One of the fastest growing departments within LeadPoint is our United Kingdom division. One of the benefits that our UK cousins have is the fact that lead generation is still in its infancy in the UK compared with the US. This can be both a benefit and an obstacle.

As in the United States, the lead generation pitch makes a lot of sense – reach prospective customers, buy the results of somebody else’s marketing spend, and speak to prospective customers within moments of their requesting to be contacted.

Our UK office felt marketing such a concept to a new market would be a slam dunk and that prospective partners would be lining up around the corner to buy leads.

As evidenced by their 300% growth in 2008, the reception of lead gen in the UK has been strong. However, as is generally the case, success does not come without challenges. Despite our UK team’s best efforts, they were not always able to communicate the value of how lead generation and technology are interlinked.

In the US where work shuts down if the Internet should happen to go down and many of us cannot fathom life without a Blackberry, it appears that the need for technology in the UK (at least in some business sectors) is not as pervasive as in the US.

In one instance our UK office was contacted by a prospective buyer who read in the press about the merits of lead generation and was excited at the prospect of buying them. Unfortunately, the gentleman did not have an email address to receive leads, nor a computer for that matter.

When trying to explain how online lead generation and owning a computer go together like the British summer and rain, he promptly told our sales person that he didn’t like typing so he would not be changing his working practices any time soon.

Our UK office assumed that this was just an isolated incident. Apparently this wasn’t the case. Not long afterwards, another prospective customer contacted them who also did not have a computer. However, this gentleman did not see the lack of a computer as an obstruction to buying Internet generated leads. Instead, he came up with the solution that our UK office should just call him every time he received a lead and read him the lead detail over the phone. He could then just copy the information down himself.

Despite such setbacks, lead generation is continuing to grow in popularity in the UK as it has in the US as word of its value spreads. We congratulate our UK office for their 2008 success and look forward to a successful 2009.

For those of you unfamiliar with Kaizen 改善, it’s a Japanese philosophy focused on continuous improvement. It’s a philosophy that LeadPoint embraces as part of a continued effort to enhance the quality of leads that flow through our market. In keeping with this philosophy, over the last few months we have been improving the measurement protocols used to evaluate each lead that lead sellers submit to each LeadPoint market.  Our efforts were rewarded with some eye opening results.

Online lead generation is inherently a numbers game. Visitors click on an ad. Some of them fill out the form. Others leave. Some visitors convert to actual sales and others don’t provide their real phone numbers. This disparity is the backbone of lead gen.

Some sources have always provided better results than others. We’ve worked diligently to improve our ability to grade leads and sellers effectively.  We’ve learned a lot, some of which we suspected all along and some of which surprised us greatly.  The most shocking discovery was the level of energy some companies will exert to commit what is best described as nothing other than egregious fraud. Our new market monitoring processes have allowed us to quickly identify and remove these bad actors and to refund affected lead buyer funds in a timely fashion.

As a by-product of our efforts and innovations, we have been able to ensure that both valued constituents of our marketplaces can continue to thrive. Our lead buyers can buy with the assurance that they are purchasing a “top shelf” product that yields industry leading conversion metrics. This renewal of confidence in the market resulted in our trusted, quality marketing partners once again capturing top returns on their marketing dollars.

Standing at the doorstep of an exciting 2009, LeadPoint reaffirms its pledge to practice a quality focused Kaizen in our pursuit of attaining market Nirvana, a trading platform where both sides of the model achieve a state of blissful return on investment.

Remember that great scene from Jerry Maguire, (before Tom Cruise went nuts and Cuba Gooding, Jr. sold out his Oscar for movies like “Snow Dogs”)?

Jerry pleaded to Rod Tidwell, “Help me help you!”   This is the same plea that LeadPoint is making to our lead buyers.

LeadPoint’s vision is to provide lead buyers and sellers an efficient trading platform based upon one thing: lead performance.

While it may seem like minor semantics looking at the difference between performance and quality but think about how you would judge a car. When talking about performance, you can specifically cite the car’s zero to sixty time but when describing quality, the language is less tangible. You’d be saying something like “the leather on the seats is the highest quality” but what makes it of the highest quality? What separates the quality of a Bentley’s leather from a Kia’s? The Bentley’s leather might be more soft and supple but how much softer and more supple?

The same sort of quantification should apply when selecting a lead vendor. You should be asking what are your contact rates? What percentage of your leads turn into applications? And what is your average cost per funding? With these numbers you have actionable data from which you can distill performance. Without these numbers, you simply have another lead that might be a Kia as opposed to a Bentley.

Most lead buyers are quick to provide feedback on invalid leads via return requests, but how many lead buyers provide feedback on dispositions other than return requests? Odds are you do not. By NOT doing so however, you are missing a key opportunity to influence your success.

There are a number of ways LeadPoint measures, monitors and maintains lead performance. In a previous post, we spoke about how we vet our sellers before they join the market. But the process does not stop there. We also monitor performance via buyer feedback. Most lead buyers are quick to provide negative feedback by way of return requests but more need to enter positive feedback, like contact ratios, application ratios, approval ratios or funding ratios.

This positive feedback will enable your account manager to identify and optimize your account for greater success. If you don’t know how to leave feedback, contact your account manager and they will happily walk you though the process.

The second way we monitor lead performance is though our call centers. When a new seller starts sending leads into the market, we call their leads before they hit buyers and we randomly call on leads once a seller is live in the market. While there are nuances as to how we operate and call upon leads with our call centers, these calls provide a front line look at the performance of a seller’s leads and give us a rapid way to develop a picture of a seller’s leads without impacting the exchange.

The feedback from our call centers and buyers doesn’t simply disappear into the ether but gets rolled up into an algorithm and reporting function. This data is then applied against lead sellers’ accounts to determine whether or not we cut or keep a certain seller. If a seller’s leads perform, we keep them but we continually monitor the leads they send in. If a seller’s leads fail to perform, they are cut. As someone who works with the sellers, having that data makes the conversation to cut malicious sellers very easy because it makes their shenanigans standout from the crowd. In the end, few dispute what they’ve done and accept their fate of being banned from the market without argument.

LeadPoint has in my completely biased opinion one of the best technology platforms in the world. But in their end, we are trying to build a market that neither fears nor favors anyone. We simply want to be the place where lead buyers and lead sellers are able to do what my finance professor used to rant about – be profit maximizers. Leaving feedback both positive and negative enables us to help you do exactly that. If you have any additional questions, call your account manager or leave a comment.