Consumers interested in your service calling you on the phone provide some of the most valuable leads a sales team can receive. One way this can happen is for your target audience to hear or see an ad on the Radio/Television and then call a number to be immediately transferred to your sales team.

While this process sounds straightforward, the challenges of getting the phone to ring, developing the technology, and managing the process so that it works seamlessly at a price point that rewards both buyers and sellers can be challenging.

Trading thousands of calls a day requires top notch technology and experienced/professional customer service. However, for the product to carry out on its promise and deliver the ROI buyers are seeking, the hand-off needs to be optimized.

Over the last year, LeadPoint tested a number of hand-off processes including:

• Providing buyers with a designated qualification period
• Using an IVR (voice prompt) to screen callers
• Applying a lead scrub on all calls
• Offering a return policy on invalid calls

What we discovered was that the best way to sell our direct voice leads was “RAW.”

In essence, we offer calls to our buyers the same way they would receive them if they produced the ad and purchased the media themselves, however, without the upfront costs and associated risks. This enables us to deliver the volume and quality at an appropriate price that meet our buyers’ overall needs.

A recent challenge that the LeadPoint market has faced has been demand outpacing supply, resulting in overall higher prices on leads.

Three factors have contributed to the price increase. First, there has been a surge in demand for credit card debt, tax debt, and loan modification leads. Second, media buyers and agencies have noted a drop in the overall response rate by consumers to ads. This has resulted in fewer leads being generated per advertisement. Third, in addition to reducing overall supply, the drop in consumer response has increased advertisers’ cost per lead. Agencies and media buyers now have to purchase more media to generate similar quantities of leads. This competition for purchasing optimal media drives up media pricing which further impacts lead pricing.

Fortunately, LeadPoint’s real-time market pricing and breadth of partners enables us to continue to scale in the midst of this increasingly competitive environment. As market prices have increased based on current supply and demand dynamics, LeadPoint has shared this information with our direct marketing partners enabling them to take the necessary actions to generate more supply of high quality calls keeping LeadPoint at the forefront of The Voice Lead Revolution.