How To Get More Sales From The Leads You Buy

We spoke to Ben Tyrrell the Head Of Customer Success at MVF Global to explore how to get more sales from the leads you buy, how to optimise lead flow, and why it is so important for lead sellers and lead buyers to build a strong relationship and work together.

Below are some of the key ideas discussed on the call but be sure to check out the full podcast (with links at the bottom of the page).

Why is it so important to work work directly with the lead buyer to optimise their sales process?

Ben Tyrrell: Why is it so important? For us at MVF we had a sort of realisation four or five years ago about the issue of quality. It’s a consistent issue that all lead buyers and lead sellers have a conversation about, and also the transient nature of what the word “quality” actually means. Quality means different things to different people at different times. And really what it came down, what we drilled it down to, was a very basic formula:

You have to deal with both sides of that equation. You can’t have one without the other.

Now, I used to be a lead buyer. I scaled up a business in Asia on the back of buying leads. So I developed our own approach to how we did that, and I realised how much that changed the output of the leads that I was buying in. You know, calling them quickly, building up a process by which you could scale up a system around it.

This is why the sales process and how a client processes leads is as important. It’s a fundamental part of the equation of the overall success of a campaign coming in.

And this doesn’t necessarily just apply to leads, this applies to all marketing input. It’s what happens to in on the other side that can turn the dial.

It is also worth considering the history of lead generation in relation to this.

At the moment we are seeing the re-marriage of sales and marketing after an acrimonious divorce in the 50s and 60s were massive above the line TV spend forced marketing and sales into two competing departments within an organisation. Whereas now what you’ve got is the opportunity and ability to bring them back together again. Marketing and sales working together gives you the efficient output that modern businesses need.

But a lot of companies do struggle with this because sales are buying the leads and the departments are siloed? What do you do when you encounter this?

It becomes an issue of the long-term sustainability of the relationship. The higher up the tree you go within organisations at a strategic level the more sympathy the de-siloing argument receives.

I think what you also end up with, especially within the lead generation world, is a lot of legacy systems as a shadow of the old approach. So you see a lot of contact centre that are staffed based on cold data lists and the old way of generating leads. And what you sometimes end up with is a bit of a Frankenstein monster of how the approach the marketing input. It’s not a sustainable way to build a long-term lead generation campaign.

This starts things off on shaky grounds so it becomes quite to hard to then delve in and suggest adjustments.

So what do you do about it? You work with them and try and use the “Brian Clough approach” which is to sit down and explain to them that our approach is the correct one. It’s a slow one, but it’s something we can see changing and everyone is moving towards.

How can brands and land buyers enhance their lead flow to push success?

I think the starting point of this is a relationship issue. The relationship between lead sellers and lead buyers is a partnership. You need to ensure that these partnerships are strong and you can have some open and honest conversations about how to make things better.

You need to move away from some of the old adversarial relationships of “Your leads are crap” and move beyond that to “This is what we expect. These are our success metrics. This is what we expect. How can we get to that? What can we do together?”

The starting point is the recognition of the equation (above). The quality and success side of the formula is a function of the marketing input AND the process. And understanding what that process is and how to optimise it.

To give you an example, one of the single biggest factors to the success of a campaign - from that side of the equation - is simply how fast you call the leads. If I ask you how quickly you are calling the leads, an unacceptable answer is “Quickly.” An acceptable answer is “95% of leads are called within one minute of receiving them. We’re constantly monitoring that metric because we’ve found that our contact rates have a 10 percentage point increase if we hit them within 60 seconds.”

That is the acceptable answer, and if you can’t give me that answer, start there.

Wanna hear some more from Ben? Check out the full podcast on Spotify, Apple or watch the video over on Databowl’s YouTube Channel.