Kasra Dash: So you have got your first inquiry and, or actually you might have had multiple inquiries by now, and you are now responding to the leads. Obviously myself, I have got a lot of experience, I have trained up a team on actually this exact process. So I have got a few questions for you. What should your first message to a lead look like? Should you have loads of details going back and forth, should you keep it simple, what are you looking at personally?

James Dooley: Instead of the first message, it is just kind of grabbing the traction to make certain you are responding to say “thanks a lot, I have received your lead” and just asking a very simple question for them to respond back to your email. So in my opinion it is about the service of responding as quickly as possible. We did a lot of data studies and we showed that if people started to respond to a lead, literally if they did not respond for a day, it was pretty much non existent. If they responded within an hour it became like 10x better response than responding within the day. If it was within 30 minutes it was a lot better and basically more and more as the time reduced down, as you were responding to those leads faster you got much higher conversion. So in my opinion for me if I am dealing with any company, I am generating them leads or we are getting leads ourself, we need to be responding as fast as possible. So it is about the response time and then physically it is a very simple message, not having links or videos or anything in there. A plain text “thanks a lot for the inquiry, please can you give us this bit of information”. It is the very simple response just asking them for something just so then you have got the communication going back and forth on email. Why that first email sometimes, the first email when you are responding, it might go into their spam or into their junk because you have never sent them an email before. That is why I like it being plain text. If you start having it where it has got images or videos or links through to their website, all that increases the chances of it going into junk or spam. So I just want a plain text very simple response as soon as possible when responding to leads.

Kasra Dash: So when responding to the first inquiry that has come through, very super plain, super plain email. Would you have like a footer template, like with for example my picture?

James Dooley: So you would not have that at all. On the first email I am going back with I am just literally a plain text “thanks a lot for the inquiry” and then I am asking them a question. So the question could be when are you looking to have these works done, can you give me more information about this, can you send me some photos with regards to what you are inquiring about. So you are kind of super plain email and you are just striking a conversation with exactly that. I am just prompting that fast response. “Wow that was impressive how quickly they responded, it is unique specifically to them” and asking them a question. And it has to be an open ended question. You need them to respond back to you. And then after that, so once you have inboxed and they have responded, they are going like the safe senders list from there and then from there.

Kasra Dash: So then obviously right now you are talking a lot about email but what should you be replying back to with. Should you always be replying back to email or would you potentially sometimes send them an SMS. I know WhatsApp is pretty big right now, or potentially even phone them.

James Dooley: Yeah for sure. I mean it completely depends on the niche. So if I am an emergency locksmith and someone does fill in a form online, I am ringing them straight away because they are not going to be waiting for an email to come back. They are wanting to speak to someone, they are locked out the car or they are locked out the house. But some people, if they are wanting information and data, it might be better via email that it goes back and forth. At these times, within the call centre what they will do is they will email but then they will also WhatsApp or text to say “when is the best time to call, do you want a call”. You are asking them do they want to pick up the phone and speak to someone. If they do they can book in a call with the right engineer or the right mortgage broker or the right financial advisor or it could be the business owner or whoever it could be, the surveyor, whoever, what department needs to speak to them. But normally prior to speaking to them I like to get the information ideally on an email or WhatsApp can work, but I would like to get the information to pass it to the right person who can then speak to them within whatever company that they are dealing with.

Kasra Dash: So another question, and you have kind of went over this already, but how quickly should I be responding to leads.

James Dooley: So the faster the better. Prime example, we do a little bit of lead generation in the financial sector. We have got KPIs set in place that we want to respond within 23 seconds. So that is like ridiculously fast. I am not saying that every business can do that, but that is the ideal. So the closer you can get, the faster, as soon as the inquiry comes in, the faster you respond the better the chances are of converting that job. Sometimes we decline clients and sometimes a business owner might come to us and say that they are the ones that are going doing, let us say loft insulation or installing artificial grass in a garden, and they are the ones that are going doing it. Then at night they come back and then they try to do the emails and the quotes and they might not have responded for six or seven hours. That affects my inquiries that I am sending to that company because they are not responding fast enough. So we might end up saying “look, we are going to have to send these to a company that is going to respond faster to the lead”. The answer to your question is the faster you can respond to the inquiry and get that conversation going, the better that it is. Because they might fill that form in or inquire with three or four different companies and generally speaking once they have had that interaction with the first company they are going “wow, these are good” and they are going back and forth, they are getting the photos that they might need or they are getting the information that they might need. The faster, the better.

Kasra Dash: Right, OK. And then let us say for example for some of the more established businesses that this might be an issue, how should I decide which leads to respond to.

