The art of converting marketing traffic into actual sales, what we call in the lead generation space as lead management, as finally started to hit main stream conversations. Customer Relationship Management platforms have been fooling performance marketers for years now claiming they are the best way to convert sales, when in fact they fall way short. In the true lead generation and performance marketing era, lead management companies have started where CRM’s have left off and have provided huge benefits to companies that made the smart choice of focusing on the intricacies of converting leads into sales.

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We talk about EDU being a counter cyclical vertical whereby when the economy is down and jobs are scarce people look at furthering their education in hopes of a better future. And subsequently lead generation companies follow and capitalizes on peaking vertical.

Another vertical, one that I have less experience in, that looks to be counter cyclical to the health of the economy is the Payday loan vertical. Not only is it a growing vertical and demand for these leads have increased, the actual demand for payday loans increase based on seasonality trends.

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Released today was another report revolving around the EDU lead generation space. This report, fortunately, will not send stocks plummeting or law firms scrambling like the GAO report, but instead gives a little insight into the demographics of people filling out lead gen forms.

The study, which was released today, was undertaken by EduDirectReponse and took a closer look into 1000 random generated edu leads. The study took general advertising campaigns (none degree specific messaging) and syndicated the campaigns across multiple channels including SEM, Email, and Display. The campaigns covered the entire United States and produced at least one lead in every State.

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There are only a few lead generation conferences, let alone ones that are worth attending. Sure there are a number of conferences that overlap into the lead gen space by focusing on certain eliminates of lead generation, but in reality there are only two specific lead generation conferences: LeadsCon and TARGUSinfo’s Interactive Insights Summit (formally the Lead Quality Summit).

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Today, QuinStreet announced their fiscal 4th quarter earnings as well as their fiscal year end earnings. The lead generation leader reported a 31% YOY growth in total revenue and a 76% YOY revenue growth in the financial services vertical.

QuinStreet CEO attributed much of the growth to the “flight to quality” in the EDU vertical due to all the regulatory crack down on the vertical.

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I received a nice little email today reminding me that the LG Technologies VS. Shin, Smith, Diana, LeadPoint and others has not been completely settled. The last update was that Shin switched his plea to guilty and has been ordered to pay back any monies due to LG Technologies.  This left the other defendants still in question.

As of the 5th of August 2010 and according to the Riverside County Court House the charges against Edward Shin, Karen Shin, LP Services, LLC, Chris Smith and Iris Sunwoo have been dismissed. According to the emailer LG Technologies and the defendants came to a settlement agreement. The details are unknown.

Left out from the dismissals, however, were LeadPoint, Marc Diana, Breakwater Ventures and Breakwater Ventures II. It is unknown whether or not these parties will come to terms with a settlement agreement as well or continue to be prosecuted by LG Technologies.

Additionally I am not sure if this settlement with Shin has anything to do with the courts order to repay LG Technologies. I will leave the speculations up to you. Regardless, it seems as though one of the largest lead generation scandals is coming to an end. We will have to wait and see what the outcome is for the remaining parties in the case.

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It was mentioned on Domain Name Wire that the website and domain name Insurance.com was picked up by QuinStreet a few days ago. This comes a number of months after their recent acquisition of insure.com for $16m. The price of the insurance.com purchase as yet to be disclosed, but according to Yahoo Finance insurnace.com plans on letting go of all 144 employees. We are not sure if those employees will be rehired by QuinStreet.

According to Domain Name Wire the domain is speculated to be one of the most valuable in history, possibly more the sex.com.

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Over the last month there have been a number of  changes taking place at LeadPoint. Most notably their recent series F round of funding of $6.5 million. This is the latest in a long list of investments from the VC community, which means with every round the ownership of the private company continues to be whittled away.

This round of funding also came at the same time 10-12 LeadPoint employees received their pink slips. Most notable of the lay offs included COO Gina Anastasi.

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News hits the wire yesterday and is confirmed that BankRate has completed the purchase of both NetQuote and CreditCard.com.

With these purchases, BankRate continues its gain more market share in the lead generation industry.

DOW JONES LBO WIRE:

Personal-finance portal Bankrate Inc. is planning two big acquisitions, less than a year after being purchased by private equity firm Apax Partners.

Bankrate inked a $205 million deal to buy NetQuote Inc., which is backed by Spectrum Equity Investors LP and Stripes Group LLC. It agreed to pay $145 million for CreditCards.com, which Austin Ventures purchased in 2006 with financing from American Capital Ltd.

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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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You can read Part I of my review of lead recycling here; this is part II. As promised we ran an analysis on lead recycling and we made some interesting discoveries. First, let me remind you how Leads360 defines “lead recycling”: It is the process of automatically re-assigning a lead to another rep based on specific business critereia, such as after a period of inactivity.

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When you’ve been in the lead generation business as long as BuyerZone has, you begin to notice that despite dramatic changes in the technologies and economy, certain issues come up again and again. They may not be groundbreaking, but they’re not going away, either. Here are 11 lessons for both lead buyers and lead generators.

For lead buyers

Getting the most out of online lead generation programs requires that you adapt your sales and marketing processes – here are some of the essentials.

Different lead sources demand different sales approaches

Prospects can come to you with a huge range of preconceptions. They may know little more than your business name, or they may have done extensive research through your web site and other channels. They also vary widely in purchasing tactics, needs, and expectations. Think you know the ‘typical’ buyer for your business? Think again.

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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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If you don’t call your leads, they’re not going to close.  Pretty simple, huh?  You might be surprised to learn that the research I have at my fingertips says over 30 percent of Internet leads never get a response and there is has been little improvement over the past year (at least in the for profit education vertical).

This spring, LeadQual, went undercover to conduct a survey to see how 158 for-profit colleges respond to over 780 Internet leads.  This survey repeats one that we did last year in which we carefully submitted more than 450 Internet inquiries during regular business hours to a cross-section of more than 100 American colleges.

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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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