Kaleidico Lead Management Articles and Whitepapers

Social CRM, Turning Social Media into a Sales Prospecting Tool

Bill Rice — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:52:56 +0000

There is a lot of buzz on social CRM, but what does that really mean. After all, hasn’t Customer “Relationship” Management always been social? Aren’t sales inherently social? What changed?

That really is the core of the new concept—something changed. Whether you call it social CRM, social selling, or Sales 2.0 you are talking about leveraging this explosion of social media and networking to increase your sales opportunities.

Listening for Opportunity

Fundamentally social media exposes more of your potential customers’ profiles, intent, and preferences. That means you simply have to listen to generate sales leads.

How? Here are some ideas...

1. Twitter Search—This is the fundamental underpinning of any social lead generation campaign. Twitter has unleashed real-time search—allowing you to tune into discussions and conversations that may be relevant to your products or services.

2. TweetGrid—This Web tool allows you to monitor multiple live conversations and searches at one time.

3. Seesmic Desktop or TwitterDeck—These desktop tools allow you to monitor targeted Twitter searches and specific groups of Twitter users.

4. Google Reader—The ideal RSS reader for efficiently reviewing hundreds of blogs and the numerous posts they will produce each day. Google makes it easy to search for keywords, share or annotate a post, or star them for importance.

5. LinkedIn—One of the original social networking tools, LinkedIn has evolved into a great place to prospect. LinkedIn makes it easy to find connections, relationships, and potential referrals or partnership. However, one of the best prospecting features may be LinkedIn Answers. This question and answer feature gives great insight and opportunity into potential prospects.

Now that you have your listening posts set-up, it is time to learn how to fill them with a steady flow of intelligence.

Building an Audience

Probably the most critical step in making a social CRM process effective is your ability to build a large and well-targeted audience. The general rule of thumb for creating an audience that will yield results is to remember that people like to buy from people like themselves. Therefore, the more natural and open you are the more likely you are to attract people who will trust you and ultimately buy from you.

Keeping in mind we are trying to attract people, not bombard them with broadcast advertising here are some techniques that work to build your audience:

Use Twitter to share value (links to information and tips)
Engage and interact with people asking questions (Twitter and LinkedIn)
Ask your own questions, survey, or ask for help (Twitter and LinkedIn)
Share information and great posts using Google Readers “share” feature
Occasionally, share your own blog posts (1-to-5 ratio at most)

As you do these activities you should be very aware of using keywords that will draw in prospects looking for your products and services. Focus on creating and interacting in discussions that showcase your expertise.

Using these techniques you will begin to trigger a steady flow of intelligence. Now it is time to turn these rivers of information into prospects.

Targeting Sales Prospects

Your initial engagement in these social networks is designed to draw in a growing audience, based on attraction. Now it is time to get a little more aggressive and target prospects.

Each of the social networks and tools I have mentioned above operate on the premise of connections or followers. Your attraction campaign will gather to you several initial prospects. However, the biggest gains will come from leveraging the power and opportunity of their audiences.

Every time you engage someone on Twitter, LinkedIn, or other social network you are immediately exposed to thousands of other connections (friends) of these people. And chances are they trust or are in some way similar to your audience—another opportunity to attract more prospects into you immediate network.

The key is building authority and value around your profile for your niche.

Engaging for Sales

Two legs of your three-legged social sales tool are in place—you have audience and a steady flow of opportunity--time to turn that into sales engagements.

Triggering sales opportunities is now a matter of engaging in the conversation when your audience is ready. The tools mentioned above will allow you to immediately see when a prospect in your audience (new customer database) needs help, can use your services, or is asking for a product. Your contact management has become as simple as clicking and responding. Even better, when you do this in a public way all of the people who had the same question or problem that didn’t ask may contact you.

Now your prospects are inquiring directly with you! Social CRM just got a lot more interesting, huh?

Give lead management a try—free for 30 days—and watch your sales production climb. Kaleidico’s Sales Manager is the pioneer of pull-based, high velocity sales lead management, giving your sales team a competitive advantage. Lead management will pull more deals through any sales pipeline.

Blogging for Customers

Bill Rice — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:47:04 +0000

Internet lead generation, once the sole purview of mortgage lead providers has become a core competency of many mortgage brokers and lenders. The secret? Learning to blog for customers.

I am going to assume in this article that you know the basics of setting up a blog—moving straight to blogging strategy. Let me share with you some of the best practices that are yielding many of our lead management software clients a steady flow of leads.

Start with the Basics

Each of you is an expert in mortgages. When you start blogging try to put most of what you know on the back burner. Your prospective customer, 90 percent of the time doesn’t know the most basic tenets of a mortgage. Talking about the bond market’s effect on mortgage rates or what the Fed thinks is unlikely to yield you many mortgage leads.

New homebuyers and even existing homeowners are typically searching the Web for the most basic of concepts. Here are some very popular search concepts:

How do I get a mortgage?
Can I qualify for a mortgage?
What is the mortgage loan process like?
How to find a mortgage broker?
What are mortgage rates?
Should I refinance?

Add a local flavor to your blog and you can capture a lot of these basic searches, while the big boys fight over mortgage rate tables and mortgage calculators.

Promote Your Posts on Social Networks

Filling your blog with regular posts on the most basic of mortgage concepts will yield a reasonable amount of “organic” search engine traffic. However, the mortgage niche is very competitive—you will need more.

Driving traffic is the key component to generating leads. And, traffic never comes without effort. The trick is to make that traffic as natural and targeted as possible.

Social media and networks is one of the fastest growing ways to generate large audiences that will visit, refer, and inquire. Unlike paid traffic or even search engine traffic social networks leverage the multiplicative effect of a “passed link.”

Like email, social networks allow for the very simple flow of Web links. That means one referral to your network potentially yields multiple referrals to their networks, and so on. Very quickly, assuming you have produced attractive and compelling content, you have hundreds of folks referring prospective customers to your website.

The key is adding value with your content as well as reciprocating with other referrals and expert conversation.

Leverage Other Related Audiences

Above I mentioned how to use social networks to leverage other audiences, but don’t discount the opportunity to land the big Kahuna—leveraging other blogs’ traffic. Seek out blogs that have relevant content and audiences. These blogs are likely to have a need for quality content and are willing to showcase your articles to their audience.

Often, with a well-researched and pitched article proposal you can land regular guest posts on other blogs. This approach will quickly introduce hundreds and even thousands of new prospects to your blog—adding them to your lead generation sales funnel.

Lead Management, Increasing Sales Volume and Velocity

Bill Rice — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:39:34 +0000

For year’s sales has been the recipient of CRM after CRM, all with the same challenge. Each new CRM entrant brought promises of increasing sales efficiently, but always little more than another database of leads.

Of course, the last think sales people need is another piece of software to add contacts to and annotate updates for management. Lead management offers a different approach—active management of sales leads.

Ditching CRM

Lead management breaks from CRM by understanding that the fundamental assumptions—you have a customer or a relationship—are flawed.

CRM systems are generally simple extensions of the databases they are built on. This means a significant amount of data entry and sorting of contacts to work your leads. There is really no action, no management, and no forward motion on your sales pipeline.

Lead management changes this paradigm with an awareness of the sales process. Focused on managing leads through a sales cycle, good lead management software automates many elements of an effective sales process.

Some of the functions lead management systems often automate:

Lead capture
Lead distribution and allocation
Prioritization
Annotating status or actions
Callback frequency
Lead nurturing
Remarketing (or closed loop marketing)

Ditching CRM and getting lead management is like adding an automated assistant to your sales efforts.

Sprints not Marathons

By putting your leads in motion with lead management you can begin selling in sprints, not marathons.

Under the CRM paradigm you drudge through sales leads—finding a lead, calling a lead, updating a lead, and then looking for another one. In contrast, lead management pumps you the next lead, prioritized, ready for action. Simple disposition after the call sends you onto the next item.

Again, lead management software focuses on putting leads in motion. CRM simply focuses on storing leads and creating reports.

Activating Hot Leads

It is precisely this activation of your contacts that makes lead management as much a lead generation tool as a contact management tool. The acts of capturing, distributing, automating marketing, and prioritization makes sure your sales team is always working on the hottest leads. Even more importantly, old leads can be worked and activated behind the scenes as you put effort on the ones that are most likely to close first.

Is Loan Modification CRM the Key to Helping Troubled Homeowners?

Bill Rice — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 01:15:02 +0000

Right now, thanks to the housing crisis, tens of thousands of homeowners are on the brink of foreclosure. While this is definitely bad news for them, it is good news for businesses in the loan modifications industry. There has never been a better time to grow your business and at the same time, help consumers who are in desperate need.

Foreclosures

Foreclosures don’t benefit anyone, from the homeowner to the bank, and loan modifications are the answer to keeping the economy afloat. With thousands of homes in foreclosure, neighborhoods are suffering and banks are going under. Is loan modification CRM the answer to this problem? It just might be. Let’s take a look at how CRM software works and how it can help you with lead management and in turn, help the economy and homeowners.

Loan Modification CRM

First, the way that loan modification CRM software works is that it enables you to easily add and manage your leads. Whether you are working with a few hundred new leads or you have thousands of leads at your disposal, you need to have an intuitive way to manage them if you want them to be profitable.

This is where CRM software comes in to make the entire process easier. You’ll be able to sort, age and perform other key lead management tasks, all within one helpful interface. Today’s applications offer intuitive design and features that reduce the learning curve, making it easy for your team to stay on top of their tasks and get them done more effectively.

Helping Homeowners

One way that loan modification CRM software works is by helping you sort through your leads more effectively. For example, you can use these applications to find the leads that are in the most desperate trouble and you can focus on them first. These are the people that are already in the throes of foreclosure or so close to it that they need instant help.

