Both addiction lead generation and mental health lead generation play a vital role in the success of treatment centers across the country. Whether a recovery operation is organically generating leads or purchasing third party leads, achieving an acceptable cost per acquisition per admission is critical to the financial well-being of a treatment center organization. When lead conversions don’t occur as expected the first thing that get blamed is usually the leads.

Here’s five top reasons why addiction lead generation can fail and you might be surprised as to what ranks as the top 2.

Reason #1: The Sales Admissions Team Is Being Run Too Loose

Many admissions teams consist of non-sales people in recovery operating in very loose call center environments with minimal oversight, untrained in call handling, no scripts, and no controlled follow-up procedures. While addiction leads do vary in quality, many recovery operations erroneous blame the leads when the problem primarily exists within a slack admissions team. With the acquisition cost per lead and admit increasing substantially due to more competition entering the marketing place, admission teams have to be managed daily with tight precision.

Reason #2: The Wrong People Are Working The Leads

Within the addiction and mental health industry there are primarily 2 type of leads. Outreach or referent leads, and media sourced leads. To compete in the recovery market place today, both are required. For an admissions team, working with each type of lead requires a managed approach and minimum skill level. Typically media sourced leads are more difficult to close due to their nature of being a cold inbound lead type. It’s common for low skilled or inexperienced admissions sales people to blame the leads first especially if they have primarily worked with outreach or referent type leads. Media sourced leads require specific and controlled call handling by a well-trained call center admissions team otherwise admit cost per acquisition will be prohibitive.

Reason #3: Sales Management System Has Not Been Properly Implemented

Going along with running a loose admissions team is the lack of technical controls and methodologies which are provided through a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. And it is not just about implementing these controls, but how you structure them within an interdepartmental operation. A CRM implementation must provide for effective follow-up control and well as eliminate lead rot otherwise lead burning will occur and this will directly drive up admit cost per acquisition.

Reason #4: Call Management System Has Not Been Properly Implemented

How many addiction and mental health call centers are being run with an outdated PBX hunt group phone technology or a low end cloud based VOIP platform like Kall8.com or RingCentral.com. Actually, many! High volume lead generation cannot effectively be implemented over these simple systems. Deploying a high volume lead generation system requires sophisticated call management and tracking platforms otherwise a recovery operation will miss calls and burned admissions leads, consequently experience unacceptable admit cost per acquisition.

Reason #5: Media Channel/Lead Source Tracking Analysis Is Not Being Conducted

In other words, the lead source is bad. But you truly won’t know for sure unless  you have implemented detailed lead tracking analytics. With so many variables that could be the cause as previously stated in the top 4 reasons, identifying the actual root cause is not always obvious. This is why media channel and lead source analysis must be conducted in conjunction with sales analysis. Key Performing Indicators (KPI), otherwise known as critical numbers, must be assessed. Part of this assessment includes determining the number of leads generated within a specific lead channel in comparison to verification of benefits (VOB) run. Next, this value has to be compared to other media channels as well as individual sales performance because lower converting sales representatives could have worked these leads as opposed to high converting treatment consultants working other media channel lead types.

With that said, the scope of lead tracking analysis extends far beyond this blog, but the primary message to get here is simply understanding that thorough analysis must be applied to lead generation otherwise an addiction and mental health treatment center could be at the mercy of an under-performing sales team chanting the mantra that the leads are bad. And if your team leaders and supervisors are buying into that belief you may have even bigger challenges possibly.

In Summary

Addiction lead generation and mental health lead generation are certainly here to stay with advent of rapid growth experienced within addiction and mental health industry. In order to successfully compete, recovery operations have no choice but to embrace and maximize their potential with this direct response form of demand generation. A healthy blend of internal lead generation and third party lead generation is an ideal solution within today’s recovery market. If implemented properly this approach can scale an operation effectively and drive revenue for years to come.

Blog Writer: Anthony D. Wolf