How to Prioritize Leads Using Phone Metadata
Vetting and prioritizing leads is an important exercise for any marketing or sales team. For marketers, vetting leads allow you to assess lead quality and the value of the leads you purchased. More importantly, this gives you the knowledge of whether you should buy leads from that source again. For sales representatives or call center agents, the value of vetting leads is obvious: less time wasted on leads that have a low or no probability of conversion. But what about lead prioritization? How do we rearrange the order of leads so more time is spent on the leads with the highest chance of conversion?
An effective method for prioritizing leads is to use phone metadata. What is phone metadata? A good example is the line type of a phone number. A number could be indicated as a mobile, landline, or toll-free line type. Using metadata like line type, lead prioritization for agents becomes much easier.
Here are some ways that we see customers utilize phone metadata in order to prioritize leads:
Line Type: Indicates whether a number is a landline, mobile, fixed (usually associated with a business) or non-fixed VoIP (including Google Voice or Skype), a premium number, or a toll-free number.
We typically see customers utilize line type to stack-rank leads based on an order like the following:
- Mobile
- Fixed VoIP
- Landline
- Non-Fixed VoIP
- Toll-Free, Premium, Voicemail, Other
The stack ranking will depend on the nature of the leads you’re trying to reach out to. For example, if you’re targeting business, it’s best to prioritize Fixed VoIP lines first.
Country Code: Indicates which country the phone number originates from.
We typically see customers using country code as a top-of-funnel prioritization for dispersing leads to international teams.
Validity: Is the phone number valid?
Validity is an excellent way to sift out noise from your lead queue and not waste an agent’s time.
Commercial Flag: Does the phone number belong to a business?
We see customers using the commercial flag when they are specifically targeting business leads, surfacing all leads with this type of phone line to the top of the queue.
Primary Owner: Who does the phone number belong to?
We see customers use the primary owner name as a corroboration of the lead data that already exists. If there’s a match, that’s a high quality lead. If there’s a mismatch, the person on the other end of the line may not be the person the agent thinks.
Associated People: Who are people associated with the primary owner?
We see customers use associated people to gain a better understanding of who may be in the household, find additional leads, and properly address prospects on the phone when someone other than the lead may answer thereby increasing trust in the caller.
Alternate Phone Numbers: What are alternate phone numbers associated with the primary owner?
We see customers utilize alternate phone numbers to augment their outreach efforts when the primary phone number may not be available.
Current & Historical Addresses: What are current and historical addresses associated with the primary owner?
Addresses can help prioritize leads for teams in different geographies. We also see that accurate address information is typically the key field used to find supplemental information. For example, if a marketer is targeting a certain demographic, they may use the address to understand the household information based on census information.
Are you looking to start increasing conversion through lead prioritization? Talk to Trestle about how to get started.