Category Archives: Guide

5 lead handling steps to conversion success: turn more third-party leads into new customer sales

A proactive approach to lead handling and lead nurturing can have a drastic impact on lead-to-sale conversions, removing frustration and maximising your commercial performance.

Last month, we won Best Lead Generation Campaign alongside clients Mindshare, GTB and Ford at the Performance Marketing Awards. Drawing upon the success of that campaign and our 17-year heritage in the industry, we’ve compiled five steps that can help you and your sales to get the most out of the leads you buy – whether it’s from TLA or another third-party company.

1. Provide context

Not all leads are generated equally. If you’re working with a reputable lead generation partner that goes to great lengths to ensure quality, communicating how these leads are different to the sales staff that receive them can have a huge impact.

By providing the context behind the lead – where it originated from, how it has been qualified, what information the consumer provided, what opt-in procedures were used and more – sales staff understand the quality of the opportunity they have. That ultimately means they can dedicate the appropriate time and energy towards engaging the consumer and converting the sale.

There are a number of ways this communication can be done, from presentations to brochures to videos. It will be down to you and your lead generation partner to discuss and agree on what works for you and the sales teams you need to engage.

2. Be quick

Leads cool quickly. A study published in the Harvard Business Review found that qualification rates drop by as much as 400% when consumers are contacted after 10 minutes of submitting an enquiry compared to 5 minutes. Now imagine if they haven’t been contacted for more than 24 hours. The impact of response time on conversions cannot be underestimated.

Our in-house team contacts consumers who have made an enquiry as soon as they’re received. If they are qualified as a lead and distributed to your CRM, we recommend that they are contacted at the earliest possible moment to ensure the lead stays hot.

3. Be persistent

The same Harvard study also concluded that by attempting to contact a consumer six times, contact rates increase by 70%. A qualified lead puts your sales teams in the driving seat to engage and convert a new customer. By allowing a lead to spoil, your sales teams could effectively be handing over the impetus to a competitor.

A qualified lead for us is someone who has arrived by way of an inbound enquiry and has double opted in to be contacted by our client’s team. In short, they’re expecting the call. So, if for some reason they can’t answer straight away, be persistent and keep trying!

4. Remain adaptable

Most third-party leads are consumers who enquire as part of their research and comparison journey – a journey they remain in right up until the purchase takes place.

While they may have expressed a clear interest in one particular product or service, it’s important to acknowledge that they could still making up their mind and remain open to different options. It therefore makes sense for your sales team to do the same.

They could arrive one of your products but now want to discuss other options you provide. Or perhaps they’ve had their head turned by one of your competitors. By staying open to different possibilities, your sales teams give themselves the greatest scope for providing what they want and need. Lead nurturing doesn’t end until the sale is complete.

5. Repeat and clarify

Don’t assume that because the script used as part of the qualification process has covered the key features or benefits of your product or service that the consumer doesn’t want more before committing to a purchase.

We go to great lengths to make sure the information shared with a consumer is understood, but it never hurts for sales teams to repeat and reinforce the message when first contact is made. Likewise, there is only so much information a consumer wants to hear or is able to take in on a qualification call or via a digital qualification.Having opted in to be contacted by your sales team, that consumer is now primed for more granular detail about what you can offer that others can’t.

In our experience, following these five steps can help you and your sales teams to get more out of the leads you buy and maximise your potential for conversion. If you’d like more information on any of the above, drop us a line and we’ll arrange a follow-up call.

How an estate agency comparison site generates more accurate lead data

There’s one thing that rings true across the lead generation landscape: the better the data, the better you can interact with a potential prospect and the higher the chances of converting that lead.

Marketers across all industries are using the internet as a cornerstone of their wider growth strategy, collecting data in better ways and using new customer information to reach out in creative forms.

This is especially relevant to the world of real estate, as online estate agencies across the UK represent the preferred option of 13 million people, according to a recent study by LetBritain.

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How online estate agencies can get better leads through a comparison service

Is the traditional estate agent under threat of extinction? Andrew Ellson believes so, writing recently in The Times that “Estate agents need to be dragged into the 21st century.” In particular, he laments the often exorbitant fees some charge for doing relatively little work.

He’s mainly talking about high-street agents, though. The industry is far from dead, although online companies such as PurpleBricks are offering a much more personalised service for sellers, and are growing at an incredible rate as a direct result. Continue reading

Join the proptech revolution to generate GDPR-qualified leads

Advances in property technology (proptech) are creating unique ways for estate agents to interact with clients and convert potential leads online.

Some estate agents, for instance, allow buyers to use Augmented Reality (AR) to walk around homes in virtual reality situations. A specialised virtual reality headset can give leads a much better view of a property, offering far greater depth than floor plans and pictures found on agent websites. Continue reading

Why your online estate agency needs GDPR-compliant B2B leads

If you’re looking for fresh leads to grow your business, then it’s likely you’ll have heard about the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) legislation being introduced by the European Union on 25 May 2018.

GDPR is designed to give consumers more power than ever before over their personal data and information. Businesses looking to contact potential leads from May 2018 – estate agent or otherwise – will have to be given explicit consent to contact leads who have chosen to share their details.

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