Many schools become frustrated with purchased eduction leads because contact rates are too low, online competitors have call centers that respond instantly, or the leads are uninterested in speaking with a career counseor, admissions advisor or enrollment representative.

LeadQual’s Rapid Lead Response and Live Transfer Service responds to your leads for you – quickly, professionally and more efficiently.

Success with Internet Leads Requires a Quick Response to Student Inquiries

When any type of organization, whether a mortgage company, for-profit college or B2B sales organization first begins dialing leads generated and sold by a 3rd party lead source, they often run into problems.

First, too many dials do not result in contact with the lead. Prospective buyers, students or borrowers often do not answer calls, despite their expressed interest through an online form. Dialing your leads more quickly can help. An MIT study on lead response revealed that you are 5 times more likely to make contact with a lead when you call in 5 minutes, versus 10 minutes!

Second, when actual contact with a lead is made (often after several repeated attempts), a surprisingly large percentage of leads have already lost interest. Why does happen? The lead has already spoken with a competitor and received the information they were seeking. Again, a faster response to your leads can help.

A more rapid response to leads will yield better contact rates and better sales qualification rates. It goes without saying that the number of prospective clients, buyers or students who are interested in actually discussing your orginal offer or program rises when your representative is the first to speak with them.

Do You Really Want to Be a Telemarketing Firm or Call Center?

A dedicated organization with good loan officers, sales team members (or admissions counselors for online schools) may make a concerted effort to respond quickly to all leads, yet still struggle to make headway. There is a fixed limit to the number of calls a representative or any one team member can make. Once that limit is reached, additional team members must be hired if one wishes to increase sales, loans or starts.

The successful company seeks out ways to improve lead response, while scaling the number of good, hot prospects with which they can spend time quoting, consulting, advising or selling.

Hiring additional dedicated team members for lead response is typically not an option, due to cost. In addition to salaries, there are issues with training, equipment, optimal script discovery, management and more. Most companies have no desire to run a call center operation, yet still want to be able to process more leads.

Automated Dialers: The Downside

Automated dialers may allow a lead buyer to achieve a faster response to leads. There are two types of systems that are used frequently: Predictive Dialers and Lead Notification Systems.

Predictive Dialers

Predictive dialers are used by generic call centers and organizations with a large phone sales force. These systems dial large batches of targeted phone numbers until contact is made, then patches successful connections through to a waiting operator, or lead qualifier (called flippers).

If you have ever heard complete silence when you answered a phone call, followed by a click and background noise, accompanied by the auditory equivalent of a deer in headlights and a phone rep asking for you by name, you have been called by a predictive dialer.

The initial silence with a predictive dialer is called a pregnant pause and you have probably experienced it yourself. Recall the tinge of irritation that you felt in that brief moment before a real person came on the line. Predictive dialers usually result in a high number of dropped calls. These dropped calls are leads that may have been perfectly willing to speak with a courteous, professional sales professional, but have little tolerance for being called by a computer.

Predictive dialers may have their place. They are commonly used for outbound cold-calling against a low-value, low cost list of name records or large customer databases for the purpose of lead generation. When a connection occurs and a sales suspect is identified, the next available sales representative will be patched in. All too often, when the respresentative is patched in, the lead has already hung up the phone. Do you want to risk a $50 education lead or a $20 mortgage lead to a system like this?

Predictive dialers are not appropriate for contacting fresh, real-time, Internet leads because too many consumers hang up once they realize that they have been called by a computer. These leads cost more, and deserve a much more professional response.

Lead Notification Dialers

Another type of auto-dialer can call your phone for you once a lead has been generated and delivered into your lead management system. This type of dialer essentially provides a lead notification alert by telephone.

For a very small company, or an individual salesperson, this type of dialer can improve your response speed because you are notified of new leads in real-time, without having to check your email inbox or lead management system account. These systems can also prompt you for new follow-up calls with leads that did not answer the phone on your first attempt.

This type of dialer is NOT a lead scrubbing, qualification or live transfer system, even if billed as such. Your phone rings for all leads and follow-up calls, whether the lead is contacted or not. These systems simply facilitate a faster response to leads on the part of individual salespeople, assuming that these salespeople actually do press 1 to make the outbound dial.

