A poor lead conversion rate isn’t just frustrating, it’s also expensive. Given that your bank spends a lot of resources to generate leads, it’s only natural that you expect your sales teams to do a better job.
Is a higher conversion rate possible? Gartner says that high-performing SDR teams can convert 59% of SQLs to actual opportunities. Evidently such teams must be doing something right that others aren’t.
In that context, it’s tempting to pin down your own teams’ below-average performance to bad quality of leads. But such simplistic reasoning would be almost fatal; it’d keep you from improving your pre-sales processes and rob you of future opportunities.
4 reasons your leads don’t convert
Pre-sales processes like lead allocation, for instance, play a big role in whether your sales reps will close the deal. A McKinsey article suggests that win rates could be as high as 40 to 50% for organizations with strong pre-sales machinery.
By examining what keeps your teams from converting leads, you will be able to improve your systems, get better results from the same sales team, and drive growth in revenue for your financial services organization.
Here are the top four reasons:
1. Your lead allocation is seriously sub-optimal
If you’re using some primitive method of lead allocation, you’re likely losing the battle even before getting started.
Sales leaders often use a rep’s location to decide whether to allocate a lead. In many cases, recency – whether the rep converted the previous lead allocated – impacts the allocation decision . Such manual lead allocation methods are highly inefficient. Moreover, they contaminate the process with human bias.
Against that, an automated sales engagement platform built for a bank or financial services organization would be able to collate multiple data sets and allocate leads in a highly efficient manner.
2. Your reps aren’t responding in time
Your leads are short of time. They have a number of things sitting on their mind, and delaying your response significantly decays your chances of conversion.
Perhaps the lead went to a rep who was already overbooked. Or perhaps the rep thought they didn’t have enough sales collateral on hand to even make the first call. Or maybe the system at your bank took a long time passing on the lead.
Whatever the reason, you were late in beginning to engage the lead. And in the meantime, an agile competitor, even one with inferior features, might walk away with the deal.
Vymo’s own deployment data shows that by reducing the time for the first call, businesses have seen an increase of 25% to 35% in their lead conversion rates.
3. You aren’t learning from your best reps
Given the intense competition, it’s unlikely that your bank or financial services organization has only poor-performing reps. If you’ve seen growth, you must be having a bunch of SDRs who perform very well.
The question is: what are you doing to use their learnings and take the rest of the reps further? The answer in most cases is, sadly, nothing. And you’re not entirely at fault if this applies to your organization as well. Humans can only do so much, and in absence of a strong technology platform, they’d be too overstretched.
A sales engagement platform can become a massive repository of the actions that your reps take. And then the platform, powered by ML, will identify actions that the successful reps took. As a result, when the rest of the teams want to push their performance further, you have a system in place that has learned from the best reps.
4. Your system is overwhelmed with data
If there’s one thing that most banks today have, it’s more data than they are equipped to make sense out of. So when your current system tries to qualify leads using data, chances are the data is overwhelming.
And the fact that the leads come from different sources – your own database, referrals, web, promotional events, and the like – a dated system simply cannot connect the dots. The result is you get leads with sharply divergent quality. And then lead conversion is bound to suffer.
Successful financial services organizations use and connect a wide variety of criteria to qualify leads, as this comprehensive report mentions. A powerful platform that is capable of integrating bigger data originating from multiple sources is the solution you’re looking for.
Gartner has put together an amazing Guide for sales engagement applications. It discusses how, among other things, sales teams leverage technology to execute at scale multichannel, multitouch engagement.
Making a difference
Your sales reps are already under pressure; don’t make it any harder by running the sales operation on slow, inefficient, systems.
Intelligent lead allocation is the key to better lead conversion. Going forward, a platform that learns from lead attributes and then helps your bank automate the processes is the only answer. At Vymo, we’re proud of the results we have generated for our enterprise customers that use our lead allocation engine.
Why not check out some of our case studies to learn how Vymo has transformed sales for global insurers, banks, and other financial institutions?