Let’s face it. It’s 2016. When it comes to sales and marketing, data is king.
Agents today must juggle all sorts of tasks. Knowing when to dial your leads shouldn’t be one of them. Let data tell you when to dial, and dial from within a platform that can serve up the most-likely-to-convert lead next.
InsideSales.com, an industry leading CRM and telephony system, puts out a report titled, “The Best Practices for Lead Response Management” and NinjaQuoter reports on metrics that are of value to insurance agents and marketers. Data doesn’t lie, so when we laid our data over the top of InsideSales’ data, we weren’t shocked at the resemblance. Agents shouldn’t be either.
The data sets, for the skeptics:
InsideSales has 3 years of data, all wrapped up into one single infographic that most would pay money for. They give it away for free. This is the dialing reporting behind 15,000 unique leads, and 100,000 call attempts from within their CRM.
NinjaQuoter is reporting on over 1,000,000 interactions of consumers on websites hosting NinjaQuoter as their website quoter and lead capture forms. Those 1,000,000 interactions turned into 44,000 engaged leads generated and sent to agent CRM systems.
Let’s dive into some old ways of thinking and explain why statistics matter.
The question often asked by agents new to dialing on leads is, “When do I call, and how often?” The answer has always been “early and often.” That is partially true. When you use the science and statistics behind lead dialing, you can cut out a lot of useless dialing and follow-up to focus on other business-generating tasks. Sure, an immediate call to a lead is still required – that is when the consumer is absolutely the most engaged. Calling that new lead within 5 minutes increases your likelihood of qualifying and selling that prospect by 400% vs. calling in 10 minutes.*
Data shows the best time of the day to make contact with a prospect is between 4-5 p.m., with the second best time being 8-9 a.m.* These are very specific time slots to dial leads – you should be doing nothing else but calling on prospects during this time. Between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., contact rates with new prospects falls off a cliff, becoming a useless time to dial on leads.
Diminishing return of too many dials
After attempting contact 6 times, there is a diminishing return on answer rates. Simply put, every contact attempt after the 6th is making it less likely to make a sale.
This tells you something: these consumers are not ready to buy, yet. Getting a quote from your website doesn’t solve this issue. They need long-term nurturing vs. high-volume phone calls. These consumers need a long-term sequence of email, white papers and social media posting to keep them engaged in life insurance, while teaching them why they need it. This strategy is not “sell, sell, sell!” – it is education.
Within the first 6 attempts, you will make contact with 90% of the total people you will ever make contact with.* Hammering them with dials will not get you that extra 10%; sending them consistent emails and engaging them on social media will. Lets face it, lead quality and contact rates continue to drop, so you need to pivot to other means of contact and nurturing.
Best days to make contact
The best day to make contact with a consumer is Thursday, while Tuesday is the worst based on the InsideSales study.*
Why is this? Let’s look at the typical worker’s’ schedule: Monday is always a slow day for employees, Tuesday they catch a wave and by Thursday they plateau. Friday productivity slows to make up or all the procrastination earlier in the week. If you look at consumers like you look at yourself, and do the opposite, you will close more sales just by contacting more people.
The most quote requests generated by consumers according to the NinjaQuoter data were generated on Thursday, followed by Wednesday. The data looks very similar to the InsideSales data. Does it tell a story?
Data doesn’t lie. The most engaged day of the week for clients and life insurance is Thursday, followed by Wednesday. Is this a coincidence, or human nature?
Paint a picture: It’s a Thursday at 4 p.m. and a consumer is sitting online shopping for life insurance. They hit your site, fill out a quote and answer the phone. This is statistically going to happen more often than any other day or time of the week.
• Does this data align with your experience? Please comment on this thread: Data divulges best day and time to reach a lead
Breaking down the online consumer
It is no surprise that consumers don’t fully understand life insurance, and are relying on price to drive their buying decisions. Data shows 40% of consumers select a 10-year term quote over all other durations. Dear carriers: 25-year term doesn’t sell! And women select less coverage than men.
Simply put, data should dictate how you market to, communicate with and sell to consumers today. Every lead is not created equal and the science behind this business model makes it easier to sell if you know what you are doing and how best to market to or position a prospect.
Sitting on a phone all day is not productive. Making strategic calls during certain times of day while spending the remainder of the day marketing, learning a new product or continued prospecting will amplify your business.
• Does this data align with your experience? Please comment on this thread: Data divulges best day and time to reach a lead
Nic West, co-owner of Austin, Texas-based Ninja Technologies, Inc., has been in online sales and marketing for over a decade. With an impressive background in online lead generation, he serves as a source of information and best practices to some of the top insurance agents marketing online today. Nic can be reached at [email protected].
Ninja Technologies, Inc.’s NinjaQuoter.com serves agents nationally, making it easy for agents to create an online quoting experience for life and final expense insurance by providing enhanced website quoting tools, with an emphasis on highly converting forms. With lead intelligence, lead posting to CRMs and Ninjalytics built in, agents today can be better marketers by using the tools provided to focus their efforts.
