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Why Aren’t Your Driver Leads Converting?

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There are a myriad of possible reasons a lead may not work out for you, but from all of our dealings with fleets over the years we’ve come up with a couple major reasons or roadblocks as to why your driver leads aren’t converting.
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Roadblocks to Converting Prospective Drivers

1. The Driver Isn’t Qualified to Drive for Your Fleet

Every fleet is different, with its own unique strengths, weaknesses, and characteristics. This is one of the many factors that make truck driver recruiting so difficult. What works for your fleet may not work for another, and vice versa. This is why it is so critical to become as targeted as possible…as early as possible in your driver recruiting process.
Eliminating drivers who do not meet the criteria necessary (whether that be driver experience, certifications, etc.) right off the bat saves you time, money, and avoids the inevitable headache of recruiters becoming bogged down or overwhelmed with slews of drivers you will never hire.

2. You’re Unable to Contact the Prospective Driver

A lead is no good if your team isn’t able to do anything with that lead. The unfortunate truth is that many trucking fleets continue to have a huge number of leads that just get forgotten about. Driver recruiters are under pressure to make every second and every call count, so if they aren’t able to connect with a lead on the first attempt, that lead is tossed to the side and quickly grows cold.
This isn’t all your recruiters’ fault either. It’s incredibly difficult to stay on top of the constantly growing lead flow they are supplied with, let alone go back and follow-up with leads they weren’t able to contact. You need to do all you can to give your team the tools and help they need to alleviate the pressure on your recruiters and get the most out of all of your leads before they grow cold.

How Your Fleet Can Overcome These Driver Recruiting Roadblocks

These two issues are at the heart of most fleets’ driver recruiting problems. The key is to find a way to address these problems and become more efficient in your recruiting approach. We find that the best way to overcome these roadblocks is taking these three steps.

  • Optimize – Make sure your recruiters are only talking to quality prospects.
  • Scale – Once you’ve identified the best drivers for your fleet, find ways to talk to more of them.
  • Accelerate – Connect with quality prospective drivers faster.

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Optimize Your Fleet’s Recruiting

 
One of the biggest obstacles recruiters find themselves facing is the sheer amount of leads they are tasked with pursuing. There are only so many hours in the day, and even the best driver recruiters can’t get to every single lead when more leads are constantly being added to their list.
You have to make sure that your recruiters’ time isn’t being wasted. Every call they make, every lead they pursue should be a genuine and quality lead. It’s a hard enough job as it is without adding countless leads that have absolutely no chance of converting for you.
A great way to optimize your driver recruiters’ time is through the use of knock-out questions or disqualification codes. This will allow you to eliminate unqualified leads before time and energy is wasted on them.
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Common Reasons Prospective Drivers are Disqualified:

  • Denied due to previous work history
  • Incompatible home time expectations
  • Denied for poor driving record
  • Lack of experience
  • Unable to contact
  • Out of area
  • Local or LTL only

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You can also add fleet specific knock-out questions (because as we touched on before your fleet is unique and has different needs than others) to address specific requirements you have. By adding knock-out questions to address these areas you effectively optimize your recruiting process. This allows you to eliminate drivers with these common stumbling blocks and make sure that the drivers your recruiters do speak with on the phone are qualified.
Once a quality prospect is on the phone with a recruiter it is vital that your recruiters are providing adequate information, and having quality interactions with the driver. If you’d like some tips on how your driver recruiters can improve their conversations with prospective drivers you can check out the FRAME technique we discussed in Why Are Your Truck Driver Recruiters Failing?
Optimizing your recruiting process is two-fold: make the best use of your driver recruiters’ time, and make sure you’re only spending time and energy on quality prospective drivers.
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Scale Your Efforts to Talk to More Quality Drivers

 
After you’re successfully able to optimize your process with knock-out questions and make the most of your driver recruiters’ time, you need to take advantage of any time you’ve freed up by eliminating unqualified prospects and get your recruiters in touch with more quality drivers. This means you need to supply them with more qualified leads. Where can you find those?
Chances are you already have them. The second roadblock facing fleets I mentioned is not being able to contact a lead. The biggest issue fleets seem to have is it’s just too hard, if not impossible, for them to reach all of the leads they generate in a timely fashion.
If you find yourself struggling to contact your leads there are a few things you can try.

  • If possible, hire more recruiters to field calls.
  • Dedicate specific recruiters to handle your inbound calls.
  • Use a 3rd party service to assist you in contacting your generated leads.

