According to BusinessWeek BankRate is looking to sell 5-year notes to raise $280m to acquire NetQuote.

Excerpt:

“BANKRATE INC., the online consumer personal finance network, may sell $280 million of five-year notes to help pay for the acquisition of NetQuote Inc. and CreditCards.com Inc., according to a person familiar with the transaction. Jeffries & Co. and RBC Capital Markets are managing the offering of notes, which are non-callable for three years and may be rated B2 by Moody’s and B by S&P, the person said.”

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The face of lead generation is changing, in my opinion. Now, I guess at face value that is pretty obvious statement, but I think it is becoming a little clearer on how it is changing.

I hesitate to make a big deal out of this, but I think it is worth a post that simply notices that the change is happening. Years ago we discussed how the lead generation process needed to change and how the consumer needed to be better educated throughout the process. We also pondered how that would happen. The obvious statements were made that more content needed to be available to the consumer, but many of us could never precisely define how the process should change any further then that. The emergence of Mint.com, BillShrink, Comparison Ads, and many others gave more insight into how that content would be defined. These sites showed us that the content that we claimed the user needed did not specifically need to be paragraphs of written words, but rather personal financial content and recommendations. These sites created tools for the consumer to use and to interpret their own financial content and then recommend money saving products and services.

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In general, the ability to return leads is a safe guard put in place by lead sellers, or demanded by lead buyers, that allows for a certain level of leeway when paying for “leads”.

The acceptable reasons for a lead to be returned are fairly specific and generally boils down to the definition of a “lead”. Quickly, what is a lead? For some reason this definition is not completely clear to most. While it would seem a very simple question. When you throw in the topic of returns or the payment for qualified leads, it gets a little blurred. A lead is a person that has indicated interest in a product or service by requesting to be contacted through a inquiry form online or via a number of other sources.

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This week is going to be a busy one for me. I will be heading to the Career College Association (CCA) conference in Las Vegas, which is expected to keep me away from blogging on LeadCritic for this week, but I did want to make two shameless plugs before I go.

First, the LeadCritic Lead Generation Directory is filling up fast, so take a minute to get your company listed asap.

Second, a little over a year ago the Lead Buyer Network was launched and just the other day it surpassed 500 members. When I launched the network it was intended to be a place for “Lead Buyers” to network – as if the description was clear enough -  but as usual, and I knew this when I launched the site, the actual lead buyers did not join. Over time they lead buyers did join and they benefited from being able to see what types of wholesale offers exist in the marketplace. When I created the site it was my intention to turn it into a traditional lead generation industry forum and that is what I am planning on doing in the next few months. What does this mean for you? It means that if you are not a member, you should join now before it the transition takes place. The current members of the Lead Buyer Network will be given access to private forums, so sign up before I make the switch, otherwise don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Otherwise, have a great week and if I come across some worthwhile lead generation news and opinion at CCA, I will be sure to post here.

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The lead generation space has been through a number of ups and downs in the last 10 years. Each vertical seems to have gone through or is going through some level of scrutiny and lead generation methods have evolved because of it. Lead buyers have evolved too and their lead management processes have improved tremendously over the last 5-6 years. Much of this improvement is due to the development of  lead management systems like Leads360 and others. For this call I had the pleasure of speaking with Nick Hedges of Leads360. We discussed the comparisons between the mortgage vertical and the EDU vertical, techniques that buyers from each vertical can learn from one another and a host of lead management tips that buyers from any vertical will find beneficial.

Take a listen below.

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A week after my conversation with BillShrink CEO, Peter Pham, quietly steps down as CEO. Late Friday, around 5pm, Peter posted this article announcing that he would be moving on to pursue his entrepreneurial ambitions.

At BillShrink Peter lead the charge that helped drive to BillShrink to become a leader in the space. He will now be joining his mentor, Gus Tai at Trinity Ventures as an Entrepreneur in Residence.

Excerpt from his post:

During my tenure as CEO, we’ve built a truly talented 22 person team, launched six amazing verticals, had a national ad campaign with T-Mobile behind us (best TV commercials EVER), partnership with WalMart, and continued to help hundreds of thousands of people a month save money in a tough time in our economy. Along with the humbling attention we’ve gotten from everyone, I feel privileged to have been part of all this great company. It felt like yesterday that Schwark, Samir and I were working out of a 200-square foot office being incubated by Bessemer Venture Partners. It was an incredible experience to work with both of them.

I wish Peter good luck with his new venture and I look forward to hearing what what comes of it.

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Big news out of the largest lead generation scandal in history.

For back story on the case between LG Technologies and Edward Shin, Chris Smith and others please read the following articles, starting with this one.

It was released recently that Edward Shin, the main defendant of the charges made by LG Technologies switches his pleas to GUILTY. According to the minutes made available through Riverside Court house Shin has switched is plea, waives his right to a jury trial, waives his right to cross examine the witnesses and waives his right against self incrementation.

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Has you know I have mentioned BillShrink a number of times here on this blog and consider myself a fan of the company and how they have introduced a new way to generate leads.

With that in mind I wanted to get Peter Pham, the CEO of BillShrink, on the phone to discuss the company and their marketing strategy. As you also know the name “Carpool Confessions of a Lead Gen Pro” comes from the fact that I have these calls to and from work. They are casual calls that replicate a typical call I may have with my industry peers. This call was literally took place while both Peter and I were driving from work and unfortunately the sound quality on this recording is pretty bad. I couldn’t do much about it, but nevertheless I wanted to go ahead and post it. I think there is still some very interesting information about how BillShrink acquires their data, what their future plans are for entering new verticals and how they acquire their traffic.

