. However, some sales managers continue to drag their feet on embracing the inevitable and refuse to invest in Lead Management. To illustrate this problem, lets take a look at two sales managers working in insurance who we’ll call Larry and Ted.

Larry is “old school” and prefers to rely on his gut. He likes playing his hunches when it comes to leads and he doesn’t abide by relying too heavily on data. He pays extra for high quality leads and then distributes them based on his own hunches about who will work them the best. He believes in his instincts and relies on them to make his decisions. While he’s struggling to meet the bottom line, Larry insists this is an offshoot of the bad economy and there’s nothing to be done about it. After all, if Larry and his hunches are failing to close leads, there must be something wrong, right? The only smart approach is to increase their marketing buy to get higher quality leads because, after all, the more you pay the more you get. Larry has a lot of friends and he gets along well with them, but he’s decidedly less popular with the CMO of his company, who wishes Larry’s process were much more transparent.

Ted, meanwhile, is more objective and prefers to remain results driven in his thought process. As a result, he invests in a Lead Management System from Leads360 to keep track of the leads he’s investing in and collect data on who is working what leads and how effective they are. Ted is flexible in his approach, willing to accept what the data tells him and working hard to maximize his ROI and get the best results. He doesn’t like relying solely on his personal conclusions about his staff and instead allows the Lead Management System to manage his lead distribution so that they can get to every hot lead as quickly as possible and allow other leads to be nurtured until they’re ready to be closed. All of this is facilitated by his Lead Management System which allows him to automatically track leads, distribute them, and follow up in the most efficient way all while keeping detail metrics on what, precisely, is and isn’t working for him. Ted is not as popular at the local watering hole as Larry is, but his CMO beams with pride every time you mention Ted’s name, thanking the heavens that he has such a competent sales manager.

Larry and Ted are each confronted with similar problems. Internet leads are both expensive and necessary. They have little choice but to fork out the money to buy these high quality leads, but it means that they need to make sure that they’re getting the most out of each lead. For Larry, this means a frenetic approach to his sales staff. As soon as he gets a lead, he immediately routes it to the sales person that he thinks is best fit to handle them. Larry has a general sense of why he does this the way he does. Some sales people seem to do a better job at closing leads from certain regions, while others are stronger at closing hot leads. Sometimes this means giving a lead to a sales person who is already working on another lead, which means that they don’t get to it right away. Other times, he gives too many leads to certain sales people, meaning that some of their leads aren’t being worked and never get follow up calls. Larry, though, knows that he’s a veteran sales manager who knows the business and relies on his good sense of which member of his staff will be most effective at working the lead. If some of his leads don’t get enough follow up calls or don’t get contacted in the first twenty minutes, so be it. Some of the leads are bound to slip through the cracks, Larry assures himself while sipping coffee from his “#1 Boss” mug, thumbing his suspenders and firing quotes from Glengarry Glen Ross. This is sales and it requires a gutsy manager who is willing to play his hunches to find success.

Things are different at Ted’s firm. Ted prefers to rely on hard data rather than hunches, and his Leads360 software proves invaluable in this regard. When Ted gets a lead, he puts it into the system and it immediately and automatically gets routed to the next available sales person as soon as possible. Instead of playing hunches, Ted has honed his Lead Distribution System to route leads to the appropriate sales person based on a variety of customized factors, including availability, closing rates, region and lead scoring. Because Ted uses a Lead Management System, he knows which sales people are going to be able to immediately call their leads, making contact during the critical first five minutes and closing immediately those leads that are already interested in buying. What’s more, sales people are given reminders to make follow up calls to leads at the appropriate time, ensuring that no lead goes to waste. Those leads that aren’t ready to close are carefully nurtured until they’re ready and then routed back to the sales staff so that they can spend more time closing leads that are ready and less time working leads that are dead ends. On the whole, Ted knows that every valuable lead that he’s paid for is getting contacted as quickly as possible, getting followed up on and getting nurtured until it’s either closed or can be qualified as dead without a shadow of a doubt. What’s more, the details of every lead are carefully recorded so that Ted can go back and refine the approach of his staff based on the data they collect. At the core of this is Ted’s Lead Management System from Leads360. It’s precisely and specifically calibrated to Ted’s business, it’s automated and makes routing and following up leads an easy and efficient process and it ensures that he’s working as hard and as smart as he possible. Ted drinks green tea for its antioxidants, he prefers to wear a belt and while he has seen Glengarry Glen Ross and enjoys a timely reference, he doesn’t overdo it.

What are the results of the two approaches? While their choice of beverages, method of keeping their pants up and frequency of quoting Glengarry Glen Ross are entirely irrelevant, Ted’s use of a Lead Management System makes all the difference in the world to his business. Ted has ensured that he’s getting the most out his staff and his leads by taking a quantifiable approach to things and incorporating the right software to track and score leads while maximizing his ROI. While Larry is going to his CMO and insisting that they need to increase their marketing buy and purchase more expensive leads, Ted has impressed his CMO by discovering that some of their less expensive leads are actually yielding a higher ROI. Larry’s approach prevents his sales people from responding quickly enough or following up enough to get these kinds of results, and, even if they did, Larry wouldn’t be able to identify the trend because he doesn’t have access to the same metrics that allowed Ted to make his discovery. Ted’s staff respects him because there’s transparency in their sales pipeline and they know what to expect. What’s more, the results are undeniable. Larry’s staff enjoys his company, but they’re growing frustrated with his leadership style while it fails to produce results. They’ve talked to the members of Ted’s staff and they’re jealous of the systematic approach offered by a Lead Management System.

In the end, investing in Lead Management is just good business sense. No one, no matter how good their instincts, can handle the speed of business on the internet without a clear, methodical approach that is transparent enough to change in response to inefficiencies. A Lead Management System will improve every element of a sales staff’s approach and ensure that a firm can squeeze every ounce of value out of every lead they purchase. In the end, Larry doesn’t stand a chance when going up against Ted because Larry’s instincts, no matter how good, will never be able to compete with an automated, metrics driven approach like the one provided by a Lead Management System.

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