This works in two ways – first you’re helping them keep their homes, but at the same time you are also targeting a lead that is already going to be sold on the service you offer. It is much easier and more profitable to focus on leads that are this laser targeted.

Growing Your Business

Unlike speculators that take advantage of consumers, debt modification companies exist to help consumers, particularly in a trying time. By utilizing the tools of your trade that will make your company run smoothly, you will be able to offer timely assistance, as well as growing your own business.

Just because the economy is troubled doesn’t mean that you have to allow your business to suffer. Utilize the tools that are available to you – you’ll be helping those who are in desperate straights and you’ll be helping not only the economy, but your own business as well. In this situation, everyone wins, even though the housing market appears bleak.

If you haven’t tried a CRM application before for lead management, there has never been a better time to start.

How to Close More Internet Auto Leads

Nick Martini — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 01:11:00 +0000

Nearly every business can benefit from online marketing and the auto industry is no exception. Whether you specialize in auto loans or loan modification, there are millions of consumers out there that you can easily reach with the power of the internet – but how can you stand out from the rest of the crowd. If you’re trying to close more internet auto leads, there are a few techniques that you can use to help guarantee your success.

Keys to close Auto Leads

1. Broaden Search for Auto Leads. While there are plenty of places to buy auto leads, they are not all created equal. There is no point in wasting your time and money on leads that are not effective. For growing businesses, working with a company that provides instant leads that are fresh may the best way to go, even if it is more expensive.

In this situation, the consumer visits a site to learn more about auto loans and they fill out a form. Their information is passed along to you for a follow-up. If you do decide to use this method, make sure that you have enough staff on hand and the time to follow up immediately. These are powerful leads and should not be ignored.

2. Employ Lead Management Techniques. Since you will have access to literally thousands of leads, scribbling them down on a sheet of paper is not going to cut it. This is the time to start thinking about how you handle your leads and how your sales process works. If you’re not using auto CRM software, you may want to consider it at this juncture.

Auto CRM software helps you manage your leads in a variety of different ways, from aging them, to setting reminders for follow-ups and allowing you to easily add new leads and track their progress. If you want your company to run smoothly and profitably, often, it is this small step that makes the difference.

3. Improve Your Sales Process. We mentioned this briefly above, but it is a vital part of handling your online business. Look at how you are collecting leads and managing them from start to finish. Try to pinpoint any trouble areas that may be holding you back. Often, utilizing marketing metrics or analytics can help you see what area may need the most improvement.

Online Marketing

Online marketing is similar to traditional marketing, but there are a few differences, such as the ability to instantly get new leads any time of the day or night. By realizing this difference and its power, you can make it work for you, not against you.

Internet marketing has become a vital part of an auto loan business and if you are not yet utilizing it, this is a great time to start. Whether you simply set up a site and start collecting leads on your own, or you are buying them, these techniques will help you start reaping the benefits and seeing an increase in business.

Turning Your Blog Into a Sales Prospecting Tool

Nick Martini — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 01:09:00 +0000

Corporate blogging has evolved over the past five years into a powerful medium that can increase sales, develop your status as an authority and even help you find new clients. Sales blogging is a great way to help you find new prospects, but there are a few pitfalls that you will need to be wary of when you are first getting started. Here are some tips to help you increase your social sales through smart online marketing.

Sales Prospecting with your Blog

Step 1 – Develop your blog. If you don’t already have your own blog, starting one is very easy. It is best to use your own domain if at all possible, and the popular blogging tool Word Press makes it easy for anyone to set up a blog in a few minutes. If you must use a free service, try to at least get a vanity URL that will cloak the free domain name. This will help your readers take you more seriously.

Step 2 – Develop your approach. Online marketing requires a lot of consumer savvy and you’ll need to adapt your sales pitch somewhat. No one enjoys reading a sales pitch, so this the time to work on developing a pitch that can be cloaked within useful information. If you must do a pitch, remember to keep marketing posts to a minimum, and spread them out with other useful informative posts in between.

Step 3 – Promote your blog. In order to reach out to prospective clients, you’re going to need to get your blog out there in the public eye. This is perhaps the most frustrating part of sales blogging, and it is necessary to be patient and put in some hard work. Social bookmarking sites are a vital component of social sales, but again, they must be used wisely. Always err on the side of caution and give away information that can be used freely.

If you don’t have the time to promote your blog, consider outsourcing it to a company that specializes in social bookmarking and commenting. They are typically very inexpensive and this is a great way to jumpstart your traffic right from the start.

Step 4 – Get involved in the blogging community. Even sales blogging is going to require some interaction, not only with your audience but also with other industry players. This is a different kind of promotion but it works quite well. Consider supplying guest posts to related blogs in exchange for a link. Read their blogs and comment on their posts, again leaving your link.

This is one of the easiest ways to build your own social network and it is an important way to help your sales blogging efforts pay for themselves. Online marketing has changed blogging, and it has made it possible for companies to reach out to potentially millions of new clients. By using it properly and avoiding these pitfalls, you can be assured that your efforts will result not only in increased sales, but also a firmer foundation for your brand.

Using CRM to Manage Debt Leads

Bill Rice — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 01:00:00 +0000

Whether you are dealing with thousands of leads or only a few hundred, keeping them organized is vital if you want your business to be successful. There are many different options available for lead management, and it is important to select the one that is going to be most suited for your company’s individual needs.

Debt CRM software comes in many different flavors and can be used by companies large or small. Thanks to the availability of this software, you can easily find a scalable solution even if your budget is quite small. Let’s take a look at a few of the benefits that this software brings any debt company.

Improving The Sales Process

Your sales process should be seamless from beginning to end, and the way that you manage your debt leads has a big impact on this process. If you are relying on an antiquated database, or worse, you’re not managing your leads at all, you’re going to have difficulty in growing your business. Debt CRM software helps you get organized from start to finish, providing you with a way to keep track of everything that your business is doing.

Most CRM software packages allow you to easily add and track new leads, aging them as necessary and scheduling follow-ups at appropriate times. If you’re dealing with aged leads, this software can be very helpful and can provide you with a bird’s eye view of exactly what is going on and the response rates you are getting.

Organize The Sales Team

If you have one sales person or one hundred, getting them organized is the key to your sales success. This software makes it simple to figure out which team members are working which leads and it helps you get your company organized.

Many CRM solutions now offer enhanced team building and managing capabilities.
If you have a sales manager in charge of debt leads, this software will help them get the team organized and working towards a single purpose, instead of cross purposes. Scheduling is made easy and assigning tasks is intuitive.

CRM Solution

From enhancing your sales process to building a better team to work your debt leads, CRM applications are a one stop shop for success. Most packages range in price from $100 to more than $1000, but you can also hire a developer to create a custom solution for you that will be designed for the way that your company works.

In today’s world, we simply cannot rely on old-school techniques to manage leads and this applications have opened up new horizons. By keeping everything centrally located, easily adding new leads and tracking the status of older ones, your entire organization will operate smoothly.

This is a competitive industry and you owe it to your business to utilize the tools that are necessary for your success. Consider downloading a trial application and working with it for a week. You’ll be surprised at just how much you get done and how well you do it.

Using Lead Management to Warm Up Enterprise Software Deals

Bill Rice — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 05:00:00 +0000

The enterprise software business is a unique industry, and it benefits keenly from lead management and sales force automation. In a struggling economy, it has become necessary for many companies to change the way that they do business in order to stay afloat. If you’re finding it difficult to make new enterprise software sales, you may want to consider some of these techniques to help your business grow.

Sales Force Automation: Benefits

Let’s take a look at a few of the benefits that your company can reap from sales force automation, as well as enhanced lead management techniques that will help you grow your business.

1. Automating your sales force. Whether your team has a handful of members or you employ a large amount of sales people, automating what they do benefits everyone. Your sales process is a vital part of your business and if it is not operating smoothly, you’re definitely going to see a drop in sales.

Thanks to new software applications, you can combine automation with project management to ensure that each team member understands their specific duties and has tasks to complete within a specified time. Your sales manager can easily assign out tasks and the software will help you keep track of what is going on.

This works in a multitude of ways. First, you’ll be able to easily spot a weak link in your organization. Whether there is a sales person that isn’t working up to their potential, or your lead management isn’t going as planned, automating everything will help you find the trouble spot and fix it before it gets worse.

2. Taking care of your leads. Enterprise software sales is an industry that can be complicated. Typically, solutions are expensive and trying to find new clients can be very difficult. However, with the right lead management techniques you can start to see big results.

In order to manage your leads, it is necessary to make it simple to organize them, add new ones and track the activity of each one. CRM software makes this task easy, and you’ll be able to tell at a glance how each lead is performing. Considering how expensive leads can be, this method allows you to get more for your money.

3. Increasing sales. At the end of the day, the money you spend on leads and lead management isn’t going to do you any good if you’re not making sales. In order to do that, your sales process needs to be completely functional and intuitive. CRM software can help you set and achieve these goals and it is a great way to tell which leads may not be panning out.

By combining all of these techniques and utilizing sales force automation, you’ll be giving yourself time for the day to day running of your company and your sales staff will have the tools they need to get their jobs done – and to do them well. Every company can benefit from lead organization, no matter what industry they are in, but the enterprise software industry can truly see results with proper management.

10 Tips on Motivating Your Sales Force

Bill Rice — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 05:00:00 +0000

A business is only as strong as its sales, and if your current sales motivation techniques aren’t quite paying off, it’s time to add in some new ideas. Any business, no matter how successful, can benefit from a strong sales force that is committed to helping the company move forward. Here are some ideas and how to make that happen.