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Press Release:

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y., May 18 /PRNewswire/ — A federal antitrust complaint was filed by BanxCorp against LendingTree LLC, a subsidiary of Tree.com, Inc. (Nasdaq: TREE), for engaging in an unlawful per se horizontal market division and customer allocation agreement, and a per se horizontal price fixing agreement with competitors.

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There has been a ton of talk about call service technologies over the last year and additionally the importance of speed-to-contact. With that in mind I wanted to get an old friend on the phone on my way home from work and talk about what he has got going on.

For this Carpool Confessions episode I get the chance to speak with Beau Bratton, founder of Consumer Transfer about their product that undoubtedly increase your speed-to-contact with out implementing a 3rd party call center. Very cool stuff and is definitely worth a listen

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Finally, the LeadCritic Business Directory has been updated to something a little more official!

When I initially created the directory a year ago I envisioned something much different then what was created, however I simply did not have the time build out anything more then the current pages. Not much has changed with regards to my time, however I think the format that has been added will do the job just fine. I have added a number of different categories to start, including an industry blog category for those of you with your own lead generation blogs.

The current listings will be removed by the end of the month, so please add your listing prior to the pages being removed!

If you have any questions please feel free to reach out to me via the contact form.

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5 years ago the major lead gen players were bank rolling the mortgage vertical by leaps and bounds over any other vertical. EDU was making a strong charge, debt was making a showing and insurance has always been a solid money making vertical, but overall the mortgage was the name of the game. Since then it has taken a huge decline in favor and was in some respects replaced with the EDU vertical.

I have mentioned this before, but we are lucky to work in an industry that is as flexible as the lead generation industry. Depending on how big your ship is you can flip into different verticals fairly easily. When verticals, like mortgage, begin to decline there usually is a counter cyclical vertical, like EDU.

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Sometimes I feel the true players in our space could all fit in my small living room. If you have been on the advertisers side of the table and either bought leads or tried to run an affiliate offer you quickly find out that the leads are either brokered or the traffic ends up coming from the same sources. The ever growing quest for volume in some verticals as lead us to this point in the road.

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There is a lot of talk about educating the consumer and providing the proper content so that they can make informed decisions. In the finance space this content is completely missing from the lead generation process. In the EDU space there is content overload.

The finance space provides very little information about the companies the consumer is being matched with until after the consumer has committed to receiving phone calls from unknown companies. There are a few companies that are changing that process as we speak, but I can continue to make that general statement until it becomes the norm. What the finance space does do well is cap the amount of companies that will contact the consumer. While we all know there are companies that sell their leads more then they claim, we can assume that most legitimate companies are being ethical and responsible with their distribution model.

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Big news hits the Lead Generation space with the announcement by EDU mammoth, EDMC, that DoublePositive will be managing all online marketing initiatives across all their brands.

This is huge news for DoublePositive, so I want to take a moment and congratulate Sean Fenlon and Joey Liner on gaining this amazing opportunity!!

Here is the letter that was sent out to all EDMC vendors:

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Carpool Confessions are conversations that take place with Lead Generation professionals on the way to and from work. Casual interviews with industry friends.

A little over 6 months ago Jay Weintraub founder of LeadsCon and Dave Wengel former GM at TARGUSinfo formed an alliance with the creation of Shouk Media. Even more recently they formed the LeadsCouncil.

In a quick call with Jay, I had the pleasure of discussing the LeadsCouncil and the up coming LeadsCon East event. On that note, don’t forget to register for LeadsCon East today. The early bird discount expires today. Register here

Take a listen:

The time I spend blogging consists of 5-8 hours a week between the times 8pm and 10pm and depending on whether there is a must see game on TV or extended after-hours work that needs to be done, blogging can be difficult at best. Over the last week I have been struggling with the NBA playoffs and work, but  while I haven’t been turning out a ton of blog posts I have been putting together some really cool future posts.

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Executives from Career Education Corporation, CUnet, EducationDynamics and Westwood College to Drive Conversation

VIENNA, Va., April 22, 2010 – Scoring online prospective student leads can benefit everyone in the education industry.  However, lack of communication or transparency in the lead generation process hinders even the most willing buyer or seller – and ultimately, the prospective student – from finding the best program that fits their educational need.

Today, TARGUSinfo, the trusted leader in On-Demand Insight^® linking billions of consumer and business attributes in real time, spotlights leaders in the education industry speaking at the 2010 Scoring Summit.

Hosted by TARGUSinfo, the Scoring Summit, taking place May 5-6 2010, at Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans, LA, is a first-of-its-kind event bringing together B2C marketing decision makers to discuss how real-time scoring and analytics is transforming business.

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Salesforce.com announced today that they have made cash offer of $142 million to purchase Jigsaw.

Saleforce.com, who recently raised cash through taking on $575 million in debt made it clear by bringing aboard a number of M&A specialists that they were going to  use much of the cash to acquire companies. Jigsaw, being the first major acquisition by SalesForce, I think, is a company that provides massive amounts of business contacts by encouraging people to keep their own information up-to-date. Similar to SalesGenie and Hoovers, Jigsaw can be described as a lead generation service for companies and people looking to build lists and contacts in the btob world.

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