With lead notification dialers, you must still call every lead, including those who will never answer, have no interest in speaking and have wrong numbers. Each additional follow-up attempt increases the number of inbound phone calls from the dialer that do not connect with the lead.

Unless you are simply sitting around waiting for your phone to ring, the inbound calls can be highly distracting to your day-to-day business. When you are unavailable to respond to a dialer call, the lead will still sit and age, without a timely response. If you attempt to scale lead volume, the number of incoming calls on your phone that do not yield real results will begin to overwhelm even the most well-staffed company.

While lead notification systems may help to unchain you from your Inbox in attempting to make contact with leads more quickly, they do not really reduce your phone time overhead. The only real efficiency they provide is a reduction in the number of digits you must press on your phone keypad to call your lead.

Call Centers

Your real objective should be to increase the number of productive conversations you have with leads, while eliminating the unproductive conversations and calls altogether. This allows you to scale your lead acquisition efforts, which in turn results in more new clients.

A call center can call your leads for you, scrub and qualify the leads and then live transfer only the qualified and interested leads to your sales team. This can significantly reduce phone time, improve lead conversion rates and allow you to scale the number of leads your team can effectively and profitably handle.

The Type of Call Center You Choose to Work With Can Dramatically Impact Results.

Many call centers, in an effort to reduce cost, use predictive dialers and are operated outside of the U.S. They are designed for outbound cold-calling campaigns to generate new leads at the lowest possible cost. These types of call centers are not appropriate for responding to live consumers that are expecting a call from a professional. As discussed already, predictive dialers can have a detrimental impact on contact and live transfer rates and when combined with poorly trained, outsourced telemarketers, they will dramatically reduce the value of your most serious leads.

Your success with with leads hinges on a high quality, professional response that does not betray the professional, courteous service that you wish to provide your clients.

LeadQual Rapid Lead Response & Live Transfer

Initial lead response is a wholly different function than consulting with prospective student, answering questions about interest rates for prospective borrowers or providing insurance quotes and closing sales.

The objective in Internet lead response is to quickly contact and verify a lead’s details, qualify the lead to determine whether they are a viable sales lead, then get the qualified and interested leads into the hands of a live representative. These functions should be performed professionally and courteously.

LeadQual improves Internet lead conversion by addressing all the best practices in Internt lead response. LeadQual’s U.S. based, professionally trained Internet Lead Response Experts will:

• Call 100% of your Internet leads in less than 3 minutes (often under 1 minute).
• Live qualify your leads with a custom script and your custom sales criteria.
• Live transfer only the qualified, interested leads to a sales tem member, admissions advisor or loan officer.

LeadQual only transfers the leads that are ready, willing and able to close.

No more time wasted chasing unqualified, uninterested or unreachable leads!

LeadQual’s flexibility is unmatched by any other system. It offers multiple live transfer methods, including a patent pending messenger application that results in your lead never having to be placed on hold. It can accommodate virtually any organization’s lead management system and can work with hunt groups, direct lines and various conferencing systems – seamlessly.

LeadQual results is better contact and qualification rates, more productive conversations with prospects and more closed sales.

View the LeadQual’s Rapid Response & Live Transfer System Difference

Real Estate brokers with IDX web sites featuring MLS listings have the ability to generate a tremendous amount of leads through a required registration process.

Once a good web site has been established, there are numerous options for generating traffic to the site, which in turn produces good buyer leads through a registration form.

Finding these buyers and answering their questions quickly is key to extracting maximum value out of your leads and achieving maximum ROI on your Internet marketing efforts.

Agents Don’t Like Calling Leads

Real Estate brokers have difficulty getting their agents to contact the leads they are generating, for a variety of good reasons. They often begin to wonder if providing the leads to agents is justified.

If you are generating your own real estate leads, take heart. There is gold in your leads. That gold simply has to be unearthed and this can be done quite easily, at a very reasonable cost.