Sales Motivation: Top 10 Keys

1. Sales training. If you have not officially put your staff through sales training, now is the best time to do so. You may not think that your industry requires much training, but it is the basics of selling that matter. Without this good foundation, no team will be as capable as they should be.

2. Selling Techniques. If your sales training manuals were written more than five years ago, you’ll need to update them. Online marketing has changed the horizons for companies and if your team isn’t trained in utilizing the latest methods, your company is missing out on this frontier.

3. Sales Performance Goals. It’s human nature to want to strive towards something, particularly if that goal is attractive. While it would be nice if your staff simply achieved high sales for the good of the company, the reality is, every sales person needs to have performance goals.

4. Strong Sales Motivation. In the secondary portion of sales performance goals, you’ll need to decide if you are offering enough motivation for your team. No one is going to want to put in extra hours to get a coffee cup, but offer them a Kindle or an iPod and watch your sales take off.

5. Tiered Systems Work. A tiered reward system is typically best for most companies. This gives every employee an attainable goal, whether they struggle to make sales or they have a natural flair for selling.

6. Stay on Top. If you don’t have a sales manager, you may want to think about hiring someone to take over this position. A team needs a cohesive formation where they know to whom they can turn. A manager can help with the grunt work, freeing you to manage your company.

7. Streamline Your Team. The economy has forced several businesses to streamline, and even if your company has not felt the pinch, now is a good time to evaluate your team. Members that aren’t producing should be given a chance, through proper sales motivation to add to the team. If they can’t they will need to be replaced.

8. Increase Sales Force. While it does cost more to have more employees, if you hire talented sales people, your company’s profit margin will support it. Team members can burn out, and if you don’t have enough staff on hand that is talented, this can put your company into a dry spell.

9. Consistent Sales Training. It doesn’t hurt to have your team go through training each year, or even every six months. Industries are always changing and your team needs to be aware of these changes and how to adapt their pitches.

10. Simple=Success. The true secret to sales success is a product or service that the public wants. Keep innovating, watch for downturns in interest on certain products, and keep moving your company forward.

Sales Force Success

The success of your company doesn’t depend on you, the owner, and it doesn’t depend on just the sales staff. If you want your business to take off, you have to have a team that will make that dream a reality, and each employee in your company represents that team.

Prioritizing Your Sales Pipeline

Bill Rice — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 05:00:00 +0000

No matter what shape your business is in, prioritizing your sale pipeline is a necessary exercise that will result not only in increased sales but also a streamlined company. By taking the time to take a hard look at how your sales team is operating, and the changes that could be made to improve their work, you will see almost immediate results.

Sales Force

To start, you’ll need to begin by categorizing your team members. Find which ones are performing, and which ones are not. If necessary, you may need to make some cuts, or offer those who are struggling extra training. You will also need to find what is motivating the top performers to see how they get their jobs done. Each employee will have a different motivating factor, but once you narrow this down, you can begin to get your priorities in line.

It is important to figure out both short and long term goals for your company. It doesn’t have to be just an increase in sales, although that is the first priority. Building long term client relationships however cannot be overlooked and should be a part of any strategy.

Sales Lead Management

Now you can begin to focus on your leads. If you don’t already have leads in place, purchasing them will help the process go much faster. Sales lead management is an important component for any team, and it is vital to have someone working on this that can handle the job. If you don’t have the time to go through the leads on your own, a sales manager will be able to take this burden on.

Lead Priority

Lead priority can be determined by a number of different factors, including the age of the lead, the propensity of that lead to make a purchase and how relevant they are to your industry. While some companies try to save money by buying leads that are general in nature, in the long run, you’re better off paying extra for those that are directly targeted to your industry.

This helps you determine lead priority easily, and with less hassle. Now that you have your leads ranked, you can begin to streamline your sales pipeline. Assign the strongest team members to those leads that may be more difficult, while your weaker sales staff can focus on those that will be “easy” sells. While no one wants a weak team, invariably each person will have different strengths in selling.

Contact Management

The next step after the initial contact is lead management, and handling how you will follow up with different leads, and the priority that you will assign for each one. A database system or lead management software program will make this much easier and do a lot of the hard work for you.

Your company is only as strong as your sales team, but that strength also depends on the quality of your leads and how you manage them. By taking the time to prioritize, you’ll find your organization running much more smoothly and your sales will increase as a natural result of that smoothness.

Three Killer Ways to Use Internet Lead Generation to Your Advantage

Nick Martini — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 15:44:32 +0000

The internet has opened up many doors for businesses, but perhaps none are as inviting as internet lead generation. This is a powerful tool that can be utilized by any company, but it is necessary to know how to use it properly. As with any powerful tool, there are downsides if you misuse it, but these are outweighed by the benefits and the ability to surmount these difficulties.

Lead Generation: Power Combo

Here are three killer ways that you can explode your sales with the powerful combination of online marketing, social media and internet lead generation.

1. Internet Lead Generation: The first place to start is gathering your leads and luckily there are many different ways that you can do this. The most obvious is purchasing leads, but this can lead to many troubles for businesses. There are literally thousands of companies that offer leads, but there are few guarantees that they are legitimate, or that they will actually benefit you in any way.

There is also the issue of dealing with targeted leads. By far, your money will be best spent on leads that are laser targeted to either your product or service. This is the one secret that every single company needs to know, regardless of their niche. Targeted leads will help you take your online marketing to the next level and make the trip a lot easier.

2. Online Marketing: Although there are many similarities to offline marketing, the online world has it differences. First, you will have many different avenues available to your company, but not all of them should be explored. It is best to start small, and work your way towards success until you are completely comfortable navigating the online marketplace.

It is not enough simply to have a website and hope people come. You’ve got to get out there and really work on online marketing. There are a variety of different ways to do this, but taking advantage of new techniques will help you reach success in much less time. Social media is a powerful means of reaching out to your customers and possibly the easiest way to make sure your online campaign is a success.

3. Social Media: Before you dip your company’s collective feet into the sometimes treacherous waters of social networking, it is vital to understand how it works. Take the time to watch how other companies are utilizing it. Pay attention to your competitors, you’ll be able to learn from their mistakes.
Social networking is about building customer relationships, in addition to selling products and services. You can’t simply burst on to the scene with a hard sales pitch if you want to be successful. Today’s consumers are savvy and they are wary. Become friends with them, build up that level of trust and the sky is your limit.

Marketing is never a simple task, but the technology and resources that are available today will make a big difference in how well your company does, provided that you use them correctly.

Using Mortgage CRM to Close More Deals

Bill Rice — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 23:50:11 +0000

Although any business can benefit from lead management, it is vital for the mortgage industry. If you are relying on antiquated methods to manage your leads and increase your sales, you may find that you simply cannot keep up in today’s fast paced online world. However, by using a mortgage CRM program, you can quickly take advantage of all of the benefits that this technology has to offer.

CRM Features

Mortgage CRM software makes it easy to keep all of your leads in one place, allowing for easy prioritizing and management. Instead of using a database, which does not afford you additional options, many of today’s lead management programs feature streamlined interfaces. This allows you to easily add, manage and track new leads.

Managing Sales Leads

When it comes to leads, you really cannot have too much management. You need to properly age them, find out which leads are panning out and which ones are merely a waste of your time. Although you can do this the hard way, utilizing software that takes care of this is a tremendous time saver. If you can easily sort, find and add new leads, think about how much time you can save.

Scaled to Fit Companies Needs

Although the mortgage industry is a pretty cut and dried industry, different businesses will have different needs when it comes to handling their leads. Luckily, mortgage CRM software comes in many versions and allows you to pick the one that is most suited to your individual business. If you have a small company with only a few members on your sales team, you can use a scaled down version that is easy to manage. Larger companies can benefit from robust systems that take care of nearly every facet of managing leads.

Cost

This software is relatively low cost and easily pays for itself over time. Most versions can be purchased for less than $200, although the most robust packages will cost more. There are also free trials to help you find the right application, as well as some freeware that can serve its purpose for a smaller company.

Sales Lead Tracking

Sales is a vital part of a mortgage company and your leads will make up 95% of that equation. You simply cannot wait for customers to come to you in this competitive industry. Utilizing the right application will help you get out there and find the leads that are going to pay off, but the benefits don’t stop there. By keeping track of your leads, aging them properly and finding new ways to connect with your customers, your business will automatically improve.

CRM Success

Even small companies can realize big success when they operate like a well oiled machine. Don’t start off by thinking small. If you want to make a profit in today’s economy, getting the right leads and handling them properly is the key. CRM applications hold the answer for streamlining the entire process from start to finish.

Using Social Media to Grow Your Mortgage Business

Nick Martini — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 18:09:44 +0000

With the current state of the housing market, those in the mortgage business are understandably worried. There is a lot of confusion and misinformation out there and consumers are desperate for some answers. Even though the economy may be in a downturn, this is an ideal time for a mortgage business owner to make their mark.

Mortgage Business Opportunity

When you have a situation where consumers are desperate for assistance, you have a gold mine of opportunity for those that have the answer. Whether you run a loan business or you are a mortgage broker, right now is the best time to start thinking about lead generation. The markets won’t stay in this shape for ever, and by building a strong foundation of leads right now, the future will be promising.
One of the best ways for a loan office or a mortgage broker to begin building that foundation is through the use of social media. This is a slippery slope, but when navigated correctly, the rewards are tremendous.

Social Media Advantage

Let’s take a look at three ways to utilize social media for your advantage in this industry.
1. Directly connecting with your target base. You can use services such as Twitter to get into direct contact with potential leads. While outright selling is frowned upon, this service is a remarkable way to network when used correctly. Just keep in mind that you need to offer something useful to your followers and they’ll keep interacting with you.

