John Wetmore, a system and sales expert, unveils the strategies behind his lead management success. These techniques, which he personally applied and imparted to over 2,000 insurance agents and multiple agencies, have proven to be highly effective.
82% of salespeople believe that building relationships with their leads and clients is the most important part of selling, yet 48% of salespeople never make a follow-up attempt when contacting leads.
Clearly, there is a disconnect between what is recognized as sales’ best practice and the techniques being applied to lead management.
John Wetmore, an agency owner to over 6,300 insurance agents, explains, “Many agents feel a lack of confidence in their skillset. We all know that rejection is an unavoidable part of sales, but there are absolutely ways to curb it and build a robust strategy for contacting and converting leads.”
Understanding Consumers
The root of sales should be about addressing customer needs. The general research around customer service shares that the reason humans prefer to talk to other humans rather than AI-bots or automated communications is because they believe humans understand them better.
This means that the best way to approach a lead is as a human in a conversation rather than as a bot reading a script, which can be more difficult than it seems.
Wetmore shares, “Scripts are a great tool that can help ease the fear of rejection when there’s this supposedly effective structure to focus on, but it’s very common for sales reps to have memorized their scripts and run through as much of it as possible before they get rejected. What actually proves most effective is lengthening the time spent with the lead by engaging with them as if they were a friend and holding a very simplified and guided Q&A.”
Increasing the Value of Leads
Once a sales rep understands how to approach their lead conversations, they can focus on ensuring they get an opportunity to speak with every single one of the leads on their lists.
Another common approach by reps is to call through their lead list once and lose track of all the leads that didn’t answer. Reps may come back to these leads at some point in the future, but they are more often forgotten and wasted.
Wetmore states, “An effective question I ask agents during training is, ‘If we had the top 100 sales books in the world right here with us, how many contacts on average would they say it takes to make a sale?’ Sales reps always answer 5 to 12 contacts so my response is, ‘If you know that’s the average number needed, why are you giving up after one dial or one objection?’”.
Instead, Wetmore explains that the best strategy to optimize the value of a list is to take a portion, perhaps 25 out of 100, and triple dial each of them. Five may answer with four rejections and one becoming a qualified lead. For the remaining 20, repeat the triple dial process, and then repeat it one more time after that. Dialing the same number three times in a row increases the pickup rate by 75%, and there will be a handful of people who have gotten nine calls in a 90-minute window, which is guaranteed to increase the pickup rate further.
“For those wondering, ‘What happens if someone is mad?’, well, some people are mad after just one call, so that’s an irrelevant fear and if they are it is very easy to say, ‘I’m sorry something was up with the phone and I didn’t think it was dialing, so anyways my name is John and I’m calling about XYZ’, as a very basic level objection,” Wetmore states.
Optimization
The next step in re-imagining lead conversion is to optimize the lead sources and utilize the right lead mixes that support the business’ sales strategy.
There may be one perfect lead type for a given product or service, but it’s inefficient and highly competitive to be only sourcing that one type of lead when every other sales rep in the industry is targeting the same one.
This is why Wetmore believes, “The most effective strategy is utilizing multiple lead types – a lead mix – and multiple lead vendors for each type. This way you guarantee a greater pool of sales opportunities and you increase your level of sales knowledge and experience which will only be beneficial when it comes to business growth and scale in the future.”
Tracking
The final, and arguably most important, step to leveraging leads like a sales master is tracking all activity.
Everyone has implicit biases of their own effort and work ethic, often measuring intention rather than actual input against output. The only way to fully understand where your lead conversion may be faltering is by looking at every piece of the process and how many minutes are truly being utilized in a day to bring in revenue.
Wetmore’s view is, “You need an activity tracker because once you understand how much you are putting into contacting leads you will be able to look at your data in depth and it will tell you exactly where you should focus your time. You will optimize your work hours and increase your income.”
Leveraging Leads
Salespeople should never have to fear contacting leads.
The foundation of a successful sales flow is understanding that consumers want to feel understood, which can only happen through conversing like a human being rather than a robot.
Dialing and re-dialing leads will become more effective with a process structure to follow, so fewer opportunities for conversion are lost, while utilizing a lead mix multiplies those opportunities and decreases direct competition.
However, the only way to know exactly how successful these tips are is to track each and every sales-related activity.
