The Truth About Aged Leads
By Jason Kort – Director of Marketing, SoftVu
Most salespeople tend to focus on the high-probability “hot leads” that recently came in the door. They don’t have time to stop and sweep through a list of aged leads on a regular basis. SoftVu recently completed a “meta study” compiling four years worth of data across 38 clients to quantify what we already knew—when you ignore aged leads, you’re throwing away money. Here’s a quick look at results for a typical lender. In general, our findings show that:
- 58% to 76% of aged leads remain viable for a significant period of time after initial contact.
- The typical sales team misses somewhere between 600 to 800 aged lead opportunities for every 1,000 initial leads.
- Most respondents still want to be contacted with follow up information, offers, etc.
The simple message is, “Stop ignoring aged leads!” But, how you go about doing that is not quite so simple. There are three primary takeaways here…
- The vast majority of aged leads are still viable (and most sales teams ignore them).
- Staying in front of your potentials results in significantly more closed deals.
- Your sales staff is doing a good job if they’re just keeping up with new leads (someone else needs to qualify and nurture leads after the initial contact).
One solution to this problem is a consistent lead nurturing campaign that can be automated to…
- Identify which aged leads are still viable
- Stay connected with viable aged leads with relevant, timely messages, and
- Route “new” leads and recycle viable “aged” leads back to your sales team in a timely fashion, so they can stay focused on high probability leads.
Learn more, please visit Business-Software.com’s marketing automation vendor showcase for SoftVu.
[Photo courtesy of revjeffhood.]
