Lead Buyers Hurt Their Own Lead Quality
Lead buyers are disadvantaging their own lead quality. Our traditional thinking, as lead buyers, is that it is solely the responsibility of the lead provider to generate quality leads. Furthermore, if they generate a bad lead–fake, bogus, or just not ready to close–then the buyer should get a credit.
This sort of thinking, combined with a general belief that providing performance data back to providers leads to price and lead flow manipulation, creates a harmful effect to lead buyers. Change your perspective for a moment. If this were your internal marketing department would you provide positive and negative feedback? Would you try to use near real-time metrics to make adjustments to your creative, copy, and placement? Of course you would.
Unfortunately, in stark contrast, we have created lead receipt methods that only receive leads, lead management systems that do not track actions, and feedback loops that only provide data about how many bad phone numbers we received.
The result is a disproportionate focus on verifying phone numbers instead of generating better, more product appropriate, and more time appropriate consumer inquiries.
What do you think would happen to lead quality if lead providers put their time, energy, and dollars into innovating their marketing methodologies and technologies instead of setting up call centers. Call centers that call and verify leads before they are sold to CALL CENTERS? Talk about price increasing inefficiency and creating a crappy customer experience!
If we want better leads we should:
- Offer real-time feeds, to our “outsourced marketing departments,” both positive and negative feedback
- Stop sending in and managing returns and credits
- Have lead providers shut down their lead call centers
- Then demand a high quality lead for a fair price
What do you think?
6 comments so far
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Bill,
What do you think is a better lead?
Interest?
A product specific lead?
I was just pondering how they could improve their methodologies and of course it would be based on what the needs of the buyers are.
Thanks
I think the key to quality lead generation is content. I just don’t see a lot of lead generators investing in content as a lead generation methodology.
Sure, they place attention or interruption (as I–I think someone else coined this–like to call them) ads, like the LMB add in the previous post. I got this add off of my Yahoo Fantasy Baseball league page. If I clicked it and filled out a quick app, would you want that lead?
Now let’s think about all you would see–I have a big house, with a lot of equity, a great credit score, and a nice income. Would you pay for that lead? Sure, but it is going to suck because I am going to tell you LO to pound sand on the pay option ARM he is going to offer me to get the payment the LMB add offers.
Would you rather instead pay for my quick app if I went to website that I found when searching for ways to get the best terms in a slow market (a little counterintuitive to a mortgage broker, but it works–http://www.longbeachrealestatehome.com/2007/04/10/how-to-get-the-best-home-loan-neatness-counts-when-you-want-a-home-loan –how many folder completes do you think he gets faxed in the first call?)
I rambled a bit, but I guess the point of my original post was that we are getting our lead providers all focused on the wrong things. I think this is why little guys with little quotas are starting to win in the conversion game.
All my humble opinion…thoughts? I may put this up into a multi-part post. Good topic!
Bill, many lead suppliers do utilize the feedback to maximize profits, that is the origin of the assumption.
lead id’s for funded and originated loans is provided to all my suppliers but i do so on a case by case basis depending on the relationship i have with a given account rep.
some reps just don’t know what to do with the data and companies rarely offer feedback on your feedback.
What would impress me is if more companies took the approach the Key Leads did with us and offered us back suggestions on how to close more loans based on our “Positive” metrics.
Negiotiated flat rate returns percentages negates the need to report back bad #’s, “Negative” metrics in most cases.
Bill,
I agree with you to an extent. First, lead providers will always continue to ad “value” to their leads by implementing quality assurance steps or features. Do they really add value, not really, but it is an easy way to raise their perceived value.
Second, CPM marketing (banners and text ads) will continue to interrupt people and do not create the same type of lead that a search specific lead will. My opinion is that search related leads (organic or paid) are best option when trying to acquire customers actively searching for mortgage information. The major problem with that is it takes 6-12 months to reach the first page of a search engine and this is only if you are employing every SEO tactic out there. The general and very competitive terms that are related to mortgage refi are difficult at best to achieve placement with. I must say it is not impossible, because we have been able to reach page 1 on all the search engines for very competitive keywords, but my point is that it takes time and CPC and CPM marketing creates instant, sellable leads. I think many lead-gen companies become solely focused on this type of marketing, because of the instant gratification, and forget about organic search. CPC, also included in organic search, but still not as effective as organic placement. Top CPC placement, at best may capture only 50% of consumers attention.
Bankrate is a company that has perfected organic search game.(Well perfected may be an overstatement)They focus heavily on content and build solid links with their rate widgets.(Simply put)
I know I am rambling here, but the issues is that many lead providers look no further than 6 months out and that may even be a stretch. They need to focus on content and quality information to gain quality traffic and in turn quality leads, which takes long term planning and a shift in mentality.
Wow, I almost forgot what I was even responding too.
[...] have been brief discussions on this topic here and here, but I would like to open up the discussion again and maybe it will spill over into the [...]