Not every lead generated by a real estate web site needs nurturing before it is ready to convert. While most home buyers that register on an IDX site are just getting started in their home search and may not be ready to speak with an agent, a percentage of the leads are ready and willing to speak – right now. These same leads expect a call too – right now. If you don’t call these home buyers, your competitor will.

Finding the ready and willing buyers and answering their questions quickly is key to extracting maximum value out of your leads and achieving maximum ROI on your Internet marketing efforts. It is this minority of leads, the hot leads buried in the lookie-loos, that can actually generate the majority of commissions.

Rapid Lead Response and Live Transfer for Real Estate Leads

The very same agents who were loathe to call leads are more than happy to speak with a qualified, interested prospect that arrives by telephone. The smart and practical broker recognizes this. The smart and practical broker also realizes that calling Internet leads is a very different function than advising clients and negotiating a home purchase, and both functions should be separated from each other.

How can you identify and speak with good leads, without being distracted by those that need to be cultivated with your drip marketing efforts? Most agents feel like calling your leads is a waste of time, because they can’t respond quickly enough, too many dials are required and too many “just looking” conversations are taking place.

LeadQual’s Rapid Lead Response & Live Transfer Service is a good solution. With LeadQual’s Real Estate Lead Call Center, you can call 100% of your leads in less than 3 minutes from IDX site registration, qualify each lead based on your custom sales criteria and live transfer the qualified and interested prospects directly to your agents.

Read About LeadQual Service and Benefits

The speed with which you respond to your Internet leads has a direct effect on the ultimate value of your web site. The first REALTOR® to contact a lead has a 238% greater liklihood of closing a deal than the second REALTOR^® to contact that same lead.

LeadQual insures that you are first to respond to prospective home buyers, boosting your lead conversion and ROI. With Rapid Response and Live Transfer, your contact, conversion and transaction rates rise, lifting the value of your web site and the visitors you send to it.

With LeadQual, your agents will be happier and more productive as they will spend less time playing telemarketer and more time closing deals.

To learn more about live transferring your MLS web site registration leads to your agents and general Internet lead conversion strategies, please subscribe to our blog in the right-hand sidebar.

A call center can be used to quickly contact leads that are generated from your own web site, as well as leads purchased from lead generators.

The call center should verify lead details, determine the quality of a prospective borrower according to the client’s criteria and then quickly live transfer leads that are qualified to the client’s sales team.

Every good lead that fails to live transfer due to poor, inefficient or improperly handled call-center practices is the equivalent of a lead that never received a telephone response.

While one may wish to pinch pennies on call center costs, it will likely come at the expense of good live transfer rates and conversion. Every good lead that fails to live transfer due to poor, inefficient or improperly handled call-center practices is the equivalent of a lead that never received a telephone response.

Professional Call Centers Designed for Internet Mortgage Leads

If you choose to use a call center to live transfer mortgage leads to your Loan Officers, make sure that the call center is staffed by professionally trained Internet Lead Response experts who will be using your custom script and qualification questions. Call Center operators should review each lead before dialing, understand the lead’s basic intent and know the desires of the lender to whom they will be live transferring good leads once they have passed all the initial screens.

These criteria cannot be met with off-shore call centers, automated dialer systems or generic call centers designed to handle inbound calls off radio, TV or direct mail. Internet leads need to be handled in a unique manner if you want them to convert to their full potential.

Live Transfer Methods

Live transfer rates can only be maximized when a call center has the ability to transfer qualified and interest prospects in a manner that can accommodate the specific structure of the client organization.

LeadQual’s Rapid Lead Response and Live Transfer Service is flexible enough to provide for multiple live transfer methods, which will allow you to maximize live transfer rates.

Direct Dial

When transferring live leads via direct dial, each Loan Officer has a dedicated, direct line. LeadQual agents can dial each individual Loan Officer in a pre-determined sequence, based on priority or geographic assignments. LeadQual can also dial and live transfer to Loan Officers on a round-robin basis, with equal weight given to each Loan Officer.

The advantage of Direct Dial is that you have full administrative access in your Lead Center and will be able to add or subtract Loan Officers from the LeadQual system, along with their specific geographic or priority weightings for receiving live transfers.

