Why Your Lead-to-Contracted Producer Rate Isn’t Where You Want It

Impact Growth Today With What’s in Front of You

Like many of you, I use a Gmail account for my personal email, and I sometimes let my son, who’s 11, use the Google Hangouts feature to talk to his friends. Last time he accessed it, he changed my Google ID to “Mr. Noodles,” a name that was more entertaining to him and his friends than it was to me.

When I logged in to my email, I was surprised to see my new ID. I asked him to change it back, which he did. Yet the next time I logged in after he’d used Hangouts, there was “Mr. Noodles.” “Who’s Mr. Noodles?” a friend asked in an email. I asked my son to change it back and not to do it again.

Once my son has his mind set on something, though, he sees it through. The next time I logged in to write an email, who was infiltrating Google? Mr. Noodles. And this time, he was there to stay. My son had changed it three times, preventing me from changing it for 90 days.

Though I was frustrated, I had to hand it to “Mr. Noodles” — his persistence made him successful. Mr. Noodles is a natural-born salesperson. “No” didn’t stop him.

More companies could be more persistent like my son. He’s learned the sales strategy that 89 percent of IMOs and BGAs haven’t. As someone who interacts daily with our sales team, I already knew the importance of follow-up in lead generation. But when Agent Link conducted a study with 164 BGAs and IMOs to determine why some BGAs or IMOs seem to have a much higher conversion rate from leads to contracted agents than others, it uncovered the crucial component of persistence in agent activation and recruitment.

What if we told you that you could impact revenue growth without adding or investing in additional resources? You can. This potential is right at your fingertips. To impact growth, you need to follow up with leads not one, two, or three times, but at least seven.

In our extensive research, we found that 80 percent of sales happen between the seventh and 11th interaction. Only 1 out of every 64 IMOs or BGAs actually followed up past the fourth interaction. No wonder so many leads don’t close: The systematic follow-up just isn’t there. It’s lost revenue you don’t see — your biggest losses come from these missed opportunities.