Further uses carefully curated questions and guided steps to provide you with the best quality leads with as much information included and with all the context we can gather. This approach takes a bit of time, and we push the leads to your CRM 6+ minutes after the lead was created within Further tools. Those 6+ minutes are needed for us to verify all the information leads have provided and to try to capture any additional information that may be relevant. This includes if the leads are financially qualified, if they want to schedule a tour, if they have additional questions. There is also an additional delay if Messaging Assistant (MA) is active for your community because we allow additional time for the ongoing conversation so we can provide you with a complete picture of the lead, very similar to what you would expect to get from your sales team.

However, we understand that some organizations prefer a very short speed to lead, and having a 6+ minute delay from the lead creation to seeing that lead in the CRM is just too much. For those users, we created a feature called "Instant Lead Processing", where we disregard many of our deeper validations and perform the most important ones which ensure that the lead contact information is accurate. With this feature ON, the leads should appear in your CRM one minute after the lead creation. 

In this article, we'll briefly go over some of the benefits and drawbacks of Instant Lead Processing. 

Benefits and Drawbacks

Instant Lead Processing streamlines the process of a lead showing up for your sales team. While this approach may seem good, as it allows for a faster connection with the lead, it comes with certain drawbacks.

First, let's outline that for every community that has Messaging ON, we are sending automated Campaign Messages, customized for your community.  Because the first message goes out minutes after lead creation, we reach out to the prospect as soon as they finish interaction with Further tools. 

Now to the drawbacks of Instant Lead Processing:

1. Incomplete Data Capture: Engaging with prospects instantly may result in missing out on valuable information that could be gathered through ongoing conversations. This usually includes potential tour information and checking the lead's financial status (if they are financially qualified for your community). This can be easily shown through numbers. 

When working with prospects, Further tools guide them by gathering financial data that identifies whether the prospects are financially qualified for the community. This is done through questions that happen after the lead creation and CRM submission. If a prospect takes longer to answer, it is possible that we will not be able to capture that data and the lead will appear as financially qualified when in reality, they are not. This would happen to approximately 10% of financially unqualified leads - 10% of financially unqualified leads would appear financially qualified and Further would push the lead to the CRM before we capture the financial data. During 2023, Further marked 115,851 leads as financially unqualified. Of those leads, 12,369 prospects answered financial questions more than 2 minutes after the "lead" was created and submitted to the community.  This means they were submitted without being marked as financially unqualified. 

The most common actions taken by prospects are looking at Pricing and then Schedule A Tour. If the prospect takes more time to go from Pricing to Schedule A Tour, the lead may be submitted to the CRM without indicating that a tour was requested. This would happen to approximately 18% of prospects who looked at Pricing and then went to Schedule a Tour. During 2023, 127,789 Further leads looked at Pricing and then Schedule A Tour. Out of those leads, 23,223 prospects took more than 2 minutes from lead creation to scheduling a tour, which means they were submitted to the community without the tour information.

2. Risk of Overwhelm: Instantly engaging with prospects requires a rapid response mechanism, which can strain resources and overwhelm your sales or support team, especially during peak times. Our automated systems assist with this, working properly even when multiple leads are coming in simultaneously. 

3. Potential for Miscommunication: If you have Instant Lead Processing and Messaging on, it is possible that our automated messages and your sales team's outreach will duplicate messages, confusing and potentially annoying the prospect.