The downside is that if Loan Officers are busy and unable to take calls, LeadQual may need to cycle through multiple numbers until an available Live Transferee is found. The patience of a good lead will eventually wear out and if too many numbers have to be dialed to find a Loan Officer, the risk of droppped calls rise. Of course, with LeadQual’s comprehensive reporting, you will actually be able to identify if and when this is happening, and it will allow you to improve staffing efficiency.

Hunt Group

If you have a hunt group system established, where your internal system can hunt down and dial the first available Loan Officer, you may increase the speed with which a live transfer gets to an available Loan Officer.

LeadQual agents would dial your one provided number and your system will find the Loan Officer who will get the transfer. You can still add your Loan Officers into your LeadQual Lead Center, along with their phone and email addresses.

When a live transfer is completed, even through a hunt group, LeadQual will be able to assign the lead to Loan Officer that received the transfer. This can then properly mark the lead in your Lead Management System with a post-back from LeadQual, and will also provide your Loan Officer with access to LeadQual call center notes on the lead in our lead assignment email alerts.

When LeadQual dials a single hunt group or manual conference number, priority weightings or geographic assignements applied to each Loan Officer entry in the LeadQual Lead Center will not apply, but your system may have its own call distribution prioritization already built in.

LQ Messenger

LeadQual’s patent-pending LeadQual Messenger application is a powerful way to maximize the number of contacted and qualified leads who are successfully passed to your Loan Officers with a warm hand-off. The system was built with one purpose: Increase the speed and frequency of successful live transfers.

Next, we will take a more in depth look at LQ Messenger, its use and how how it can improve Live Transfer rates for call center clients.

Good lead management practices begin with the initial acquisition of a lead. It doesn’t end once contact with a lead has been made, or even when it is live transferred to a Loan Officer.

Good lead management includes processes supported by robust technolog that is simple to use and that removes the pain associated with the daily grind in converting prospects into fully funded loans.

Lenders that are most effective with their leads rely on a lead management platform that can assist in lead distribution, follow-up, tracking and measurement.

LeadMailBox’s Lead Management System integrates seamlessly with LeadQual in a manner that allows clients to achieve maximum conversion through rapid response and live transfer, while also achieving good lead handling and follow-up practices.

LeadMailbox’s Lead Management platform integrates seemlessly with LeadQual in a manner that allows clients to achieve maximum conversion through rapid response and live transfer, while also achieving good lead handling and follow-up practices. Here is how a LeadMailbox / LeadQual integration can work:

• Lenders have leads from multiple sources delivered into their LeadMailbox account.
• LeadMailbox automatically posts the leads to LeadQual in real-time, where LeadQual Internet Lead Response Experts respond instantly with a custom script and qualification questions based on the client’s sales criteria.
• LeadQual live transfers qualified leads that would like to speak to a Loan Officer. Live transfers can be delivered through a hunt group, multiple direct dial lines, prioritized or geographically based assignments. LeadQual’s patent-pending LeadQual Messenger client can also ping Loan Officers with a message delivered to their desktop, while a prospective borrower is still on the phone with a LeadQual agent. The first Loan Officer to respond will get a call where a warm hand-off of the lead from the LeadQual agent to the Loan Officer will take place.
• When a lead live transfers, LeadQual automatically and simultaneously posts updates on the lead back to the client’s LeadMailbox account (and will even pop up lead details on the Loan Officers desktop if LeadQual Messenger is being used). Updates posted to the lead in the LeadMailbox account can include call notes, time stamps, answers to the qualification questions, lead status and, importantly, the Loan Officer that the lead has been assigned to, based on the live transfer to that Loan Officer.
• Loan Officers that have been assigned a lead during a live transfer will have instant access to the lead, and all the associated LeadQual appended notes, when logging into their LeadMailbox account – during or immediately after the call with a prospective borrow has concluded.
• Both LeadMailbox and LeadQual have lead sources associated with leads, so the lender’s Internet Marketing Manager, Branch Manager or whomever is responsible for lead purchases can pull reports from either system and determine Live Transfer rates for each lead vendor. This allows lenders to effectively measure contact, qualification and live transfer rates, for each lead source. Lead buys can be optimized on this basis and then further optimized based on the utlimate cost-per-funded loan.
• Lead that have not been contacted by LeadQual during the initial rapid response period remain with LeadMailbox for additional marketing campaigns and follow-up procedures.

