Sales and marketing alignment is a hot topic. While they may not always be in sync, there is one thing marketing and sales teams can agree on: Optimizing lead programs to increase conversion rate is paramount, but not easy. One of the biggest blockers is the inefficiency inherent in the lead hand-off process.
Financial services reps are not to blame. Amidst competing priorities, following up on inbound leads with canned emails, or sifting through lower-quality leads to find golden prospects can feel like fruitless endeavors that yield poor ROI. This is where the breakdown happens. So, how do you surface the most qualified contacts and deliver a personal, differentiated customer experience? With a focus on these three components.
- The single most critical component of lead conversion is response time. Response time to an initial inbound inquiry is critical. The longer a prospect waits to hear back from your advisor or agent, the less interested they become, and the more likely your competitor is to steal their attention. With customer expectations significantly heightened, if you’re not first to respond to the customer, you might as well be last. In fact, recent research from LeadConnect found that the company that makes customer contact first, wins the business three-quarters of the time. But it’s not just timeliness that drives success.
- Delivering that timely response to your prospective customers’ preferred channel is imperative. Remember the old adage, if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a noise? If a follow-up email is delivered to your prospective client’s spam folder, does timeliness matter? No. With open rates as high as 98%, enabling your agents and advisors to compliantly connect with prospects via text is table stakes. Connecting your field reps’ text channel directly to the marketing lead programs? That’s next level. And while timing and channel are key, the message makes all the difference.
- Message matters, and your advisors and agents need support. Flowing inbound marketing leads from a form conversion to a 1:1 advisor/client text thread bridges the lead hand-off gap, but it doesn’t help your field bridge the contextual gap. Where did that leave come from, how many times should they follow up and how often, what offer should they reference when they do? All of these components matter in that initial exchange, and drive a seamless client experience.
Hearsay Lead Actions removes the guesswork, surfacing the highest quality leads and increasing lead conversion through a micro-level workflow engine that ingests lead information and immediately acts on behalf of the advisor via text, while coaching the advisor along the way with follow-up reminders via push notification. A seamless process for the agent, more control and visibility for corporate, and a stellar experience for the customer? That’s how you bridge the sales-marketing hand-off gap in a consistent and optimized way.
If you’re ready to chat about how you can increase lead conversion by 40% and meet customers where they are, contact our team today.