In the mortgage industry, this can range from helpful links that will make their search for loans easier, news updates, your opinion on the housing crisis and tips on how to get out of debt. Value equals loyalty in social media and this is your chance to build a strong customer base.

2. Becoming an authority. When it comes to trust, consumers naturally gravitate towards those that appear to have authority status. Even if your mortgage business is in Podunk America, it doesn’t mean that you can’t rise to superstar status online. The key is utilizing social networking to your advantage and offering your visitors something they cannot find anywhere else.
Above all, taking the time to interact with and assist your visitors will create a situation where they turn to you for advice. It takes an investment of time, but your ROI will be tremendous.
3. Instant lead generation. Perhaps the most powerful aspect of social networking for those in the mortgage business is the ability to instantly find quality leads without having to pay for them. This medium is not only affordable, but it’s easy to master.

Audience Development

Start by watching how experts in your field as well as other experts interact with their audiences. You’ll be able to see what is working and what is not and this will help you avoid common pitfalls such as offering too much information, not enough, or simply abusing the medium and driving off potential customers.
Don’t let the current state of the economy drag your loan office or mortgage company down. Take the time to build your foundation and you’ll find that your business will stay strong, and weather this storm without any problems.

Strategic Online Lead Generation And Identity Management

Kaleidico Admin — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:36:22 +0000

Online lead generation is typically focused on driving traffic to the organization’s home page. Sure, this simple and shallow strategy will lead to more visitors, but what are the negative impacts to sales performance--more unqualified leads, more screening, and lots of frustrated sales people wading through junk.

Strategic Online Lead Generation Services

Bottom line-more is not always better. You need precision and strategic and tactical alignment with your products and services.

The idea behind the most successful online strategies is not to drive more leads or simply more traffic, but how to identify, target, and capture better or more qualified leads. Tactically, this can only be achieved through a 360 degree view of an organization's online identity. It is no longer enough to just capture traffic. In an ever challenging and constricting marketplace, capturing existing online market share becomes critical to overall success.

An organization's online plan must include an understanding of the following-

What is my online identity? What does our organization look like to online traffic?
Who is using our name to drive their own traffic?
Am I losing qualified leads because I haven't protected my strategic "centers of gravity"?
Are we missing opportunities for better leads simply because we are not targeting correctly?

Traditional agencies will focus on driving more traffic and measure their success by flooding pre-sales with more clicks and downloads. Marketing departments will measure their performance by what actions they have taken-increased ad purchases, greater PPC placement, or other necessary initiatives. What IS NOT being discussed and what IS NOT being measured is the online identity of the organization and how it is impacting sales opportunities.

Kaleidico can offer you a regular Online Strategic Intelligence Analysis. This specialized briefing will give you insight into your online identity, an understanding of how your competitors are targeting you, and how you can strategically and tactically capture areas of concentrated potential clients that are sitting outside any traditional marketing or advertising engagement or campaign.

Scope &Deliverables

Online Identity and Strategic Alignment Analysis

Kaleidico's analysis will provide you with a clear picture of where your organization is positioned relative to your objectives and goals. This analysis will allow you to see the following:

Perception of your organization within social media tools
Location and ranking of your company domain and keywords relative to your products
Unwanted associations of your company and products with other online searches

Online Competitive Intelligence Analysis

This review will give you insight into these valuable areas:

What your perceived competitors are trying to do online
Who you are REALLY competing with online
Inefficient use of resources based on net worth of traffic
Opportunities for strategic development based on competitors efforts

Tactical Online Marketing Plan

In addition to providing in-depth critical intelligence analysis, Kaleidico will lay out a tactical plan that incorporates your goals and objectives into methods of online actions designed to better position and align the organization with its stated strategy. These can include:

Content strategies to fill gaps in coverage and take advantage of strategic terms and areas of opportunity
Press Releases to drive exposure, create authoritative content, and exploit keywords using the organization's leverage
Recommended PPC strategies and opportunities, as well as mis-alignments of paid keyword placement
Social media methodologies and actions to capitalize on blog traffic and other Web 2.0 outlets with the purpose being to create the appropriate "buzz" in line with the company's stated goals.

Project Methodology, Staffing&Schedule

Using a core tactical team of SEO and identity management experts, in conjunction with proprietary software tools; Kaleidico will provide Compuware management with a more complete picture of their online lead generation challenges, competitive pressures, and opportunities.

HOW OUR PROCESS WORKS

Kaleidico's team and software can combine to give you a truly unique competitive advantage. Unlike your typical marketing agency or SEO firm, affixed on assumptions and intuition, Kaleidico builds on a quantitative picture of your online lead generation competitive space.

We determine where you hold position, strength, and weakness. Then, we cross-reference that strategic picture with that of your competitors' for opportunities. Kaleidico will regularly provide you information and recommendations to help you build a strategic and tactic online lead generation plan. A plan that yields you stronger positions and better sales leads.

Our online lead generation offering is built on a dynamic framework of online identity management, strategic alignment, competitive intelligence, executable recommendations, and metrics driven feedback.

ADDITIONAL SERVICES

In addition to the Online Strategic Intelligence Analysis, Kaleidico can offer the following services as needed.

Search Engine Optimization - Kaleidico is deeply focused in how to build success in online strategies. Because of this experience and understanding, we can tailor an initiative to build and monitor optimization levels for your organization, freeing up your resources for other needs. Allowing Kaleidico to drive the SEO strategy, your organization will get an outside view of what is necessary to breed success.

Pay Per Click - PPC strategies can be an expensive proposition. Countless companies put budget resources into launching a PPC campaign, only to have little understanding of the appropriate targeting, thereby wasting significant investments on worthless traffic that creates bottlenecks in pre-sales and frustrates the sales team. Kaleidico can ensure that the targeted keywords you are buying are the right choices given your overall objectives. Don't simply assume that you are buying traffic in the right space-let Kaleidico optimize it.

Lead Management Systems - Kaleidico is recognized as one of the leaders in online lead management. Our product, icoSales, has been used for 3 years by 5 of the top 10 lenders, as well as financial services organizations across the United States, Canada, and the UK. Our unique and proprietary method of ensuring that leads are distributed efficiently, worked consistently, and contacted effectively has been shown to increase conversion by as much as 6% over previous levels. Our SaaS tool can hook seamlessly into your CRM, giving your telemarketing and pre-sales groups as much visibility and consistency as you expect in your sales team. Kaleidico's lead management experience is recognized throughout the industry as the thought and innovation leaders in lead management.

Consumer Protection, What Should You Expect From Your Lead Providers?

Kaleidico Admin — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 22:41:37 +0000

Consumer protection is a hot button for the FTC and various other regulatory agencies. It is obviously important to consumers as they engage in commerce online, but what does it mean to your business?

If you are marketing online, consumer protection needs to be integrated into the fabric of each of your campaigns. Most understand this fact and are vigilant to comply with relevant regulations. However, most don't use the same diligence in holding their lead providers to the same standards.

Careful, you can be held accountable for their practices.

Here are 6 important points of lead provider review the next time you evaluate a lead provider:

1. Do you use third party lead generation services or affiliates? If so, what is your compliance and due diligence process?

Most lead providers and brokers will purchase some quantity of traffic and leads from third-party sources. You are doing your job to perform consumer due diligence against your vendor network--make sure your lead provider is doing the same against their vendors.

2. Can I review an example of your standard affiliate, buyer, and vendor agreements (as applicable)?

This is the quickest way for you or your legal team to evaluate your legal exposure to practices of your lead providers. It is also a great way for you and your lead generation partner to strengthen each other, in a collaborative way.

3. Do you have a compliance education program for your marketing department and/or third-party lead generation sources?

This is really a simple effort. Whether it is a blog or an email newsletter, sending regular and brief consumer protection best practices out to your network is a smart move. This improves relationships and partnerships with regular communication and strengthens the network's overall compliance fabric.

4. Do you have a quality control process that evaluates the validity and integrity of leads generated and marketing sources?

This is a non-brainer step in the right direction. Many lead providers have a proprietary process for scrubbing and quality controlling leads coming into their system. However, if they don't have the technical capability or expertise there are great services available, like TargusInfo.

5. Can I review the landing pages, ad creative, telemarketing scripts, or privacy policy used to generate leads?

Obviously this is a sensitive request considering this is generally the competitive differentiator of most lead providers or marketing agencies. However, since you are outsourcing your marketing responsibilities to these lead providers you have some rights of review. You will most likely be carrying some liability for their lead generation practices. So, unless they are going to give you a contractual indemnification clause against these risks--do some level of review on these items.

6. What is your policy for dealing with relationships and marketing sources that are found to be out of compliance with relevant consumer protection laws?

Of course, all of this is idle chatter unless their is enforcement. It is absolutely a fair question to ask your lead provider what they do in the case of consumer protection compliance failure.

Get Educated on Consumer Protection

If you are not already education yourself on consumer protection laws and regulations, it is time to dig into the facts. Learn not only what the laws are, but what consumers are being told to expect from their online transactions. Here are some valuable consumer resource that I recommend you review:

Lead Contact Management, More Than An Address Book

Kaleidico Admin — Fri, 01 May 2009 15:47:52 +0000

Okay, so you are a sales guy or gal. I guarantee I can guess where all of your best leads are...in your Outlook contacts--right?

This is a natural way to organize phone numbers and email addresses, but there are a bunch of reasons that approach to managing your leads is hurting your sales. These address books are simple, electronic representations of the classic rolodex. However, in the old days we used sales sheets as an extension of that static database of contacts. Unfortunately, most software neglects supporting that part of the process--and your sales numbers are suffering because of it.

