Sales representatives typically prospect for and obtain leads from a wide variety of sources. Today, in many industry segments such as Insurance, Loans, Real Estate and Automobile sales, agents and representatives routinely rely quite heavily on leads obtained online. This has to do with the fact that more and more Americans are going online. Consider the following facts:
- 68% of Americans or about 137 Million people use the Internet today
- As many as 97% of Internet users research products and services that they intend to buy online
Source: “America's Online Pursuits: The changing picture of who's online and what they do.” - Pew Internet & American Life Project’s (http://www.pewinternet.org) report on Internet demographics in the US.
- In 2005, auto dealers are drawing an average of nearly 230 online prospects per month. This was defined as people who had winnowed their car choices on other Web sites before clicking through to the dealers’ sites. In 2004, the same question was asked and the result was 116 online prospects a virtual doubling in one year.
Source: National Automobile Dealers Association Survey, Nov, 2005 – Referenced in http://www.townnews.com/articles/2005/11/03/publishers/pub081.txt
Given the above data, companies have recognized the importance of prospecting online. As a result we have seen a marked rise in online presence and in online marketing campaigns. To highlight this point consider the following:
- In 2005, 94 percent of the some 22,000 auto dealers in the United States have Web sites; onequarter of these auto web sites have come online within the last three years.
- One just has to enter “sales leads” into Google to find hundreds upon hundreds of companies that can provide leads
Source: National Automobile Dealers Association Survey, Nov, 2005 – Referenced in http://www.townnews.com/articles/2005/11/03/publishers/pub081.txt
The Flood of Leads Causes New Problems This increased investment in online marketing has created a glut of leads. While leads are plentiful, businesses are now faced with two major problems in converting these leads to sales. These are:
- Quality of leads
- Timely and effective follow up of leads
Lead Quality – Fixable once Identified
The quality of leads depends on such factors as the attractiveness of the offer, the construction and targeting of the marketing campaign and effective coordination between marketing and sales. These issues are somewhat easily addressed once the issue with lead quality is identified by the company.
Lead Follow Up – Hard to enforce Process
On the other hand problems with timely and effective follow up are a little more difficult to fix as the underlying causes are most likely process related. Often there is no process or when a process exists, it is not being followed effectively.
The Yankee Group estimates that up to 80 percent of sales leads are either lost, go stale, or are simply never followed up on. This is despite the fact that there is plenty of data that clearly shows that timely follow up to an online lead does help improve sales. Consider the following :
- REALTOR.com survey data shows that for realtors who don't respond immediately, the conversion rate is only about 2 percent whereas realtors who respond to an online lead immediately, find their chances of converting into a sale increase tenfold from 2% to 20%.
- Forrester reports that only 165,000 out of 1.8 million online sales leads are closed by the auto industry each month. They point out that this is a problem with lead processing technologies and follow up. Forrester suggests better performance could increase online vehicle sales by 40%
Source: Forrester Report as referenced by an article in Internet Retailer - http://www.internetretailer.com/dailyNews.asp?id=12652
- According to a survey by the CMO Council and the BPM Forum, business executives placed the opportunity costs of lead losses at between 10 and 20 percent of all sales.
This data clearly shows the importance of timely follow of sales leads. Businesses that recognize the importance of timely follow up usually have implemented the processes and tools to enable it. Typically the process involves, receiving leads and manually entering them into a lead tracking or sales force automation (SFA) system. These systems – depending on their sophistication, may automatically reply/market to the leads, distribute/assign the leads to sales people, schedule appointments and reminders and track overall follow up. One would think that tools like this should help solve all the lead follow up issues. However, the reality is that even the best processes supported with the best lead tracking tools will often fail because of the human element behind them. The two key problems areas are :
- Lead Capture
- Adapting to new SFA Tools
Lead Capture - Key Issue
Even though Lead Tracking and Sales Force Automation tools can help automate most elements involved in the lead follow up process, they rely on a manual process to get leads into the system. Typically most leads are delivered by email, fax or on web pages. A human has to physically transcribe the lead data into the lead tracking or SFA tool. If lead volumes increase, then manual data entry can become problematic and the rest of the fine-tuned, automated system breaks down as well.
Adapting to new SFA Tools
There is no dearth of sales lead tracking and SFA systems in the market today. With the adoption or implementation of each, there tends to be a learning curve for people. Also, people tend to have private data in spreadsheets or in personal applications that they feel comfortable using for manipulating or storing the data. Given these realities, businesses always end up with situations where the fancy tools end up being marginalized.
The eGrabber Solution
eGrabber’s eMail-Lead Grabber (ELG) is designed to address the two specific problems we detailed above. ELG helps :
- Automate the capture of sales leads
- Enable and automate the sales leads follow up process using all the existing applications
Leads are typically “auto-routed” i.e. sent one by one as they are processed by the lead source, or are batched together and delivered periodically. Leads are usually delivered by email in text, pdf or spreadsheets, fax or through an online system. ELG automates the capture of leads by automatically recognizing leads in email or electronic documents and then converting them into the appropriate formats suitable for the specific applications or databases that in use by the business today. ELG has an underlying workflow engine that allows it to automate the process of routing the captured lead data into the lead tracking or SFA systems. ELG has adapters/drivers for all major SFA or personal lead tracking systems including Excel spreadsheets. Unlike other sales lead process automation technologies, eGrabber actually automates - and hence eliminates, the costly/unreliable manual effort required to enter sales leads into a lead tracking system and automates the flow and coordination of lead information between existing applications. It does not require a new application/system to take advantage of the sales lead data being captured.
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