LeadQual boosts contact and application rates on real-time leads due to response speed, optimized call scripts, professional training for its Internet Lead Response Experts and professional live transfer methods designed to maximize the lender and LO’s credibility. LeadMailbox insures good lead handling, distribution, follow-up and tracking after the initial conversation with a Loan Officers has taken place.

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Since 2003, LeadMailbox has provided a turnkey, secure, 100% web-based solution to lead management. LeadMailbox’s platform includes a user-friendly interface and countless features, with robust partner integration to multiple 3rd parties. LeadMailbox serves over over 4000 clients in mortgage, financial services, insurance, education, debt settlement and other industries. Contact LeadMailbox at 888-317-1130 or visit them on the web at www.leadmailbox.com.

How are you managing lead follow-up? LeadQual integrates with multiple Lead Management systems. With Leads360 Lead Management System integration, LeadQual can increase conversion on real-time leads, while also squeezing more conversion out of aging leads.

With Leads360 Lead Management System integration, LeadQual can increase conversion on real-time leads, while also squeezing more conversion out of aging leads.

New Mortgage Leads: LeadQual Call Center Handling

• Have your leads delivered directly into your Leads360 lead management platform from all your lead vendors, your web site lead capture form and your various online marketing campaigns.
• Leave your leads temporarily unassigned (i.e. do not assign immediately to a Loan Officer).
• Post your leads to LeadQual for call campaigns, based on your business rules, in real-time.
• Once LeadQual calls, qualifies and warm transfers your leads, LeadQual can automatically post back lead updates, including an assignment of the lead to the Loan Officer that received the live transfer.

New Mortgage Leads: Loan Officer Assignment For First 4 Minutes

• Responding to your leads within 5 minutes is critical to maximizing lead conversion, and Leads360 integration with LeadQual can assure that this takes place, even if you still wish to give your Loan Officers first crack at your leads.
• If you have Loan Officers that respond quickly, or if you have an effective and fast call center or lead response system in place, you may choose to give Loan Officers a few minutes to call on your real-time leads that are delivered into your lead management system.
• If your Loan Officers are busy and do not call leads fast enough, your Leads360 lead management system can automatically send your leads to LeadQual for a quick response, based on the amount of time that has lapsed since the lead was posted into your system.
• After LeadQual makes contact with your real-time leads, those leads that pass the initial screen and who are willing to speak about a loan will be live transferred directly to an available Loan Officer and automatically assigned to that LO in your Leads360 lead management system.
• LeadQual can change your lead status, trigger actions and automatically display the appropriate lead in Leads360 after making warm transfers to your Loan Officers.

Pre-Existing Mortgage Leads: Remarketing Campaigns

• Use Leads360 XML Triggers and LeadQual’s Rapid Response System to remarket to existing customers and leads.
• Leads360 XML Poster routes lead data from targeted customers based on company-specific triggers to LeadQual such as time delay, qualification, or lack of follow-up.
• LeadQual’s Rapid Response experts can call the leads, qualify and live transfer qualified and interested prospects to your sales team.
• Find opportunities in old leads: Search leads by any criteria and batch-post those leads to LeadQual for special call campaigns.

The possibilities are endless with Leads360 platform and LeadQual’s rapid response call center services. LeadQual’s fast and professional lead response, warm transfers, integrated with your powerful lead management system, can help you squeeze maximum performance out of your hard-won leads.

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Leads360 provides lead management software and services to help clients achieve a better return on their lead investment. In just 5 years of helping businesses grow, Leads360 has established over 2,500 clients for their lead management platform. For a demonstration or more information, contact Leads360 at 1-888-856-0534, or visit www.leads360.com.

Are You Subsidizing the Purchase of Leads by Competing Lenders?