James Dooley: So that is a great question. If you do not work in a certain area and it goes out of your area, then you can just delete the inquiry if needs be. But generally speaking you want to try and deal with a company that you are generating leads for that one, they do the service that the person that is inquiring is asking for, and two, it is in the area of where they are kind of inquiring, and then hopefully then you go “yeah this is a perfect lead for them”. If it is not, this is where it definitely poses a problem if you are paying per lead and then you are getting what I class as being unqualified leads. Well that is a problem. I am paying 50, 60, 80, 100 for a lead that is not really a service or a product of what I do and it is outside of my geo location of where I cover. Well that is not good. But if you are working with let us say someone like FatRank that do not charge you for the leads and it is a product that you do not do, if you spoke to one of the sales representatives and said “look, you are generating me a lot of leads for this, we do not do it, we only do that”, if they say “well look, this is the same, it is the same search for this and this, you are going to get some”, at that point if it is one that you cannot convert you either delete or FatRank might decide to send on to another company that might be able to deal with that inquiry.

Kasra Dash: Right, OK. And then is it normal for all leads to reply back to you. There is a lot of people that say like “why have I not heard back from this customer”.

James Dooley: So that is a great question and I do not know why this is but generally speaking 50% of leads that get generated online you do not get a response from. That goes across all industries. Now we are in over 500 different industries and still to this day it is the bane of my life of being “why has someone inquired and you responded within 2 minutes and then they do not end up responding back to you” and you are like, you have just inquired. And you are saying you want loft insulation and we are saying “not a problem, can you send us a picture of your loft” and they do not respond. And you are like why have you just inquired. It could be bots, it could be competitors seeing who you are, it could be that it does go into the spam and it does not get sent through to them. This is why sometimes a follow up with regards to maybe a WhatsApp or a text or a phone call if they do not respond in email could be worth it because they might go “well they have not responded, they are a bad client”. Their inbox might have declined it, it might not even have gone into the junk or the spam, or it could have gone in the junk and spam and it has been lost. So for that reason this is why a follow up is important with a second email or with a text, a WhatsApp or a phone call. But yes, even when you do everything from a text, a WhatsApp, an email, call, sometimes they just, the number is incorrect, the email is not there and it is just like wow. So generally speaking when you are looking to purchase leads, 50% you are not even going to get hold of and then normally if you have got a good lead generator, a good lead generator, 50% of the 50% you get hold of normally are interested in exactly what you sell. So you are down to one in four or 25%. And then it then comes down to price. So you are up against a few of the others. Generally speaking, around, it does vary from niche to niche, about 10 to 15% of cold web leads would turn into an order.

Kasra Dash: Right, OK. And then you are obviously a really big fan of this, you have literally got the entire team trained up on this, but for anybody that does not know, what is one click response and how can it help me.

James Dooley: One click response is input. It is just about, again it just comes back down to speed. So you have got to be trying to get your systems and processes in place that people ask the same questions. So if you are brilliant at fitting grass in gardens, well generally speaking they might start saying “is it dog friendly”, they might start asking “what sub base is needed”, “can I install it on top of this”. So if you are ready for those questions and you have got one click responses to them and you have got all your frequently asked questions in place, again the response is so quick, you are getting them from a cold web lead and then filling it in, to answering all their questions, into being “wow, these know everything, what I am going to ask and they are actually answering it”. Once you have got like a one click response and a really nice email set up to explain everything with regards to the sub bases or whatever it could be like the what is, the mortgage rates, where is the best lender. It could be anything, depending on the niche. The one click response is to give that service, is key.

Kasra Dash: Yeah for sure. And then obviously at FatRank we do exclusive leads. Can you just tell us a little bit more about what exclusive leads are and why you prefer that model as opposed to cost per lead model.

James Dooley: So in my opinion exclusive leads are very important because if you are not getting exclusive leads that means that that inquiry is being sent to 5 or 10 different companies. Generally speaking then it is a race to the bottom on price because you are up against all your competitors that are also getting that exact same lead and at that point, majority of people, they might not go with the cheapest price, they will like to say they go with best value but normally it is the cheapest price. So at that point then you are at a race to the bottom. Where an exclusive lead, you are the only one that is getting the lead. Now, the customer might fill in a form on several different websites so they still might be looking for different prices, but if you can get that service and respond to them very quickly and you are the only one that is getting it exclusively from the lead generation site of where it has been sent from, your conversion rate is so much higher and you can be charging the prices that you think is fair and not be in a race to the bottom on price.

Kasra Dash: So for any business owners that do want exclusive leads, where should they go.

James Dooley: So FatRank has got an exclusive lead generation model. If you head on over to FatRank.com and then go to the forward slash contact us page and then what you can then turn around and do is fill in your form, explain the industry that you are in and the demographic of where you work. It is a completely zero risk supply of inquiries. So you do not pay anything for SEO, for PPC, for social media. You only pay on converted jobs. Big caveat to this is one of the big, like this video here is talking about the response time of leads. This is one of the biggest questions that we want to be asking you. If you are not going to be able to respond to the inquiries and it is going to take two or three hours to respond, we are probably not going to work with you because the response time of the lead is very important. And because you are responding very slowly, it might end up meaning that our leads that we are generating, which could be a quality lead, because of your response times you are not converting it and for that reason we might not want to work with yourself as the company that is taking the leads in. So head on over to FatRank.com, see whether you qualify. If you are in an industry that we can generate leads for, then like you said it is an only pay on converted jobs, but something we are looking for is the response times of those leads that we are generating. It has to be fast to generate that service that the person that is inquiring will go “yes, I want to work with this company”.