double POSITIVE Marketing Group, Inc.

eStara issued a press release today announcing the launch of its Form to Phone service, which provides consumer data from online form submissions to sales professionals via phone in addition to email.  ”The solution has been proven to shorten response times for lead generation marketers and improve customer satisfaction by delivering prompt responses to online inquiries, ” the release states, and goes on to provide statistics on how Autobytel’s use of the service has increased the qualified leads delivered to dealers while improving conversion rates, in one case by 300%.   

“Time is of the essence in any sales transaction, and online merchants who are able to connect with customers while their interest is high are more likely to close the sale.  eStara Form to Phone is an effective tool for delivering timely, personalized service and tracking lead generation performance,” says eStara’s John Federman in the requisite CEO quote.

So how about this, Mr. (or Ms.) Auto Dealer–or Real Estate Agent, or Other Sales Pro:  instead of getting a phone call providing online form data, how about a phone call with the live consumer on the other end whose online form data went in real time to a call center agent, who phoned them immediately, verified their interest and qualifications, and then if appropriate, called you and personally introduced them to you?  

 Which would you prefer?  Whom should we call at Autobytel?

Early on at DoublePositive we realized that, for consumers and for our clients, the face of our product is our call center agents.  Therefore, it is our responsibility to ensure that the face of our product is the best it could possibly be.  And what better way to ensure that than to have our agents talking only to genuinely interested consumers who, only seconds before, inquired about a new home purchase (or refinancing their home, or debt consolidation, or online education, or any number of the areas we work in).  In one of my earlier posts, we talk about the LSQS or LeadScrub Quality Score.  A proprietary scoring model that allows us to only contact the most interested consumers.  The second half of that is getting those consumers on the phone as quickly as possible. 

 It’s kind of like basic physics.  When you throw an object – the speed at which that object leaves your hand is the fastest it is ever going to be (barring outside influence).  Every second that object travels, it slows down, until finally, it hits the ground.  Leads are the same way.  The moment in time that a consumer expresses interest is also their ‘maximum’ expression of interest.  Every second that goes by they forget why they expressed interest or to whom it was expressed.  At some point, that consumer hits the ground and that lead is considered dead. 

Recently, DoublePositive released an updated version of its highly sophisticated call center toolkit which allows near seamless integration with almost any call center around – regardless of its technological affiliations.  In doing so, DoublePositive has reached a milestone that I am sure no other marketing firm can claim.  Since the release of this new technology the average time it takes for DoublePositive to contact a genuinely interested consumer is 3.54 seconds.  Yes, that seconds.  That means that between the time a consumer decides they want to talk to someone about refinancing their house and the time they actually begin that process is, on average, 3.54 seconds.  It is probably taking you longer to read this sentence that it is for us to contact a consumer that just expressed interest in one of our products.  If you want to talk more about real time lead flow contact me at s y e d @ d o u b l e p o s i t i v e . c o m.