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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As a blog writer I always wonder about all the great articles that were written years ago that now get no love. Ok, ok, “all” is probably an over statement. Maybe the one good article that was written here……by a guest author, I wonder about. The content was great and it included tips that every lead buyer should read. Those gems get piled on by other articles and post every week and continue to fall of the visible chart of good posts. Well, unlike me, friend and fellow blog writer Bill Rice compiled a “Best of BetterCloser” page with all if his post pertaining to buying leads, sales, lead management, social media and much more.

Check it out, its worth a look. Actually, there are a number of post missing from the Best of Page too!

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

This morning I had the pleasure of speaking with Jeff Liebl, CMO at eBureau and got the low down on Lead Scoring.

Lead scoring has been a really popular topic over the past few years and has been covered at most industry conferences, but I have never felt like there has been a really good discussion on the topic. So within 20 minutes I tried my hand at it with Jeff and tried to get to the bottom of lead scoring.

Take a listen:

So today I had a few seconds to read through my Google Reader and catch up on the blogs that I follow and one of them includes a fairly new blog, that I actually added to my blog role, but haven’t yet had a chance to mention in any posts. The blog is excellent and I recommend that every lead buyer, no matter what the vertical, should read. Its insightful and very informative, however as the author will tell you and freely discloses that he is a Leads360 employee. In this case, it really doesn’t matter and you shouldn’t expect to get bombarded with Leads360 ads. In fact, you will probably see more here then there. Its very similar to the founder of Kaleidico Lead Management Systems blog, bettercloser.com. The new blog is titled “The Lead Blog” and I suggest you become a subscriber.

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A company that does not get mentioned here as frequently as they probably should, for what ever reason, released their bi-annual benchmark study last week. I was going to cover it as soon as it came out, but I was actually going to make an effort to try and acquire the study, but did not have any luck, so this post isn’t as timely as I would have liked, but better late then never.

That said, many of you have probably already seen the press release, if not you can download it here, MortgageBot Benchmark Study. First, I love the fact that MortgageBot puts the time and effort into putting a report like this together for their clients. They have the data, so why not share it?

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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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