I think you should reveal yourself at the LeadsCon conference. I have always appreciated your comments and would love to meet you in person. If you want to stay anonymous, wear the Nacho Libre mask and share your ideas with me over a drink.

Raj, you too make some excellent points but again you refer to the Cost per Funded Loan as the “Holy Grail.” That very well may be the case, but I think it is imperative for the superb Lead Managements Systems like LeadROI to help steer the conversation purely from costs and make income and ROI the Holy Grail. Again, if anything needs standardization it is the fact that managing your business purely to costs is like operating your business with blinders on. You need to have the peripheral vision that income gives you to really maximize ROI.

Yes. Cost per funded loan is very important, as is revenue per funded loan. Ultimately profit per funded loan is what we all want to know.

I believe that the LMSs that can deliver this piece of information as well as the metrics that I describe above that enable people to optimize CPFL and RPFL will be the ones that “break-through” over the next year.

And you are right, the 7 metrics I mention will be tracked out of the box on Leads360 system from this week onwards. We believe that this will create a minor revolution in the way that lead buyers and users think about their information.

ROI is certainly the ultimate objective. However, the metrics that I have laid out enable lead buyers to increase conversions. Increasing conversion is undeniably directly linked to income which is half of the profit equation. The other measure that you could also track is revenue per funded loan, which I ignored because having a large number of loans convert is typically superior from an ROI perspective to having less loans fund at a higher revenue per loan.

On the cost side the metrics do a good job of measuring the efficiency of the sales force which is typically the highest cost for most sales shops.

Leads360 focuses primarily on the 7 metrics that I mention because we believe that these are the ones that ultimately drive the highest ROI. This is what we see in our data. I do agree, however, that it is also best practice to keep a close eye on the ROI metric too.

I’d be interested to hear if there are other specific metrics that you think are critical in driving superior ROI.

Nick, you seem to be a way to be laying the groundwork for new reports to be released in the 360 system, which is great, but if we can’t tell our clients what each conversion is costing them, don’t you think we’re smoke and mirroring a little? Lead Critic has always said this to us when he was with the company that is a client of LROI, but we just didn’t have all the pieces to accurately provide him with this info. So, we conveniently dodged the bullet.

However, we have never forgotten his, and many client’s words and we have identified a way to more accurately gather this info and make reports reflect this. But, accuracy is key and it does require breaking a lot of pieces of the lead management process apart and attributing cost and income metrics to them. In my opinion, providing inaccurate CPFL data is far worse than not providing it at all because once it is provided, key business decisions will be made from it and it is too risky of a proposition to not do correctly.

Look, we didn’t choose the ROI name for no reason. We understand that the ‘Return’ part of ROI is what keeps our clients in business and what is ultimately important to them, but I sincerely believe that the slower evolution of lead management analytics is something that was inevitable. There is a foundation of learning that can only come from seeing how users respond to this kind of software implementation at the point of sale and then examining what kinds of data can be gathered based on usage patterns. Fortunately, we have learned quite a bit in the past 2-3 years. Now it is how our systems respond to these learnings that will ultimately determine our success in the future.

Nick, I love what you’re saying though. All the points of data you mention above are definitely components to better understanding Lead ROI.

However, I do think that using these metrics will allow a sales organization to optimize their sales team in a way that generates the highest number of converted loans. A better way to increase revenue than focusing primarily on revenue per funded loan.

Yes, I absolutely agree. ROI is the underlying metric that we all really care about. However, I think that the other metrics that I mention, used wisely, are the enablers of a high ROI. Along with a good market and decent revenues per funded loan, of course.

Thanks,

Nick