Why Rolodexes Don't Close Deals

The hallmark of any great sales person is the size of his or her rolodex. The bigger the better. These painstakingly cultivated databases of business cards, phone numbers on cocktail napkins, emails, and referrals can be rich customer fields to be cultivated.

Unfortunately, most forget that a huge database of customers yield nothing without a process to cultivate that database. Rolodexes and address books don't close deals--they are simply opportunities.

Activating Your Contact Database

To turn your contact database into clients you need a system to deep into those opportunities. You need a way to generate sales sheets or activate that database. This is where lead management software does the trick.

Your lead management system can automate the segmentation, marketing, and follow-up on the opportunities in your contact database. It will activate your contacts and discipline you in touching base, providing additional information, and calling these relationships to action from time-to-time.

Turning Address Book into Lead Generator

If you activate your address book by integrating it with a good lead management software you can turn those hoards of contacts into real leads. Your lead management should take in those contacts in a simple way and help you to segment, market, and regularly contact each and every contact in your database.

Using a lead management system with your address book will not only increase your sales numbers--because you are more actively engaging your contacts--it will also make your contacts feel you are more concerned and tuned into their needs.

Free Leads, How To Generate Sales Leads Online

Kaleidico Admin — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:12:44 +0000

Free leads! This is a favorite teasing promise in every lead provider's marketing campaigns. But, is there really a such a thing as free leads? Granted there is no free lunch in life, but with Internet lead generation there are a few tricks that are pretty close.

Start with an Objective

Understand and plan exactly what you want to achieve with your sales lead generation program. If you attract them with your marketing campaign, what do you want to do with them?

Immediately contact you
Pre-qualify themselves
Opt-in to ongoing marketing
Make an initial purchase

Having a clear picture as to how a prospect becomes a customer will improve the performance of your lead generation strategy.

Who Do You Want to Attract?

Targeting or attracting the right audience is key to efficiently generating leads. The more specific your objectives, the more specific your audience, the higher your conversion rates.

Attracting only the most interested and relevant leads will quickly increase your lead ROI.

Thinking carefully about who you want to attract can allow you to use free blogs or Twitter to start conversations that will attract this type of audience. These tools are free and so will your resulting sales leads.

Think Local and Own It

Using blogs, simple websites, and social media can allow you to attract a relevant audience. Most of this attraction comes from customers using the Internet--searching for products or services. But, searches can be competitive. How do you help improve your odds?

Seize your local search space. Referencing your local town, events, and market can allow you to dominate search results for the local community you serve.

Add Value First, Then Ask for the Sale

The Internet is a great way to communicate with your market, for free. This gives you a great opportunity to educate and teach your customers for free. This will immediately deliver value and build trust with prospective customers.

The result? When the time is right to ask for the sale you will get that lead, for free.

Sales Lead Generation, Filling Your Sales Pipeline With Fresh Customer Prospects

Kaleidico Admin — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:17:11 +0000

Lead flow directly correlates to revenue levels. Hitting revenue targets consistently and predictably requires a steady flow of sales leads. Learn how you can fill your sales force with a steady flow of prospective customers.

Start with a Basic Lead Generation Platform

The first step in filling your sales pipeline is to attract customers, targeted prospects. Naturally, this is best accomplished by providing information and services that these customers need to make decisions. This should be the fundamental objective of your lead generation platform.

Here is a simple framework for your first lead generation platform:

Descriptive domain name
Blog software (Wordpress recommended)
Post informative (keyword rich) articles
Add in interactive widgets that help customers (i.e., mortgage calculators)
Highlight contact information

This set-up will, without any knowledge of SEO or web development, quickly get you into relevant Google search queries. This means targeted customers with find you with their own questions--searches. It will also validate and reinforce your other offline marketing efforts.

Start Cheap and Learn the Sales Process

Certainly at start-up your own online lead generation efforts are not going to flush your sales team full of leads. This is where augmenting your own sales lead generation is important.

Start with some inexpensive Internet leads. This will allow you some low risk practice, allowing you to refine your sales process and lead management process. You will find that Internet leads and high volume sales pipelines need to be managed differently.

Improve Quality and Scale

Once you have your own lead generation in place, know how to subsidize this flow by buying leads, and have optimized your lead management--it is time to grown up your sales lead generation.

While carefully tracking your lead ROI and profitability, begin to improve the quality of those leads. Improve your own lead generation as well as that of the leads you buy. Begin to smartly scale your sales operations, closely monitoring your sale performance metrics.

Think Creative and Smart

Once you have the basics down and you have a steady base of lead flow--start trying some more creative approaches. Testing different lead generation techniques, alternate lead providers, and refined sales processes.

Internet Lead Management, Getting The Most From Web Visitors

Kaleidico Admin — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:20:24 +0000

Consumers are so connected to the Web these days you would think that we have been Internet marketing forever. Obviously, that is not the case. This segment of marketing is young and evolving.

As a result, there are a lot of technology vendors that are trying new and innovative ways to convert Web visitors into customers--fancy web designs, flashy banner ads, pop-ups, pop-unders, calls to action. However, some of the most effective ways to get the most from your Web traffic is good old fashion sales discipline, enforced by a lead management system.

Respond Fast

When you generate an online customer inquiry, whether it is a phone call or a contact form submission, make sure it is immediately distributed and contacted. This means avoiding the dreaded email back-end to most web contact forms.

Simply emailing a Web contact into a central email account or forwarding it to one or more people in you sales organization is a recipe for disaster. Here are the typical results:

No one does anything. Stats confirm this is the fate of 60-70% of Internet leads.
The lead is delayed while someone figures out where it "belongs"
Multiple eager people jump on the same lead and barrage the customer
Make one attempt or contact, when it is hot, and then never follow-up

Provide Additional Resources

Most consumers are coming to the Web for information. If you simply capture them and assualt them with a sales pitch then chances are you are missing their expectations. One of the main reasons people are so attracted to the Internet is the opportunity to browse in piece.

Make sure that when that lead comes into your lead management system your first contact comes offering additional information. This can be and email with additional information, and attached white paper, or even a call offering to provide your assistance in understanding what you offer.

Add Value

Another critical element of your lead management strategy should be optimizing your response for maximum value. The Internet makes it very easy to segment your traffic and anticipate exactly what the consumer is looking for--do the same when you receive it into the lead management software.

Consumers are highly impressed when you anticipate and respond to their need. The perception that you are adding value to a customer is typically directly related to your sense of urgency in responding and how close that response is to what they are looking for.

To increase the frequency with which people feel you are adding value, segment your inbound leads into products and service categories based on where they submit. This will give sales people ques as to how to respond appropriately--with value.

Extend the Relationship

Building a relationship is probably one of the biggest strengths of managing Internet customers with lead management. Once they are in the system to you can build systematic ways to stay in contact and follow-up.

A sales relationship is built on trust, relevance, and credibility. Managing your Web customers with lead management can make sure that you are satisfying all of these elements in your Web visitors minds and convert them into customers at a higher rate.

Loan Modification Software, Getting More Modifications Done With Workflows

Kaleidico Admin — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:22:03 +0000

Paperwork is the very definition of a loan modification. It is essentially a legal process to renegotiate or modify an existing contract. If you want to do it right and in significant volume you had better have a good workflow management system to keep your deals moving, yet keep them tightly managed.

Loan modification software can give you this tight modification workflow--helping you to help more troubled borrowers in less time.

Managing Customer Inquiries

In this market, loan modification requests are coming in fast and furious. If you don't have a system to manage these inbound leads and efficiently distribute them to loan counselors, your operation is dead on arrival.

The number one complaint of loan modification customers is the lack of response. Troubled borrowers are running against the clock--pending foreclosure, lost job, or other looming disasters. You are running against that same clock. If you don't renegotiate that loan as fast as possible you are likely to lose the bank or investor their entire loan.

Qualifying Customers

Managing the flood of loan modification inquiries is only half the battle. Now, you have to segment these customers into programs. Your loan modification software should assist you in managing customers through an organized pre-qualification process.

Lead management software can facilitate worksheets, calculators, and checklists to guide agents through a consistent process. This process should help you tag and route leads to the appropriate team or modification program.

Pipeline Management

Getting a loan modification done takes a lot of hand-holding of borrowers. That means managing a large pipeline. You are going to need to collect documents, review qualifications, make adjustments, and follow-up with customers.

Pipeline management tools within a CRM or lead management software will keep your loan modification deals moving through the process. Simple automation like emails, alerts, and task lists allow you to stay on top of every lead, increasing each agent's total capacity.

Getting the Loan Modified

Loan modification software will ultimately help you modify more loans. Loan modifications require careful and consistent processes. Lead management systems can enforce those processes and ensure all of your agents are being as efficient as possible.

Lead Management Software, Putting Urgency Into Your Sales Process

Kaleidico Admin — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:23:35 +0000

A sense of urgency is the undisputed king of closed deals. Being hyper-responsive to customers and clients always heightens customers' propensity to buy. So, why isn't it in your sales process?

Lacking urgency is the number one weakness of most sales organizations--a weakness that will immediately return poor sales performance. The challenge is finding a way to scale urgency for your clients needs. Lead management software is the quickest way to create a consistent sense of urgency, by enforcing follow-up and drive responsiveness to customer inquiries.

Lead Distribution

The first step in creating urgency within your sales organization is to quickly get customers (leads) to sales people. This is the job of lead distribution and can become enormously challenging to do quickly, especially once you grow beyond a couple of sales people.

Lead management software is the best way to automate this distribution process. You can also achieve some of these other lead optimization tasks:

Segment lead sources
Distribute leads equitably
Route leads to specialists
Re-distribute leads as necessary

Your creativity run away from you in designing the "perfect" lead distribution process. The most important thing to remember is not to lose sight of the most important thing--getting leads to sales people fast!

