There is serious gold in your old, long dead lead base.
I met Patrick Boult and Heather Green the principals of Greenhouse Marketing & Communications at the Marcus Evans Long Term Care CXO Summit in Florida this past July where they were attending as one of the sponsoring vendor organizations. While this event is an amazing opportunity to meet new people and share new ideas, there is just not enough time to have in-depth conversations. A few weeks ago we spent the better part of an hour on the phone getting acquainted.
While not so well known in the United States, they are the premier marketing company in Canada and have recently been focusing on expanding their US presence. As we talked, I was particularly intrigued by a program they have developed to find serious gold in dead and dormant leads.
Boxes and Boxes of Paper
Maybe today rather than boxes of paper, it is names, addresses, emails, phone numbers, and sales notes that have long been tagged as unresponsive, impossible or a lost cause in your CRM. This means no one is working them and for good reason, many . . . most will never have any value and it is more important to focus on hotter more current leads.
Except that . . . some of those leads, in fact, if worked properly would turn into move-ins. Greenhouse created a system that utilizes the service of a number of experts who have the ability to tease out the gold in your old leads. Here is what it looks like:
- These leads are people who are hard to get to. They don’t answer the phone and don’t return calls or emails.
- Using trained experienced experts, they are able to connect with 1 out of about 20 leads.
- Each one of the leads gets at least 3 calls. The callers average 4-5 calls per hour.
- The cost is $45-$50 per hour.
- The bottom line is that it would typically cost your about $4,000-$5,000 to work through 400 leads, which would statistically result in 8 move-ins — a pretty good return on investment.
- They update your records and remove the non-working emails and phone numbers.
What Makes This Work
The thing that makes this work so uniquely well, is that typically when low priority leads are worked in-house it is done by the least experienced salesperson or maybe not even a salesperson, but rather a receptionist who has extra time available. As a result if they are worked at all the probability of having any success is about as close to zero as you can get.
The Greenhouse approach is to contract with highly experienced salespeople who typically work from home and log-in via the Cloud to grab these extra opportunities for you. At the end of the day, their goal is to build enough rapport with these prospects to determine if they have any interest in moving forward. The further goal is to set-up an appointment for the revived prospect to visit the community. Once that appointment is set, the prospect is handed back to the local community salespeople to complete the process.
Are you doing anything to reviving your old leads? Would you do a program like this?
Steve
No, I do not subscribe to the “dialing for dollars” method of generating new interest in old leads. In that I work at a CCRC and we are qualifying people to be in good health for their age to manage future census in the higher levels of care, this method does not justify the time. If a qualified lead is quiet, then yes, calling is appropriate. But to use this method to shake a couple of leads out of a database is not worth the time. I know this goes against “marketing 101” training, but the best results in my experience is to develop real relationships with fewer people, and they do bear fruit and move-ins. We’ve had too many consultants use this bandaid suggestion and statistically, you can justify it. But great relationships are far more powerful in spreading the fire of your brand because of word of mouth referrals. Nothing can beat those.
Steve, It is true that working “old” and “cold” leads can lead to more conversions. With Prospect-Centered Selling we about 35% of IL 20% of AL conversions come from Leads that have inquired more than 1 year prior. That said, I strongly agree with Candice Milford above. We strongly believe in spending more time with less leads. You just can’t bake twice as many cakes by cooking each one half as long. Building trust and advancing prospects in terms of readiness, takes time. We measure that time, as well as the Advances. We also measure the number of Leads (old and new) per vacant unit. Frankly we are amazed to find many communities that already have several hundred leads per vacancy are still actively pursuing more leads – as though that was a measure of or contributor to their success. With average industry occupancies hovering around 90% which typically translates to about 10 to 15 vacancies – how many more leads do we really need? Finally, there is a finite number of potential “Selling” hours. Combing though stacks of old inquires as well as managing an ever increasing number of Leads reduces the Sales Teams ability to build relationships, connect emotionally and motivate readiness with individual prospects. Bottom line: more time with less leads produces higher conversion ratios.
Thanks to Steve for the article on our “virtual marketers”. Nice to see it has sparked some lively and insightful discussion.
The reality is that prospect acquisition is expensive and operators need to make the most of each lead. We are in total agreement that quality trumps quantity but we need to ascertain the quality quickly and that’s done by relationship-building. Unfortunately, by design or not, sometimes leads are too prolific and a marketer has a difficult time keeping up, or a marketer may do a substandard job. Those multiple points-of-contact that build solid relationships may suffer. As well, the quality of a lead may change dramatically over time as needs increase or social circumstances change through death of a spouse, siblings or close friends. What may not have been a high-quality lead last year may be an ideal lead this year.
Our service was borne out of simple need. Salespeople can’t keep up with all the clients in their databases and, in order to be successful, it only makes sense they’d be spending their time on a few select clients at a time, building on those relationships and moving the sale along. We simply take the big pile that’s left over and efficiently (and warmly) contact each. Lost leads are recategorized, cold and warm moved to hot as the situation dictates. And the entire leadbase gets a thorough spring cleaning. Clients siimply love having their databases up-to-date and are thrilled with a handful of “new” (previous) leads each week. I can’t tell you how many times a prospect or family member has said to one of our marketers “It’s great timing that you called today”.
So our adivce is to get your marketers to continue with all their relationship-building activities. We’ll just re-introduce them to some old friends they may not have seen in awhile.
I had a brilliant regional marketing boss invent something that motivated us years ago. All of the old leads that were considered “closed/non responsive” were rated “E”. If we got on of those “E” leads to move in, we were paid about 3 times more than the other leads. So it was challenging too, and very satisfying when one converted.