Leads2007 is currently under way! Discussions between lead sellers and buyers are plentiful and meaningful. Being that this is the first conference or “unconference” of its kind No one knew what to expect. We all only hoped that there would be something to take back to our own businesses and capitalize on and from the first day alone, this has far exceeded any expectation. Those of you who were on the fence and chose to stay home are unfortunately missing out on an industry and business changing event. I do, however want to recap today’s events and discussions for you.

The first discussion involved improving the consumer experience. Bill Rice spurred discussion by first presenting a large yellow square sheet of paper with a black dot in the middle and asked the audience to tell him what they saw. The exercise encourage the people to be more observant to the whole, complete process and not just the obvious. So many times lead buyers/brokers and lead-gen companies tend to focus strictly on what directly influences profits and do not review the complete picture. Have we been throwing the consumer experience to the way side and strictly focusing on what will make us a dollar today rather than executing practices that will not only generate a sale today but also tomorrow. I think we all have to admit that we all fall victim to this on one level or another. Currently there are buyers that will distribute a single lead to multiple LO’s within an organization in hopes have increasing the odds of a conversion. On the same token there are a number of lead sellers that are strictly focused on generating the highest volume of leads and sacrifice the consumers overall experience for an extra lead sale.

Discussions included standardizing the lead-gen process, matching the consumers with the appropriate buyers and at the same time informing the consumer who to expect phone calls from, a standardize lead grading scale based on analytics and feedback and lastly, lead providers gather consumer feedback regarding their experience. Proper loan officer training was also a popular discussion.

An interesting statistic from Forrester research, via Colleen of LowLender, stated that 70% of the people that went online did not intend to complete the process online. This bring up a number of questions and concerns as well and I would love to here your thoughts on the statistic.

The second session included discussions which detailed what technology’s currently in the market place help improve processes?

Loan Management Software was the voted the most influential. Unfortunately, many LMS users are not effectively using the software or know how to implement the software properly into the business. This was expressed by a number of different lead-gen companies. The crowd voiced a small wish list that would help improve many of the current LMS solutions in the marketplace. This included a wider array of analytical reports and closed looped sales reports from lead to funded. A few of the lead-gen companies requested standardized reports.

The 3rd session discussed different approaches to maximize relationships.

This included ideas about placing more ownership on the LO’s by mandating that they pay a portion of the lead cost or even rent seats within the sales organization. Most were agreed that this was a difficult model to incorporate and expressed that this may do more harm then good. Discussions included email marketing, remarketing, the request for referrals and customer service follow up teams.

Session 4 asked the question “does technology increase conversions?”

This included talks about automated pricing engines and the appropriate ways to implement the tool. The question was also asked, “are we simply implementing technology for our own ease or is it actually to improve the overall customer experience?”

A huge discussion broke off from this topic which include the industry wide standardization of date returns and feedback delivery from each of the LMS’s to each of the Lead-gen companies. Every one was in agreement that this could benefit all parties involved and many lead-gen companies pledged their allegiance to the idea. The question still remains who will actually follow through with the coordination of the integration.

Lastly, session 4 discussed the different points of views with the lead ecosystem and brought forth the need to be aware of the different views. It was interesting to see the polar opposite views of the lead-gen companies and the lead buyers. Each demanded the other party need to improve and in my opinion both are correct. The session encouraged partnerships between the two groups rather than working against each other.

Over all the first day was excellent and informative and I look forward to tomorrow.

We will be posting podcast of a the session recaps tomorrow so look out for those. I am exhausted from today and am about ready to fall over so please pardon any grammatical errors in the post. I think by now many of you have excepted the fact that I am a horrible writer anyway so you probably have not noticed any difference anyway.