Contact Management

Now that you have a lead it is critical to make contact. As simple and straightforward as this sounds it is where a lot of fall-out occurs in lead management. Call anxiety and simple lead overload are classic examples of why 60-70 percent of leads never get contacted.

Capable lead management software can fix this problem. The secret is achieving visibility and accountability on every lead in every agent's sales pipeline. There are a lot of ways to achieve this, but the most efficient and effective is using pull-based lead distribution in combination with a "get my next lead" approach to serving one lead at a time.

This approach will give your sales force intense focus and follow-up on every lead in your system.

Pipeline Management

How often have you seen sales die in your pipeline? Probably more often than you want to admit. Lead management software can increase your productivity by working on those leads even while your sales attention is elsewhere.

Lead management is good at helping you do the following common pipeline management tasks:

Prioritizing leads
Tagging for follow-up
Segmenting leads
Targeting strategic deals

The more you can automate pipeline management with your lead management system the more time you have to really sell.

Lead Nurturing

Similar to pipeline management, lead nurturing acts like a virtual assistant. Using this feature in your lead management software will help you stay top of mind and in touch with customers with little or no work. Your customers will feel like you are right on top of their emerging needs.

Typically a lead nurturing system will combine emails, alerts, and mail-merge features to automate your contact (touches) with a prospect or client. The more frequently and naturally you execute these campaigns the more production you will push through your sales pipeline.

The unique value proposition of lead management software is to increase you productivity and contact with prospects. A good lead management system will literally automate simple tasks and bring deals to you!

Lead Management, Giving Your Customer A Great Experience

Kaleidico Admin — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:25:02 +0000

Typically, we think of lead management and CRM only as a tool to benefit our sales number, but is there anything in it for customers?

Lead management can help you deliver the mythical WOW customer experience. Delivering speed and urgency that often brings the deal. Why is lead management critical to Customer Experience Management (CEM)? You can make lead management social and that is the key to real experiences.

Responsive First Contact

Customers have been severely abused on the Internet. Consumers have been conditioned to expect little or no response from Internet inquiries--that presents and opportunity for your sales team.

Lead management can ensure that your sales is immediately responding to every sales inquiry. Not only are you guaranteed to be more responsive, you are certain to be first. This is a very important distinction when every competitor is only a click away on the Internet.

Consistent Follow-Up

Making initial contact is only one step in the process of closing a deal. In most cases sales are not made on a single sales call. It is the process of building trust and a relationship that gets the first deal and hopefully future deals.

The only way to get that trust and relationship evolved into a sale is to follow-up. Unfortunately, this is the number one cause of losses. Simply not making that second and third call is the difference between winning and losing.

Lead management allows you to automate the follow-up process. This makes your customer feel like they are the only one in your sales pipeline--after all, "you seem so on top of things."

Trust Building Follow-Through

Good contact management processes also reinforces your trust-building. Relationships are built on little promises made and kept along the way.

Knowing where you are in a sales cycle and what you told the customer at the last meeting is the key. Your sales process should have a lock-tight approach to notes and ticklers. Your customer should not have to contact you to remind you of anything.

The more proactive you appear the stronger that trust becomes and the more profitable the customer becomes, now and in the future.

After Sale Relationships

The sense of urgency to make contact, follow-up, and keep promises are the keys to landing the deal. However, if you want to create an enormously profitable sales practice you need to shake hands with the customer after the sale. Your sales process should have a thank-you after each sale and a regular: "How are things going--what can I do to make you more successful?" conversation.

Lead management not only keeps you top of mind with all of your customers and clients, it also makes your customers' lives a snap in doing business with you.

Delivering an "on the ball" customer experience is the core value proposition of a lead management system. Make sure you have one and enjoy a more profitable sales pipeline.

Mortgage Lead Software, Turning Mortgage Leads Into Long Term Clients

Kaleidico Admin — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:27:14 +0000

Probably one of the biggest mistakes in managing mortgage leads is treating them like fleeting opportunities. The reality is mortgage leads are people that are interested in mortgages, whether now or later 65 percent of those people will get a mortgage.

Smart lenders have figured out this secret. And, those smart mortgage loan officers are leveraging this principal to flush their pipelines with aged mortgage leads. They are helping these past mortgage leads get FHA loans, loan modifications, and new government-assisted mortgage payments.

The key to unlocking the long-term value of mortgage leads is mortgage lead software.

Creating a Sense of Urgency

If you want to immediately capture the attention of a new prospective customer--show them urgency. Nothing captures a customer's trust faster than an immediate response to their inquiry.

Unfortunately, this can be challenging when leads are coming to an email inbox or in high volume. There is little to increase the visibility or prioritize leads without a well designed mortgage lead management system. As a result, leads get delayed, lost, or overlooked.

The result is that a very motivated consumer is waiting on you!

Put the Customer Center Stage

Make everyone of your mortgage leads feel like they are your only customer. Again, this can be challenging using email or spreadsheets. However, with mortgage CRM software you can automatically sort, distribute, prioritize, note, schedule, and queue leads.

Automation like this can make each mortgage customer feel like you are on top of their needs--proactively following up and always remembering the last conversation.

Treat Mortgage Leads Like Clients

We may call them prospects, but you should treat them like clients. That means you are educating, informing, and teaching. That means you are carefully looking after their interests.

Use your mortgage lead software to dynamically trigger alerts or prioritize especially relevant leads. These alerts should be based on specific attributes of the customer provided information or past application data.

Create a Lead Nurturing Program

Nurturing leads is just good client service. Regardless of whether that lead closed, and became a client or not, you need to watch after each customer's (in your databases) personal interests. You need to status them by objective or financial profile and manage that profile like they were are client.

Your mortgage lead management software should keep track of all these special needs and statuses. Your sales management system should be executing marketing automation that is working, hands off to nurture these prospects and past clients into fresh leads for the future.

If you do this. If you provide them education and valuable advice, even the ones that aren't your clients yet, they will not do business with anyone else. You have them for life.

Create a Client Loyalty Program

Building client loyalty is another important capability of a good mortgage lead software. Loyalty comes from a passionate commitment to help the client. CRM software can help you automate that passionate commitment. Let your mortgage CRM's marketing automation keep you top of mind. Let your CRM kick out informational communications and alerts to your mortgage leads. Let your CRM trigger your regular follow-up to each and every client in your customer database.

Manage Your Clients' Mortgage

Managing your client's mortgage financing needs should be your primary objective--for every mortgage lead in your database. Again, whether they are a client or not you need to continually demonstrate to each client or prospect in your CRM your worthiness to manage their best financial interests.

Loan Modification Software Lead Management To Manage Mortgage Crisis

Kaleidico Admin — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:28:44 +0000

Loan modifications are a booming business, but they require a lot of coordination to deliver. If your are looking to improve your loan modification process and profitability--Kaleidico lead management is your solution.

Loan modifications have become the mortgage industry's new mortgage refinance.

Loan Modification Business Soars

The combination of falling housing prices and escalating unemployment rates are making loan modifications one of the few options left to homeowners. These realities, combined with increasing government pressure on banks to prevent foreclosures, are only making this type of mortgage business bigger.

How Do You Manage Loan Modification Leads

The challenge is of course managing loan modification business. Not only is it a surge of volume, but it is an intensive process of client communication and follow-up to get a deal done.

That is where Kaleidico can help. Our lead management system is ideally suited for intensive call and follow-up management, as well as working mortgage applications.

Creating an Efficient Loan Modification Process

What is important to making your loan modification operations more productive?

Efficiently sorting and distributing loan modification leads
A method to status loan modification clients for appropriate follow-up
Custom worksheets for loan modification work-outs
Real-time tracking of your loan modification pipeline

Loan modifications can get really complex. You want to help as many people as possible, but every deal is unique. So, get organized. Put your loan modification sales process into mortgage CRM that is designed for the challenge.

Kaleidico's Lead Management Helps Loan Modifications

Kaleidico's lead management and loan modification software has helped hundreds of mortgage lenders and brokers already put their programs on the right track. Let us help you do the same.

Call 866-667-5253 or take a closer look at our online demo.

5 Lead Management Mistakes That Will Cost You Sales?

Kaleidico Admin — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:30:55 +0000

Want more customers with less leads? A strategy that improves your profit and decreases wasted marketing dollars? Of course you do, but you probably don't even know how many opportunities you are throwing away every day.

Proper sales management will instantly put you on top of every deal and increase the pull-through on your sales pipeline. Fixing these 5 common lead management mistakes will increase your sales numbers.

1. Email is Not CRM Software

This is unquestionably the top killer of sales leads. Email is a communication tool. Meant for short-term discussions or collaborations, not sales account management. It is not a tool to build sales relationships, with hundreds of clients, over numerous years.

Fact: the human brain can only manage so much information.

Your attempts at remembering to follow-up and diligently stay on top of hundreds of prospects and customers is a guaranteed failure. Real sales performance needs a system that will routinely automate some contacts and remind you to reach out personally on a regular basis.

2. One Call Closes are Fantasy

It is certainly the stuff of sales legend, that Boiler Room like close. But, real sales professionals know the real probability ranks up with winning the lottery. So, if you hit it be happy, but don't expect to pay your bills and feed yourself playing that game.

This is why a disciplined process of following up, on all prospects, is critical to success. Industry surveys show that the average lead takes a minimum of 5-7 contacts to close and generally requires 30-60 days. So, don't get frustrated and toss out that two week old lead--nurture it.

