USA Financial increases qualified leads more than 50 percent through closed-loop marketing strategy
The CompanyUSA Financial Marketing® is an independent marketing organization that wholesales annuities and life insurance, and provides independent financial advisors marketing and financial advisor tools.
The Challenge
USA Financial’s marketing team was delivering hundreds of leads to sales every month, but it was difficult to determine whether the leads were good quality. The marketing technologies USA Financial employed provided no insight into its marketing programs’ effectiveness or the ROI of its marketing programs, nor were they integrated with sales technologies. The ongoing result was frustration within both marketing and sales. Intense comprehensive review found that the sales team was spending too much time with prospects, trying to determine whether or not they were qualified leads, and most of the prospects marketing turned over to sales were ultimately not converting into qualified opportunities.
“Not only was this overwhelming to our sales reps, but it was very frustrating as well,” said Raeanne Thompson, vice president, marketing services at USA Financial “Our reps were essentially searching for a needle in a haystack and felt like they were spinning their wheels.
Since USA Financial has a highly targeted client base and couldn’t work with every financial advisor who expressed interest in its solution, it needed a lead-qualification process to keep sales from getting inundated with unqualified leads and to help the marketing team better understand the ROI of its marketing programs.
The Solution
USA Financial decided to take a process-oriented approach that, combined with the proper marketing technology, would allow it to understand each marketing activity’s exact value. It chose The Annuitas Group to help it build a lead-management process. Working with The Annuitas Group, USA Financial then implemented the new lead-management process in Silverpop's marketing automation solution.
To better ensure sales productivity and efficiency, it was important to disqualify prospects that didn’t meet certain criteria before the leads reached the sales force. Using survey functionality, USA Financial began to ask incoming prospects qualifying questions that captured demographic data (e.g., revenue, type of advisor and manner of insurance being written) to determine if a lead was qualified. As each lead came in, the lead score would tell USA Financial whether the lead should be disqualified, put into a nurture program, or routed to sales automatically through integration with Salesforce.com. Sales was then able to feed reporting data back into Silverpop's solution. With the help of Silverpop and The Annuitas Group, USA Financial implemented this entire “closed loop” system in just a few months.
“Prior to implementing our process with Silverpop, there was little opportunity to measure the effectiveness of our marketing programs,” Thompson said. “Now we can track leads in our pipeline and the impact of our marketing programs in driving those leads. All of the information we need is readily available for us to analyze.”
The Results
Today, marketing is providing more qualified leads to sales, and the sales pipeline has increased by more than 50 percent. Additionally, USA Financial is able to understand the value of each marketing activity.
By combining The Annuitas Group process implementation with Silverpop’s solution, USA Financial has been able to refine and maximize the roles and scope of its marketing and sales teams. “Sales focuses on closing deals, and marketing zeroes in on delivering sales the highest-quality leads,” Thompson said. “Because sales appreciates the value of the leads we are now delivering, the relationship between marketing and sales has become much more collaborative.”
In addition, using the Silverpop solution enabled USA Financial to enjoy greater success at its monthly Discovery Day events, a major conversion driver in which potential clients get hands-on training in USA Financial’s products and services. “There is a 70 percent likelihood that once a financial advisor attends our Discovery Day events, the advisor will engage with USA Financial and implement the strategies and services we provide,” Thompson said. “Because we are engaging with much more highly qualified advisors, the number of qualified Discover Day attendees has increased significantly, which has a considerable positive impact on our outcome.”
Finally, the marketing team can now accurately pinpoint the value of its marketing expenditures. “Before, we would spend thousands of dollars to launch a program and not know how effective it was,” Thompson said. “Today, we can monitor success and performance of our campaigns. This is especially important as we can move forward with the marketing that provides us the most ‘bang for the buck.’”
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