By Pat Meehan
AnnuityNews
In his popular 2003 book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, author Michael Lewis details the way Oakland A’s GM Billy Beane cleverly managed to field a consistently excellent team despite spending half of what big-market teams like the Yankees and Red Sox were spending.
His approach was to use the work of statistics guru Bill James in identifying what elements of the game were most valuable to the team and then figuring out which of those qualities were getting the best value on the open market. Beyond the focus on baseball, Michael Lewis details an important approach to business that uses data carefully collected over time to identifying the best available values. This is an approach that is just as applicable in any other business as it is in baseball.
Often, sales teams can begin to let their approach to things grow stale, allowing themselves to get caught up in business as usual and missing important trends in the market. Those sales teams struggling to figure out how to spend their marketing budget can benefit immensely from collecting data on all of their interactions and then identifying the lead sources with the best ROI. A Lead management system (LMS) is an invaluable tool in collecting and interpreting data. Lead management tools automatically record data on every lead and then help to analyze that data so that sales managers can identify the best lead sources and the most efficient ways to work them. Advanced metrics are essential to uncovering best practices and, much like Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s, begin to lap the competition without having to outspend them.
The need to get the most out of your marketing spend is an essential part of doing business for any sales team. With a limited budget, every penny has to be spent as wisely as possible. This means working each lead in the most efficient means possible while also purchasing and pursuing leads that get the best bang for the buck. In both of these essential areas, lead management tools can provide an invaluable advantage. The first comes in the way that your sales team works each lead. Metrics collected by your LMS can both help identify and hone best practices that work, as well as ensure that those practices are followed through the use of sales automation.
Basic best practices can make a tremendous difference in closing leads. Studies have shown that calling within the first five minutes of receiving a lead makes that lead 22 times more likely to close. Similar studies also detail the ways that anything from the number of and timing of follow-up calls to the number of nurturing e-mails sent can all have a crucial effect on the outcome of a contact. Once those best practices are understood and implemented, a LMS uses sales automation to ensure that your sales team follows them.
Another way a metrics-driven approach to selling annuities can benefit your sales team is through accurate and sophisticated lead scoring. While the way each lead is worked is very important, getting the right leads is also essential. However, the best lead for a company may not always be so clear. The data a LMS collects on your leads and the rate at which they convert can be invaluable to spending your marketing budget in the most efficient fashion possible.
Which lead sources yield the highest ROI can vary greatly from business to business and across different industries, and it’s important to have a method of lead scoring that is custom fit to the annuity industry. An LMS with lead scoring capabilities uses the information collected on the success rate of each and every lead to best determine which leads are getting the highest ROI. This way, a sales manager can buy those leads that represent the best values and stop sinking money into lead sources that aren’t producing.
In the end, successful annuity sales is about working efficiently and reacting quickly to changes in the market. In this regard, a data-driven approach is an essential part of any business and their efforts to stay ahead of the curve. Much like Billy Beane was able to get ahead of bigger, better funded businesses in their market by identifying value with the use of sophisticated metrics, your sales team can figure out the best methods for maximizing ROI and lap the competition without increasing your marketing buy.