3. Sales People Can't Pick Leads

The Call of the Wild fouls this one up too, our primal nature lures us to the biggest fish (whale) of the freshest meat (new lead). Two notoriously bad choices.

We can't pick the right leads! We invariably gravitate to our biases, which is typically counter productive to our sales numbers.

Grabbing for the brass ring (tackling only the biggest accounts or loan amounts) and neglecting the opportunity to land a few small ones along the way, is the perfect example. Your sales management system should help you create an ideal lead profile for each of your sales agents. You will be amazed at how different your "perfect lead" looks from your "preferred lead."

4. Prospects Need to be Nurtured

Are you trashing valuable non-responsive customers? More so than ever, leads need to be effectively nurtured. Challenging economic conditions slows everyone's buying decisions. Stay top of mind, so you will be first in mind when the pain or the need becomes right for the big buy.

This doesn't mean just throwing all your old leads into the autoresponder. Smart sales people build a detailed follow-up plan that includes email, mail, and telephone. And don't forget the value at each of those touch points--an interesting article or report, an example of success, or best practices session.

5. Get My Next Lead Increases Sales Velocity

Often we forget that sales is really about numbers in the end.

How many times do we spend too much time organizing or getting ready to do something? The best strategy in most cases is to do as my Dad was found of saying, "Do something, even if it's wrong."

Simply getting onto the next lead will produce more sales than any other strategy. So, stop reading this and do something!

Design A Good Lead Management Process And Improve Sales Lead Performance

Kaleidico Admin — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:32:16 +0000

Lead management is more than software--it is the secret to converting more sales leads. Fundamentally lead management are the key processes your marketing and sales teams should have in place to maximize your sales lead conversion.

Make sure your lead management system contains these 6 elements to increase conversion:

1. Orderly Lead Receipt

Regardless of where you get your leads--trade show, purchased data, online lead generation, or referral--you need a systematic way to receive leads. Your methodology should be consistent and efficiently formatted to expedite entry into your database and distribution to sales.

These are recommended minimum requirements of any lead receipt process:

Standard data elements and formats
Common data file formats (i.e., XML, .xls, .csv)
Sufficient data elements to filter for product types
Some level of data quality refinement and scrubbing

Using these lead receipt best practices, your lead management process should be able to take in all of your leads quickly, efficiently, and ready them for distribution to sales.

2. Efficient and Timely Distribution

Getting them in the database is the first step, but getting them to the sales team is the prime objective. Ensure your lead distribution is just as organized as your lead receipt.

Don't get complacent, real-time leads or static data lists should make no difference to lead distribution. Promote a sense of urgency in all of your leads. Get them into the hands of sales immediately and expect them to be called immediately.

This steady flow of leads is the lifeline of your sales production.

Leads sitting around certainly won't close. Sales people setting around won't close either. Get your leads from receipt to sales as soon as possible.

3. Managed and Consistent Sales Process

As any good sales manager knows, getting leads to sales is not enough. You have to ensure systematic and consistent follow-up and sales activity on every lead. This means demanding accountability.

Here is the level of discipline that should be embedded in your leads sales process:

Require every lead to have an immediate initial contact
Require every lead to have a minimum level of follow-up
Design a consistent sales process, expect it to be followed
Provide leads based on performance only, bad sales people will starve

I am going to emphasize the last point. It is magical. The secret to successful lead allocation and building the best sales team is to provide leads based on sales. If you don't sell, if you don't close, and you don't get leads. Bad sales people will "magically" starve themselves out of your sales organization.

4. Automated Marketing Follow-up

Sales is still largely based on the theory of large numbers. Marketing has never become so clairvoyant as to get us perfectly targeted, ready to close leads. So, we still have to do a lot of hustling to make our numbers.

Maximizing the sales activity on every lead will naturally increase conversion. This is where automated marketing can help. Your goal is to put additional sales pressure on each lead.

Cross-check these basic fundamentals of automated marketing against your lead management process:

Every new lead in the database gets an intro email
Email templates are available for follow-ups to calls
Email drip campaigns are working on sales pipelines
Lead nurturing campaigns are getting more from unconverted leads

Automated marketing systems, coordinated with your lead management system, will improve sales numbers. Increasing sales pressure, in a passive way, is the advantage of marketing automation working on your pipeline while sales is pressing with live calls.

5. Reporting and Analysis

Since marketing, sales, and markets are dynamic you need to measure, measure, measure. The big advantage to lead management is the discipline. It gives you tracking and measurements of your results, helping you find opportunities for improvement.

6. Process Improvement

Process improvement--this is really the key. Marketing and sales are far to volatile to stand "settle into" a routine. Success or failure teeters in the balance everyday as the market and customer needs change. If your lead management process is not designed to capture opportunities to improve or worse you can't see opportunity at all--you are dead on arrival.

Build and document a lead management process today--then see and seize success with your process.

Sales Force Automation The Key To Crm Success

Kaleidico Admin — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:33:28 +0000

CRM has some of the highest failure and lowest adoption rates of any software category. Customer Relationship Management software is famous for complex implementations, confusing features, and the killer--lots of data entry to make it useful. These are the characteristics that make sales force automation so critical to your CRM success.

Customer Relationship Management

As marketing becomes increasingly diverse. Your sales CRM, and its simplicity, becomes increasingly important. Modern customers expect speedy responses, unique experiences, and the right person every time.

Marketing on the Internet and with social media, in this Web 2.0 world, are increasingly challenging sales forces. Sales people don't have time to figure out software, set-up confusing processes, or feed a system data.

This is where lead management can save your CRM implementation from a costly disaster. Lead management, probably a better term than sales force automation, is the digital assistant every sales associate or call center agent would love to have. Simple, intuitive, consistent systems that move deals forward and tracks your leads is the cornerstone of good sales force automation.

Lead Capture

It all starts with lead capture. Minimizing the sales time spent on capturing or entering leads into a database is the first step to a full and productive sales pipeline.

Your sales CRM should have a simple, but robust lead capture suite. An agent flush with leads is a motivated asset to your team. A sales person struggling to figure out how to get precious leads into their sales management system or forced to type them in is an anchor on your sales numbers.

The most basic lead capture methods your lead management software should include are:

Spreadsheet imports
Web form integration
Outlook, GMail, Yahoo!Mail imports

Added bonuses would be the connection of your sales CRM to your social networks and Web 2.0 applications. Some important examples include:

LinkedIN
Plaxo
Twitter

Getting leads into your sales pipeline and fueling your sales process needs to be a one-click process.

Contact Management

Now you have leads. Let's start calling.

It seems like the logical next step, but most CRM software even makes this process challenging.

Many sales force applications leave the sales person wondering:

Who do I call next?
What are the best leads?
When was the last time I call this lead?
Which leads are close to closing?
Which leads need follow-up?

Basic stuff, but often neglected. Sales force automation puts contact management into an intuitive flow. Prioritizing and queuing leads for follow-up simplifies the sales process. Increases the productive pressure on teh sales pipeline. And, allows the sales force to concentrate on making the sale, not figuring out who to sell to.

Lead management can also improve the rate and consistency of follow-up. It is amazing the percentage of leads that never get a second call or contact. Super charging your contact management with a set of automated follow-up routines will increase closed deals immediately.

Sales Lead Tracking

Are you making your sales force update reports on their sales activities? Are they spending their evenings going back and annotating customer records? If so, you have the makings of inaccurate reporting at best and no reporting at worst.

Sales force automation can turn sales lead tracking into a simple and passive activity.

Simplifying lead tracking and reporting starts with lead statuses. Your sales management software should have intuitive sales statuses. These statuses should be easy to assign(automated and/or manually) to leads as they move through sales processes.

Making sales lead tracking easy will help you see real and specific areas to improve. Then your marketing analysis and sales processes tuning can become a snap. And, individual sales reps are not spending their time typing reports or entering data.

Here are some common sales actions you want to know about in your sales lead management system:

Attempt
Contact
Proposal
Withdraw
Disqualified
Do Not Call
Closed

Using simple statuses like these can give you insight into more opportunities. Incorporating the status data in your marketing automation system will also enable you to give each customer a unique experience.

Sales Forecasting

Understanding where and when your revenue is coming can be another messy art in any sales force. But, it shouldn't be. Lead management allows you to quickly see where leads are in the pipeline, facilitating real-time forecasting and sales roll-ups.

Using a sales management software with sales force automation helps you forecast and drill into answers.

Find out who and how your sales force is producing revenue, by viewing:

Individual quotas
Team and division production
Territories and product segmentation

With a consistent sales process, provided by sales force automation, makes setting quotas, benchmarks, and forecasts easier and more accurate.
Sales Accountability and Consistency

Once you have efficiently captured, tracked, and analyzed your leads, you know what works!

But, nothing is more frustrating than individuals on the sales team not adopting best practices. With sales force automation you can drive basic compliance with proven sales processes.

Enforcing best practices is not only an accountability issue, but one that simplifies sales persons' challenge with establishing their system and getting into a productive process. With sales force automation the process is there, and it will get results.

Sales force automation and lead management is the key to making your CRM implementation finally produce sales for you. If it doesn't do the things we have talked about, you need to either find a lead management companion solution to integrate or just scrap it and go to a real sales tool--sales lead management.

Internet Lead Provider, Do Your Homework For Better Lead Performance

Kaleidico Admin — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:34:25 +0000

Internet lead providers are not all created the same. Unfortunately, if you are not careful you will end up finding that out after you have wasted a lot of money on leads. Doing a little due diligence up front will not only save you money, but also improve your performance.

