Educating Lead Buyers
On the latest episode of the B2C Lead Generation Podcast we welcome Scott Payne from SDP Solutions and Michael Ferree from Lead Generation World for a fireside chat where we talk through the importance of educating lead buyers.
On the latest episode of the B2C Lead Generation Podcast we welcome Scott Payne from SDP Solutions and Michael Ferree from Lead Generation World for a fireside chat where we talk through the importance of educating lead buyers, the difference between the American and UK Markets, ways to increase conversion rates on leads you buy, and a lot more!
Formal structure quickly went out the window and was replaced with an hour long chat about the industry in general, featuring brilliant insights from leaders in the field.
Below are just a few extracts from the key topics that cropped up, but you really wanna check out the whole call - Links at the bottom of the page.
Scott, let’s begin with the positive! What are some of the best things the top lead buyers in the US are doing at the moment?
Scott Payne: The most successful people that I see have a really good between their sales teams and their marketing teams. What I find is, those companies who struggle with you know conversion rates and all of that, is you get heads butting up against one another and they’re not aligned. My background was at one of the largest mortgage companies in the US and one of the things my leadership team saw was there was a lot of this kind of butting going on and ultimately no one was successful. Someone had the insight or the foresight to know that we needed to start a Sales-Marketing Team, and my job was to sit in between and be liaison between marketing and sales. When marketing has an issue with sales instead of going straight to sales and causing the head-butting they were sent to me. Vice-versa, when sales had an issue with marketing, rather than going to marketing they would come to me to vet it out. Ultimately, I was in charge of lead distribution and then lead analytics.
Where I’m going with this is, if companies don’t have that good relationship between the two (sales and marketing) and sometimes it might take bringing in a person who is unbiased between the two, it gets a little tough. So it’s a little trick I guess, if you cross train people between marketing and sales, it can be really helpful.
Was that company buying leads externally or generating their own?
Scott Payne: A little bit of both. We actually had six different divisions, so we had our new customer acquisition where we try and get new customers, we also had a large retention division, so customers who had done a mortgage in the past. We had all kinds of divisions, but it was all using one centralised lead management system. All leads would come in and I would route them out to where they needed to go, who the best sales person was. We got really sophisticated with how we scored the leads and trying to match the best lead to the best person. It was so much fun.
Michael, one thing you talk about a lot and believe strongly in, is educating lead buyers. What are some of the challenges you face with this?
Michael Ferree: Yeah, so I was a lead buyer too*.* And partly that’s how I got into this industry and why I’m relatively passionate about it, just like Scott is about helping people, because it’s hard! As a lead buyer it’s hard to navigate this industry, determining who to work with, what companies to work with, what are the processes to put in place to be more effective with the leads that you’re buying, all those sorts of things are an on-going thing. It’s not like once you have it figured out you’re done, you know? There is always this optimisation of lead management processes and lead distribution. Or finding the right sources, pausing or stopping, finding new sources because volume has gone down elsewhere, it’s a hard thing that you’re always trying to work!
Starting Lead Generation World is really an effort to bring good companies and good processes together to try and talk about best practices and connect these things. It’s über important that lead buyers are there.
Sometimes lead buyers get into a mode where they think they know it and it’s their process and they can’t really do it any better and they feel like they’ve just got it figured out. That’s just not the case. I’m sure people listening today will pull a half dozen ideas off of Scott about what they could be doing with their lead management process and there will be a whole bunch more, and that’s what you get when you go to a conference. Especially one that has a focus like we do to really help the industry go through best practices and transparency.
That’s kind of where we’re at and we provide free passes to lead buyers because we just think it’s that important that they are there!
You can also check out the full podcast on Apple, Spotify or Databowl’s YouTube Channel.