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.

Aside from the top two most important factors which are employing an LMS and then calling the leads within 5 minutes of receiving them (hopefully even sooner then that) there is an old topic that has arisen in my daily conversations and that is the classic topic of sending feedback to your lead providers. This includes simply sending back returns/scrubs to the lead providers too. I have written a post on whether or not you should be returning leads or not and many of you weighed in on the topic.

I get the fact that its time consuming to aggregate all the returns and send them back to each lead source. That is why in many cases I would simply bake the scrub rate into the lead price. Obviously do this after you have discussed the lead price with the new source and then reduce the price based on the 7%-10% scrub rate. If you are not returning your leads or receiving a reduced rate based on an agreed percentage you are potentially losing thousands of dollars every year. More importantly you are not giving your lead sources the feedback most important to them. Negative feedback is so very important to lead providers. The more frequently you can give them this info the sooner they can spot potential problems.

There are a number of issues for not returning leads or giving any type of feedback to lead companies, but I think the biggest reason is that it is extremely time consuming. Another reason, especially in the EDU space, is that the data is seems to be very difficult to acquire from the different campuses/schools. A solution to the problem is to set up a simple API or even an HTTP post that would pass the status updates in real time. This is being done with a number of LMS companies already, but unfortunately these LMS companies only hold a very small percentage of the lead buying market. In fact many companies find it better to build out their own LMS. This is a big problem with companies that have a ton of resource, but typically don’t have the experience or the know how to build out a system that is comparable to the system that are already built.

I was thinking about this issue over the last few days and want to through out a very simply idea and then get your thoughts. My idea would to build a simple system that would work as a lead status hub for lead buyers and sellers to communicate through. This open platform would allow schools to integrate with only system to post the status updates to and then give the buyers the ability allow access to those updates to anyone they choose. The biggest challenge for companies is applying the IT resources to integrate or build out an API that lead sources can access. This status hub could reduce the amount of effort needed to allow for real time feedback. Plus its a third party and it would not matter what LMS you were using.

There has got to be a way for companies to pass data to lead providers without all the headache. Just the thought of the supposed additional work is the reason why most companies never even get started on such a process, but if they knew they only had to do it once and they would have full control over their data makes me think that more companies would start providing the feedback.

So whats wrong with this idea? Would it work? Would this help? Is it just another idea to help the lead buying industry that no one wants to participate in?

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