Vetting the Basics

When you begin your search for a lead provider start with the basics:

Are they a legitimate business? Do some Google searches, check BBB.org, look for an address.
Do they have a good reputation? Ask people in your industry, forums, on Twitter
Do they have qualified people? Check LinkedIN, blogs, social networks

These few inquiries should give you a feel for whether you are dealing with a reputable lead provider. Always start your search for your lead provider with as much information as possible. This way you will be able to verify their sales pitch and claims when you contact them.

How Do You Generate Leads?

This is a crucial step in the process. However, unlike most I won't claim that any particular method is the "best." This choice is entirely up to your business model, products, services, and budget. I have seen people be equally successful with aged mortgage leads, email generated leads, and highly brand-based LendingTree leads.

The important consideration in this step in the process is to know what you are getting, how they may differ, and what to expect during the sales process. A good discussion with a lead provider about their leads, how they are generated, and what makes their clients successful will lead to higher conversion and more loans.

Performance Expectations

What kind of conversion rate should I expect? And, how do I get that kind of rate? These are very fair questions to ask your lead generation company. After all, you are building a business plan.

Unfortunately, your answer is probably going to be vague. Make sure you stick with the line of questioning though. Have them give you examples and best practices. Get examples of what is working for their best clients, and what are the common mistakes they see--then listen to them!

All too often I see lead provider give good counsel on their leads and mortgage or debt companies stubbornly disregard the advice. Remember these guys may not be professional loan officers or debt counselors, but they know their leads.

Building a Partnership

The best sales organizations in the nation, that buy leads consistently, are ones that form a partnership with their lead provider. They are the guys and gals that exchange information, provide performance data back to their lead provider, and include them in their regular sales meetings.

Finding the right Internet lead provider can be like finding gold--they will make your sales organization rich.

Can't Never Did Anything. Are You Motivating Your Sales?

Kaleidico Admin — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:40:16 +0000

Make sure your lead management software creates a sense of urgency, motivation, and confidence in your sales team.

Can't never did anything is a popular motivational quote of hard nosed coaches and fathers. However, you would think by the time people were professionals they wouldn't have to be reminded. Not so!

Your sales team needs constant reminders of what a lack of action, effort, and belief yields--nothing! If you are a sales team leader or a manager don't let defeatism infiltrate your sales organization. Your job is to keep motivation high.

Motivation is Sales Fuel

Sales people are naturally emotional people. We zoom to big highs, but can plummet downward on the backs of the numerous objections and rejections we absorb every day. This is why sharing team successes are critical.

There are lots of ways to fuel to the motivational fire. Here are a few guaranteed winners:

Post team contact, proposal, and close rates on leader board
Run sales contests and games to bring energy back to the floor
Create live sales events, with managers showcasing live calls

Avoid letting sales folk settle into a mediocre routine. Energy requires constantly shaking things up and changing the landscape.

Confidence is a Customer Contagion

Whatever you do to motivate the troops it needs to translate into confidence. Confidence is contagious, within the sales team and outward to your customers. A motivated and confident individual will evangelize your companies products and serve with reckless abandon--giving your customers little hesitation in saying, "yes!"

In tough markets, like the ones we are currently experiencing, customers are going to hesitation and apprehension to the sales call. A positive and confident sales rep is going to quickly overcome those client fears.

Confidence is contagious in sales.

Pump Up Your Sales Numbers

Driving out the "can't" negative attitude and driving in motivation and confidence increases sales. Motivation and confidence makes your sales people more persuasive and tenacious on sales calls. It helps them overcome objections and calm customer apprehension.

Remember, "can't never did anything." So, make sure that your sales processes and lead management systems build a sense of urgency and confidence into your sales organization.

Top Sales Strategies And Lead Management For Online Sales Leads

Kaleidico Admin — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:43:30 +0000

Online sales leads are often underserved customers and many times ignored. Some surveys show as many as 60% of online customer inquiries never get follow-up. However, smart sales strategies and proper lead management can turn these online customer inquires leads into gold.

Since online lead generation is still a volume game, being organized and methodical is crucial. You need a plan and you need to execute that process relentlessly.

Start with a Script, End with a Conversation

Like I said these are more than likely damaged customers. They either have never been called about their Internet inquiry or they have only lackluster follow-up. Consequently, that first call is going to need a smooth, empathic introduction. I recommend scripting the first 5-10 seconds.

After the opening script though it is about a conversation. Many of these clients will have already been hit by a churn and burn call center. They are expecting you to jam them into any old product--break the pattern show them you are interested in their needs.

Focus on Trust Building, Climb the Distrust Mountain

The first and constant theme you need to reinforce with these customers is trust. They need to trust you, which means you are continually reinforcing your promises. One of my favorite illustrations comes from a mortgage industry blooger who describes it as, "Scaling Distrust Mountain."

Morgan Brown is talking about the sales and lead management process for working Internet leads. This process is critical and success all comes back to a very basic technique:

Make frequent, small promises to the customer and NEVER break one.

This simple and easy technique, will put you head and shoulders above the majority of your competitors--bringing you a trusting, loyal, long-term client.

Listen First for Better Solutions

Another key element to trust building is really trying to help the customer. That means listening first. To find the right product or recommend the ideal solution you need to understand their complete problem picture.

Listen, ask questions, and then offer choices. Recommendations that a customer understands and has some participation in always makes for the best solutions.

Follow-up, Follow-up, Follow-up

Much like promises and "scaling distrust mountain" following up is your commitment to that client. Make sure you do it diligently.

Give them your email, work number, and cell phone. Make them feel comfortable contacting you at any time with questions. Try to answer every email or phone call within twenty-four hours--even if you don't have the answer.

Even better, be proactive. Give them frequent updates even when nothing is going on. So, often people lose deals because a client was stewing in confusion and misunderstanding. A quick five minute check in will seal a lot of business.

Lead Nurturing Brings Future Buyers

Not all customers are ready to commit to a purchase or are still nervous about their authority to say yes. That is okay, but don't treat them like many others do. Those customers don't go into the trash can--they go into your lead nurturing campaign.

Put these aged lead customers on an email list, tickler file, or professional lead management system. Educated them, check on them, and when their needs change be ready to help.

The Right Number Of Sales Leads Can Improve Lead Conversion

Kaleidico Admin — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:44:37 +0000

Nothing kills sales production faster than the wrong number of leads. Too many causes lots of wasted money and complacency. Too little can be even worst--bored sales agents and frustrated compensation. Learn to tune you lead generation and distribution to optimize not only sales resources, but sales performance.

Measure Twice, Cut Once

Dad always said, "measure twice and cut once." I think the same rule applies to sales leads. So often we get a snippet of data and react with little thought. In online lead generation this can waste a lot of money changing strategies and damage evolving marketing successes.

As this applies to supplying the right number of sales leads you have to be very careful. Over supplying is certainly counterproductive, but so is under supplying. Attempting to maximize your sales production each month means hitting maximum throughput on your sales capacity. Often that means pumping more, not less through the sales engine.

Of course, the trick is efficiently managing that supply so that nothing gets wasted. This is where lead management come into play.

Sales Capacity is an Individual Thing

Sales capacity is truly an individual metric. Each sales person's capacity is effected by a myriad of influencers. If you are trying to determine overall sales capacity you have to create a weighted scale, not a flat average.

Whenever I am asked, "how many leads each sales agent should get?" I always ask, "what is their velocity?"

This has a lot to do with sourcing the appropriate lead flow. Sales agents will have a variety of conversion ratios, call volumes, and performance levels. These will all effect proper lead distribution.

Here are some of the factors I always review:

Sales call volume
Average attempts before a sale
Average attempts before a withdraw
Sales targets and quotas
Commission tiers (you will be amazed at the glass ceilings this causes in sales)

Remember, sales team(s) are made of human beings. They will perform as such, each as individuals. Calculate your lead generation on the combined demand of the individuals, not an average of the group.

Distribute Leads Based on Sales Performance

As you dig into all of these numbers stick with the golden rule that will always serve you well: "Buy leads for performers."

Poor performers will always hoard and waste leads. So, feed your top performers and starve your poor performers--both groups' sale numbers will improve with this strategy.

Lenderama, Improving Loan Originators With A Sense Of Urgency

Kaleidico Admin — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:47:14 +0000

Kaleidico lead management and mortgage CRM helps you build a sense of urgency into your sales process.

If you have been an avid reader of Lenderama, like myself, you know Todd believes that being a great loan officer means serving the client. Since 2005, Todd has been teaching mortgage originators how to effectively connect with clients and deliver incredible customer experiences--with service.

Experience Counts

This is where Kaleidico can help. I came out of the loan origination business. Having built one of the first 100% online mortgage originating banks, DeepGreen Bank, back in 2000 and later running National Home Equity at Quicken Loans until 2005--I have been in your position.

I have called clients, built folders, organized processors, and battled underwriters. I know what it takes to get a mortgage closed. That is why I founded Kaleidico back in 2003--I knew there was a better way to organize and drive results from my sales pipeline.

Kaleidico, Because Your Clients are Waiting

I needed every new prospect, past client, referral, or purchased lead to feel the same sense of urgency. I wanted each client to feel like they were the only mortgage I was working on. This idea created icoSales--a truly unique mortgage CRM built with an internal sense of urgency.

Our unique "Get My Next Lead" technology uses proprietary pull-based sales management to give you the next best lead, when you are ready to serve the next client.

We Have the Other Stuff Too

Of course, you will need the regular stuff too. We give you the CRM and lead management features you expect:

Import/export contacts
Add and track tasks
Schedule appointments
Send and track emails
Create email campaigns
Manage lead distribution
Customize lead distribution
Robust sales reporting

Take a Closer Look

Our brief online demo can take you through the nuances of the bringing a sense of urgency to your clients--or you can just sign-up and close more loans for 30 days on us (FREE!).