I think it is time to start recognizing lead generation companies, individuals, or groups that take initiative to make the industry a better place.

It is unfortunate, but the fact is there are companies in every vertical that use unethical tactics to make a quick buck. These companies typically go nameless, because frankly put, they know how to work the system so that they go unnoticed beyond simply having poor quality leads. If you are a lead buyer, you are probably working with one directly or indirectly. Most people do not have the way or means to out these companies publicly. Plus, unless you are an insider you have no real proof that they are intentionally trying to scam people, because it is so easy to chalk it up to a mistake. This means we are stuck leaving Karma to police our industry and trust me I believe in Karma, but in most cases Karma is not our most timely option. With that said,  what I think we can do is formulate a way to recognize people or companies that make an honest difference in our space. Companies/people that don’t simply drive quality leads or provide an excellent software, but they make strives to better our industry or better represent our industry to the public.

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A few weeks ago we discussed what I believed to be a valid lead. Take a reread of the rant at the link you just passed by to catch yourself up on the topic.

I want to revisit this topic because some lead sellers are taking advantage of very small loophole, the email address. Lets get something clear. Lead Buyers expect a valid lead to be one that can be contacted by phone. In most cases they expect a person to actually pick up the phone and not simply ring and ring and ring and ring, leading to no answer and no voicemail. I have been involved with working leads for about 6 years now and never once would expect to only rely on the email address to contact a prospect. Aside from how important email is to nurturing and following up with a lead it is hardly a sufficient means for an initial contact and in many cases a follow up. In fact, I would put money down that if a lead has an invalid phone number it has almost has no chance of being contacted, much less converted, through email.

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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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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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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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Author: Jessica Manna, Chief Marketing Officer, Residential Finance Corp.

If you’re a marketer you undoubtedly face complaints from sales about many things, especially leads.  Let’s face it, from sales vantage point, there are really just two things wrong with leads: (1.) there are never enough, and (2.) the quality could always be better!

As a consultant at a marketing agency in a prior life, I saw many companies where this relationship was either adversarial, at worst, or non-communicative, at best.  In most organizations, marketing is a black-box – no one knows how or why marketing decisions are made.  In rarer instances, the relationship is akin to a bad divorce with blame and finger-pointing.

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What do they say about recycling? It’s good for the bottle it’s good for the can. Well, that may be true; but when it comes to lead recycling, don’t assume all recycling efforts are created equal. Obviously I’m talking about sales leads not lead you find in a pencil. Incidentally if you’re interested in the origin of lead pencils and that pencils in fact never contained lead, I encourage you to read about it on Wikipedia here.

For those that are not clear on what sales lead recycling is, let me define it. Sales lead recycling is typically referred to the process after a newly generated lead has been assigned to a salesperson and then automatically and re-assigned to another salesperson. Recycling can occur based on different business rules, but it is often driven by the amount of time to first call attempt or follow-up call attempts.

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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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Mara Fineshriber is director of marketing for Western Governors University, and she’s seeing a surge of interest in online education these days.  That means her school receives a lot of online leads.  Western Governors University is a non-profit, online-only school located in Utah.  Governors from 19 states founded the institution to help people earn their degrees “independent of time or place.”

Fineshriber’s marketing efforts have made her colleague Edward Rios, the university’s director of enrollment, very busy.  The job of Rios’ team is to review thousands of online leads and work with applicants to help them qualify to attend WGU and earn a bachelor’s or master’s degree.  From a business standpoint, each online lead that becomes a qualified applicant and, eventually, an enrolled student spells thousands of dollars in tuition for the school.

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Not sure if you were able to catch the LeadsCon Recap webinar the other day, but if you missed it I want a share something that often gets looked over by lead managers.

First, if you missed the webinar you can view a screen cast of it here.

As lead managers we always talk about speed to contact, distribution and of course lead quality. One often overlook and under optimized step in the lead conversion process is the email follow-up process. In all reality this topic easily crosses over to the lead generation side of the table too. Lead generation companies also often overlook the email follow-up campaigns for partial filled out forms and even leads that were filled out completely. The email confirmation is a big step in confirming the legitimacy of your service, if presented correctly.

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I would like to think that our industry is not the only one that has such a wide array companies from the completely unethical to the highly ethical and honest, but because of its fairly low barriers of entry I think the lead generation industry might be the only one.

I started writing on this blog 3 years ago with the goal to out companies that took advantage of lead buyers. Unfortunately some the same companies that have been written about on this blog a number of times are still in business, but the good news is that many have fallen to the wayside. It is also important to note the companies that follow high ethical standards, or more frankly show any level of ethics. When I used to buy leads I would share which companies were performing the best and who in my opinion held themselves to higher standards then the others.

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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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