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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Guest post from Alex Baydin. See below for bio

If the theme of the 2009 LeadsCon East was “Flight to Quality”, then I would say the theme of the 2010 NYC LeadsCon East was most definitely “Flight to Compliance.” The recent proposed amended regulations to the Higher Education Act of 1965 announced by the Dept of Education targets for-profit colleges and definitely shaped the discussions of this LeadsCon conference. In fact, the only other topic of discussion that came close to compliance in number of mentions was the presence of a new company in our space named Lead Beaver. Sorry readers, I won’t go there.

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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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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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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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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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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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Sometimes simple is just enough.

On the recommendation of the Ampush Media blog I decided to take a read of 37Signals new book, Reworked. The book is a fairly quick read and true to 37Signals core beliefs it discusses how businesses should keep it simple. I think Ampush does a good job recapping the book, so I won’t be repetitive and recap it here, however what I took away from the book was the simple reminder to keep it simple.

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Time to get down to lead scoring business.

What better place to get down, let alone get the low-down on lead scoring then in sin city 2, New Orleans. Yeah buddy! Combine lead scoring and industry peers with boiled crawfish, shrimp etouffee and world famous Hurricanes from Pat O’s and you have NO excuse not to be at TARGUSinfo’s first annual Scoring Summit.

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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 are a few simple things in life that we must do to have a good life. Things like treating others as you would have them treat you or not committing murder, etc. lol The same applies with marketing. Yes, don’t commit murder, but even more obvious is to always implement some form of tracking on your marketing campaigns.

I recently heard a story of a VP of Marketing who insisted that a tracking phone number or a unique URL not be used in his direct mail pieces. He simply tried to track the lift of relevant results across the company. There are clearly a number of issues with this method of “tracking”, but the biggest problem is that you are not able to correctly identify what is working and what is not. Many companies during the mortgage boom wasted thousands of dollars on campaigns that they thought worked but were simply benefiting from excellent market conditions. Once those market conditions began to deteriorate it became even more important to invest in the correct marketing campaigns. By the time these companies implemented the correct tracking it was too late.

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What is it about having a deadline on writing an article make is so much harder to start? At the same time I am easily starting this post I have an article due in two days on virtually the same topic, but am having a heck of a time getting the right intro paragraph started. I guess it is the pressure that is getting to me. I am actually going to have to have someone proof read my work! lol

Anyway, a no brainer was confirmed in a press release today by Leads360. I say no brainer with a certain level of sarcasm too. You would think that this lead management stuff is a no brainer, but it is simply not for most. The release also give a very cool piece of information that I think is very valuable, but before I get into the details I also want to say that I love the fact that a company is providing information like this no matter how logical it may seem. I think the major problem with lead management is that there are so many questions that do not have statistically relevant answers for the masses, only best guess and assumptions. And when there are only best guesses and assumptions, even if they are completely logical, they become more difficult to implement within a company.

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What is the single most popular topic at a lead generation conference? We could probably even make that a broader question and ask what is the single most popular topic at an online marketing conference? If you just started attending conferences in the last few years you may possibly answer that question by saying, “Lead Scoring”. Well, if you did you would be wrong. However, I do want to talk about lead scoring in this post, I am just not there yet.

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It’s the same old story no matter what vertical you work in. The biggest reason for failed attempts at integrating internet leads is NOT the quality of the leads.It is the lack of proper lead management.

This is obviously not something new for most readers of this blog and could possibly be considered the biggest topic on this blog. The issue continues to arise in posts because I continually come across companies that fail, waste thousands of dollars and then eventually go out of business. The issue with lead management is that it is composed of a number of different pieces and without all the pieces in place you are losing money.

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Former Omniture executive brings extensive online marketing experience to Lead Performance Management firm

October 15, 2009 – Toronto, ON – Sparkroom, an innovative provider of Lead Performance Management™ software solutions for direct marketers, today announced the appointment of Dave Datars as the Vice President of Sales. With his extensive experience selling SaaS-based solutions to senior executives and marketers, Dave will lead the continued growth of Sparkroom’s sales activities in the higher education sector, while helping the company to expand and penetrate additional verticals.

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Starting a conference recap post is always painful and difficult for me. I find it similar to starting a forced grade school English paper. “What I did over summer break included….”.

I am going to use that complaint to get through the into and get right into the meat and bones of the fist day at the Targus Lead Quality Summit. Overall, great show with good content and great networking. The majority of the attendees appeared to be involved in the EDU vertical in one way or another, but there also was a nice group of attendees from the finance verticals. I am going to take this week to review the sessions I attended on post at a time.

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I wrote and deleted the beginning of this post twice already, so this time I am going to get straight to the point.

The mortgage industry, in my opinion, is probably the most capable vertical for working internet leads. They have some of the most experienced lead buyers, the best Lead Management Systems and have lived through the ups and downs of lead quality.

The mortgage boom created a vacuum of technological developments that surrounded the lead buying process. Many of the most mature and developed lead buying services evolved out of mortgage industry and are now venturing into other verticals. This is great news for those verticals they are moving into. The trial and error, the R&D funded by the mortgage boom and the experience of working millions of leads is now available to these other verticals. The learning curve has been shortened for you!

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