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.