I thought I would prove that I am not limited to only movies as the means for my analogies. For this post I thought I would use the sport of football. I love football. If it weren’t for the fact that I have a wife and two children I would never move from the couch on Saturdays while college football is on, except to make trips to the fridge or the little boy’s room. But since I am married with two young kids, regrettably this never happens.

I thought I would touch on a topic that has been brought up in the past because I think the recent revelations of advertising methods that LeadCritic wrote about warrant a re-visiting of the topic. Marketing is the most fundamental component to an Internet lead. The better the marketing – the more relevant, qualified, vetted, etc – the more likely it is that the lead will end up completing the event (i.e., mortgage) for which it was sold. It can be said that marketing is the offensive line of the mortgage lead process, (here comes the football).

The offensive line is arguably the most important position on the football field. There is the saying that, “Defense wins championships.” Flashy quarterbacks, running backs and wide receivers always get the glory, but you can’t win a championship without scoring and you can’t score without an offensive line. For the value of great offensive linemen look no further than the last 3 NFL drafts. I was simply too lazy to research past 2006, but I would assume the following pattern would still exist. In the last 3 years at least one offensive linemen has gone in the top 5 (2 in the top 5 in 2007) and in the most recent draft offensive linemen made up just over 25% of the entire first round (8 out of 31 picks).

The offensive line is what enables the QB to have time to find an open receiver or clears holes for the running back to run through. Without an effective offensive line your offense is anemic. The same can be said about a lead provider’s marketing.

Unless a lead company is effective at advertising the right way, in the right places, the leads generated are not worth the ISDN line by which they are transmitted. But what does this have to do with you, the average lead buyer? It means a great deal, of course.

The most simplistic way that a lead provider has to measure the success of a lead is by margin. In other words, how many leads can we generate via this ad and how many of them will we sell? The glaringly obvious flaw in this approach, of course, is that it says nothing about the likelihood that the lead will be successful for the lead buyer! Just because it generates a large number of inquiries doesn’t mean that those inquiries have a high likelihood to turn into an actual mortgage. But this is where you come in, oh, lead buyer.

For years the more sophisticated lead providers have been clamoring for success data. That is, leads that turned into: contacts, applications, approvals, and funded loans. Of course lead buyers are forthright when it comes to sharing negative lead data, or lead returns. This data is helpful too, but the better shops both have the means to take and want to receive the positive lead data, too. I can’t speak for other companies, but I do know that the company for which I work always requests this data. But the likelihood of receiving the data from clients too often is as likely as getting a Daily Double Jeopardy answer out of Lindsay Lohan. But why is this? You as the lead buyer stand to benefit the most? By sharing this information the lead provider should be able to track that lead back to the marketing source from which it originated. With a significant amount of data, trends will become easily identifiable as to which marketing sources result in leads with a higher propensity to turn into contacts, applications, approvals and funded loans. As a marketer, then, we can optimize the buys that convert well for our clients and discontinue those that do not.

But without the information, all we know is margin and that is only half of the equation. Send us your data. The lead management systems have developed, or are developing the means to post this information back to lead generators in real time. If you use one of the great LMS’s in the industry, then ask to be set up accordingly. If you have a proprietary LMS I would still assume that these metrics would be easily accessible. Produce the report regularly and provide it back to your lead companies.

On the flipside, if you are working with a lead company that can’t accept this information or says there is nothing they can do with it, pull the plug. If you are profitable with them, then monitor it closely. Odds are you won’t remain profitable with them because they have no way to know how or why their leads are profitable.

I know there is the underlying fear that, “If a lead provider knows my rate of success, won’t they raise my price?” That may, and I stress, may have been a concern 3 years ago when it was a seller’s market in the lead industry. But it is now a buyer’s market and we lead sellers just don’t have that kind of leverage. Moreover, it is a very short-sighted sales approach. Your lead partners’ goal should be oriented to mutual success, not winning more than you.

But from this point forward, I want the sharing of the most basic of lead metrics – Contacts, Applications, Approvals, and Funded Loans – to be part of the fundamental process for lead management. Just like other best practices as: real-time, immediate distribution, managing lead returns and the tracking of ROI, you MUST share this data with your lead providers. Otherwise my leads will be the marketing equivalent of Barry Sanders. Sanders was one of the greatest running backs of all time but never got the opportunity to realize his potential because he always had a mediocre-at-best offensive line blocking for him. Allow me to be Emmitt Smith, not Barry Sanders.

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