For many, the first option of hiring more recruiters just isn’t feasible. The second option of assigning recruiters to inbound calls to make sure no incoming lead is ever missed is maybe more doable, but this too can be hard to manage and scale.
The final option is to lean on a 3rd party for help. Randall-Reilly offers LeadConnect as a service to help cut down on response time and give fleets the ability to reach all of their leads. Whether you choose to hire more recruiters, dedicate specific recruiters to handling inbound calls, or go with a 3rd party option like LeadConnect, the key is that you must do all you can to engage with leads in meaningful conversations that help you achieve your recruiting goals.
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Accelerate Your Process and Reach Prospects Faster

 
The final step to get more conversions out of your recruiting is to accelerate your process. You have to contact the quality leads you’ve generated fast, before they go cold. This is where things can get dicey. Research shows that after only 5 minutes the likelihood of contacting a lead drops exponentially.
Speed to Contact in Minutes

Source: Lead Response Management

You may think contacting leads that quickly is impossible, and maybe it is for your fleet; but whatever you can do to shrink the window of time it takes for you to contact a lead the better off you are. Consider this, according to the same research, those who were able to contact leads within 10 minutes were able to increase the rate of contact by 900%!

Increase in Contact Rate

Source: Lead Response Management

The problem is you more than likely don’t have the manpower or budget to accomplish the feat of contacting every lead within that magic window. Beyond direct recruiter phone calls what can you do to help improve your contact rates?

Having a real live person field your calls is always the best option available to you, but short of that, setting up some automation that utilize a combination of texts, emails, and voicemails can also help you establish contact as quickly as possible.
Even if you don’t have the manpower to have a live recruiter contact every lead as it comes in, if you use some combination of texting, emails, or voicemails you can still strike while the iron is hot and open a line of communication. Remember, you have just five minutes before your chances at reaching a lead begin to drop.
Live conversations are great, but with the numbers involved it’s simply impossible for most fleets to have a live recruiter contact every single new lead…especially if we’re talking about within five minutes. But setting up automated and customized texts, emails, and voicemails is something pretty much any fleet can do. These options allow you to reach out to viable leads quickly and again helps free up your recruiters’ time to talk with drivers who are on the line and ready to talk.
Recruiting Automation System
If you’re not sure where to begin in this process, LeadConnect could be a viable option for you.

How Does LeadConnect Work?

Leads
LeadConnect can get started with any lists, partial applications, or stale leads you may have; or by jumping right in and fielding your incoming driver leads in real-time.
Text Messaging
An automatic text is sent to the driver from a number local to their location letting them know they are about to receive a call.
Automated Calls
The system calls the driver and confirms they are on the line. From there you have two options:

  • Option A:LeadConnect Agent
    A live agent pre-qualifies the driver before transferring the live call to your recruiters.
  • Option B: Automated Platform
    The LeadConnect platform connects the prospect directly to your recruiters once they are on the line.

Does LeadConnect Really Work?

We worked with a client to implement a LeadConnect campaign to help them take advantage of their generated leads. The missed call percentage dropped from 66% to just 25%. In addition to that their lead to hire ratio dropped from 91:1 to 37:1.
Case Study Results
The cut in missed call percentage and drop in lead to hire ratio means that not only did LeadConnect help put the fleet in contact with more of their leads faster, but it also helped them convert more of those leads…and isn’t that the point?
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Contact Efficiency Can Turn Your Recruiting Around

 
You worked hard to get the leads you have. Why work that hard, not to mention pay for all those leads, and fail to take advantage of them? As I pointed out earlier, in the end this whole thing comes down to efficiency. It’s all about figuring out how you can better utilize your recruiters’ time, effectively scale your techniques, and reach and convert more leads faster.
Randall-Reilly has been involved in the world of driver recruiting for decades. If you need help getting started or want to learn more about LeadConnect one of our associates would be happy to help. But the bottom line is, whether you take advantage of the experience and services Randall-Reilly has to offer or not, you should strive to build your driver recruiting around efficiency. More specifically:

  • Optimize – Make sure your recruiters are only talking to quality drivers.
  • Scale – Once you’ve identified the best drivers for your fleet, find ways to talk to more of them
  • Accelerate – Connect with qualified prospective drivers faster

Do these three things and you can overcome recruiting roadblocks, increase your recruiting efficiency, and improve your overall recruiting results.
 

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Do you need to shorten response time and increase lead closes?

LeadConnect can help.

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LeadConnect can help.

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LeadConnect can help.

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