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.

Unfortunately, I am not buying leads directly anymore so while I can pass along information that other lead buyers have told me, I can no longer directly speak to these topics anymore. For example, in the mortgage space I surveyed 4 significant lead buyers which constantly mentioned receiving excellent quality leads from LeadPoint, QuinStreet, MortgageLoan.com  and Adchemy. I know first hand that these companies employ leaders in the space that care about the consumers experience, lead quality and the lead buyer. If you are in the mortgage space you should take a look at these companies for leads.

Even though my lead buying responsibilities have been relegated to almost nothing I obviously continue to receive results and feedback from many sources. Additionally, I continue to work with a number of companies in the industry. One such company is TARGUSinfo, and while there are a number of verification and lead scoring companies in the market, such as eBureau and others, TARGUSinfo seem to stand out of the pack. Last week I had the pleasure of meeting a few members of the TARGUSinfo team at an office grand opening networking event in San Fransisco. At the event they obviously discussed their expansion into the West Coast with the new SF office, their expanded verification database, and the Lead Scoring Summit.

I had the chance to voice a few concerns about the issues many generators are facing with lead scoring. Currently buyers are implementing scoring methods and in all cases none are alike and very few share the methodologies with the sellers. Here inserts the big problem. I am not going to get into detailing out the problem in this post and let you figure it out on your own, but there is a clear problem when advertisers have no clue what leads are being rejected for minimum score caps or for what ever the reason may be. I brought this growing problem up with of the leaders and they listened, which is what you would expect, but why I think TARGUSinfo stands out from the gray murky crowd is because I know they understand the importance of transparency and will preach it to their current clients. This shows in a number of their conference sessions at the Lead Quality Summit. Now, of course the premise of the summits put on by TARGUSinfo are self serving marketing events, but that goes without saying that they benefit the whole industry too. Educating buyers and sellers on the proper lead scoring tactics and preaching transparency is worth every client they get from putting on these shows.

Great companies just don’t end with TARGUSinfo, instead they continue with companies like DoublePositive, Bills.com, GearyPMG.com (ok, a little bias there), Adchemy and many others. For every asshole slime ball you may run into that sells exclusive leads multiple times, prepops form fields with aged data and simply lies to about how their leads are generated, there are 10 other companies that are are honest hard working professionals that not only care about their own companies success, but also understand that becoming successful means their clients need to be too.

So, in light of all the BS in our industry, a quick kudos needs to be sent out to all the companies named here and that also went unnamed here that put their clients success first and hold high ethical standards.

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