To really do well with Internet leads you have to do a number of things right. You need to have the right personal, the right lead management process, the right leads, proper tracking and analytics, the right re-marketing campaigns, and slew of other things. With this is mind do you really need to know exactly where the leads are coming from?

As a lead buyer I wanted to know how the leads were being generated, where they were being generated and how many times they were being sold. Today, lead buyers are expressing the same concerns within their conversations about transparency. This is the same discussion that I mentioned last week and it has been going on for years and years. After I wrote last weeks post I sent a quick note to friend Bill Rice:

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There is a strange similarity between transparency and love.

I find it a little humorous quite frankly, but let me try and explain. I don’t claim be a industry veteran by any means, but for the last 6 years or so I have continued to hear the topic of transparency. Everyone has a different definition of what transparency is, though. I have heard people claim it is only a scapegoat for lack of quality. I have heard buyers claim they don’t get enough of it from their lead sources and vice-versa. In all reality a certain level of transparency is needed for a successful partnership (Partnership = High Quality Leads = Positive Results) to be created.

What is transparency and does it mean different things to different people? Here is what I think buyers and sellers thing transparency means?

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In this industry, specifically the lead generation industry, you don’t have to be around very long as a lead buyer to be able to start sniffing out the questionable lead sources. They claim to generate thousands of leads through SEO and Paid Search, but a quick glance at their websites stats tells a vastly different story. How do they get all those thousands of leads? It gets fairly easy and over time you learn to trust your instincts.

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Are they really “branded leads”? Better yet; Are “branded leads” really exclusive?

The EDU space is different then any other vertical slightly different then other verticals in how leads are captured. I am tempted to cross out the whole sentence and say that it is no different then any other vertical, but I will give the vertical a little credit and say it has a few differences. The key difference is the attention that lead buyers give to “branded leads”. Even though directories have been around in other verticals of ages, like the mortgage vertical, the attention to buying branded leads has never been so strong.

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Their are so many factors that affect lead quality. The list is long, so you are not going to find it included in this post, but there is one specific item that is on that list that I do want to discuss. Ask anyone that has been involved in the lead generation industry for longer the 5 years and they will tell you that the space has been growing at an amazing pace. Right or wrong I think I have seen articles stating that the industry produces tens of billions of dollars every year and is growing at a rate of 20%+ per year. The bottom line, the industry is growing at a healthy pace.

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There is nothing more frustrating then when a lead gen company is run by a bunch of unethical morons. And even more frustrating is that there are a number of them, but the good news is that you can usually spot them fairly quickly. In fact, most of them are companies you initially had a bad feeling about from the start, but wanted/needed more volume so you thought you go out on a limb and give them shot.

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Guest Post By Adrian Huth, friend and “good guy” in the industry.

Allow me to introduce myself…. I am an individual who has been in the lead generation industry going on 10 years.  I have seen the industry involve from the early days of the mortgage boom to the now recent collapse and repositioning to new verticals gaining increasing value such as loan modification and debt consolidation leads. I have seen the evolution of the search engines and SEO marketing and was there in the beginning of cost per click marketing.  I have witnessed how lead generation and lead quality was affected by the rise of the affiliate networks, display advertising, email marketing and incentivized leads.  I saw first hand how all these different types of marketing caused lead buyers to cancel and how some increased closing ratios.  Even back 4 years ago with all these types of lead generation I began to suspect that people are playing a game of buying and selling leads to each other and that everyone is becoming the enemy of the other.  Lead generation has now evolved into screwing people over and this has now become the de facto business model and state of the industry.

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In the old days I would out lead providers for being scum bags, now I am a little more cautious, go figure! I guess I have also been a little naive in thinking that there were not as many shady companies in the industry has there once was.

The unfortunate news that they are still out there, cutting corners just to make a quick buck. There not using new tricks either and even worse they can be hard to catch. These companies sell leads more times then they claim, just enough not to raise too many flags. They don’t fire pixels on their affiliate programs to insure that they don’t have to pay for all the leads generated from the campaigns. Worst part is they they think they are successful businessmen, because they made few dollars or even sold their fraud for a company.

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Finding the right lead source has always been a problem. It often entails receiving a multitude of calls from sales people pitching the best quality for the cheapest price.  You then are forced to use your gut on whether or not to make a purchase. This isn’t much different then any other purchase. For example your customers, in most cases, do not have the ability to test your product out prior to refinancing, receiving a loan modification or settling their debt. All they have to go off of is the rapport you have built and their belief in your claims.

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I think we all know that data is the key to successful campaigns. As a lead buyer it is extremely important to aggregate your data to a single location where you can properly analysize the data. From there you can determin what sources, filters or sales persons perform the best. For the lead providers they can determin which marketing campaign is performing the best or the worse. Bottom line, data is the key to a successful marketing campaign.

Taking it a step further, with regards to lead buying, sharing that data amoungst your partners is key too. For most this is sounds like a broken record. Sharing data ranks up there with lead scoring for most popular topics in 2008. Maybe I am alone here, but if I have to sit through another conference session on the topic of lead scoring and how great it is without any applicable information being given, I may have to…I don’t know, somthing horrible. I digress, however it is amazing even the most “savvy” buyers or analyst simply want to put up a fight for data.

Fundamental #1

Give feedback to your provider, good and bad. If you can provide the leads that actually performed well back to the source it will help them optimize their efforts.

You may not see a huge change in your conversion numbers right away, but it will give the lead source indicators to make immediate or future changes that will eventually pay off for you.

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How easy is it to let the simple things in our businesses slip through the cracks?

I bring this up because of an email I received a few weeks ago. The sender was looking for advice on lead buying and I caught myself starting the email saying, “Buying leads is very simple…”. And in fact it is very simple, however the problem with that statement is not the fact that I said it was simple, it was the fact that I had become complacent.

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Last week we briefly discussed lead volume per sales agent and more specifically how many leads each agent should have in their pipeline at any given time. This question is first in a number of lead management questions you should answer prior to starting another day of business.  There should be a number of business rules that should resonate with everyone in your company. The first we touched on last week and that is to call each lead 3 times a day until the lead is contacted. Another rule that you will need to create has to do with the life a lead in your system.

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