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Lead Qualification & Live Transfers Improve Education Lead Conversion

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

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

Success with Internet Leads Requires a Quick Response to Student Inquiries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Automated Dialers: The Downside

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

Predictive Dialers

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

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

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

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

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

Lead Notification Dialers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Call Centers

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

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

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

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

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

LeadQual Rapid Lead Response & Live Transfer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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