What Does a Good Lead Look Like?

Obtaining good quality leads is vital to insurance sales success. But how do you recognize a good lead? What are his or her characteristics? A new lead-scoring study by Leads360, "Lead Scoring 101: Leveraging Lead Quality Insights to Improve Conversion," reveals the personal attributes of a serious insurance prospect.

The study, which looked at millions of prospective buyers, scored leads based on credit rating, prior or current insurance carrier, education level, home state and email address. The results showed, among other things, that prospects with lower credit scores and educational attainment (high school level) were three times as likely to buy as other types of leads.

By keeping track of your leads' characteristics and applying your past experience in nurturing leads, you can determine which leads are most likely to buy. And a lead management system can help you automate this process. According to Leads360, a lead management system should include the following features:

• Automated lead importing
• Optimal contact velocity
• Automatic lead assignment based on intelligent, highly customizable, and easy-to-configure prioritization and distribution rules
• Built-in workflows that reflect best practices, but are easy enough to customize
• Real-time performance insight
• Comprehensive reporting and analytics (that help assess lead quality)
• Full nurturing capabilities
• Customer-defined data fields that can accept and store score data
• Automatic, real-time integration with scoring engines in order to immediately take appropriate actions on incoming leads or prospects according to scores
• Dynamic scoring capabilities, as new data is added to a lead's or prospect's record

Whatever your approach to lead generation, you can maximize your conversion rates by employing a system that will help you score your leads and determine which ones are most likely to become clients.