Many lenders mistakenly believe that highly filtered, high quality, long-form mortgage leads are the only leads that will convert to closed loans. This is born from their experience with their short form, non-exclusive leads, which have been sold to multiple lenders. To be sure, exclusive, highly filtered leads yield better results, but they come with a price. Often, the additional premium you pay for quality makes the leads prohibitively expensive.

If you do not call your shared leads in less than 5 minutes, you are essentially subsidizing the purchase of these same leads by more responsive lenders.

A Better Internet Lead Strategy

Consider purchasing lower-cost, non-exclusive leads from the various lead vendors and lead aggregators, then use LeadQual’s Rapid Response and Live Transfer service to call, scrub, qualify and live transfer the interested prospective borrowers to your sales team.

The cost for lead scrubbing and warm transfers should be multiples lower than the premium you might expect to pay for exclusivity or heavy filters.

LeadQual’s instant, live, professional response to your low cost leads will result in contact and conversion rates higher than you may be seeing with your premium leads.

The small incremental cost for LeadQual scrubbing and warm transfer, added to the much lower cost leads, will still result in a lower cost than your premium leads. With good conversion, the return on your lead investment will be higher.

Watch out though. For this strategy to work, your leads must still be real-time and not aged or recycled. LeadQual’s Rapid Response and Live Transfer service works because we are the first to respond to a lead, in a professional manner. If a lead is aged, the liklihood of contact will have already dropped considerably.

Strategic Approach to Mortgage Lead Acquisition

LeadQual’s top mortgage clients succeed with Internet leads where others don’t because they are essentially exploiting the state of Internet lead response in the mortgage industry. Read Mortgage Leads Study.

A lead vendor can sell you competitive leads for less, because they sell them multiple times. The way to make these non-exclusive leads work is to take advantage of the fact that half the lead vendors’ clients will not call the leads they buy, and those that do will call hours too late.

If you do not call your shared leads in less than 5 minutes, you are essentially subsidizing the purchase of these same leads by more responsive lenders. If you buy cheap mortgage leads and respond to them first, you will effectively be buying an exclusive lead, the cost of which is closer to that of a non-exclusive lead.

LeadQual makes lower cost, competitive leads convert like the more expensive premium mortgage leads, yet there is a lower overall net cost. As a result, LeadQual’s service can maximizes the ROI on your overall Internet lead effort.

You will be impressed with how easily and quickly your lead conversion has improved.

1. Establish LeadQual Account

First, set up an account with LeadQual. LeadQual is flexible and can work with virtually any company’s existing lead management system. After an account is established, a relatively quick set-up call will occur. We will help determine the best set-up for your company, provide a base, customizable script that works well in your industry then manage all the heavy lifting with other vendors.

2. Acquire Leads from Multiple Sources

LeadQual can work with any Internet lead source, including your existing leads purchased from mortgage lead vendors, or leads being generated by your own web site. We can recommend good mortgage lead sources with consistently high-converting leads, if you need them. LeadQual will work with you, or directly with your lead vendors or web site provider, to insure that leads are properly delivered to your LeadQual account in real-time.

3. Call, Qualify, Live Transfer Good Leads

LeadQual will call each lead in less than 3 minutes, qualify each lead based on your custom script, and then live transfer qualified, interested leads to your sales team. We can live transfer leads in multiple ways and will use a method that best fits your organizational structure.

4. Review Metrics and Reporting

You can log into our lead management center, or your own Lead Management System if we are posting updates to it, and view your lead activity in real time. You will see higher contact rates taking place, as well as all call notes, time stamps and the lead status for each lead. View every live transfer by Lead Source or view live transfers by Loan Officer / Agent. You will be impressed with how easily and quickly your lead conversion has improved.

LeadQual will also provide comprehensive reporting and actionable recommendations designed to further enhance your Internet lead ROI.

5. Optimize and Scale

Act upon the metrics, reporting and LeadQual recommendations; negotiate additional lead purchases or increase visitors to your web site to scale your the fruits of your effort. Armed with the confidence and confirming data that your leads are converting better and your Loan Officers / Agents are operating more efficiently, you will now be able to expand lead volume and grow your business quickly. Most clients achieve this stage within their first or second month of activity!