This post was inspired by a great article written by Sean Hannon this week. In his article, which is focused on understanding investment results, he used this simple chart to illustrate the possible results of an investment (I have reproduced this chart with my own color-coding):

Sean’s point is that you should only feel truly successful about when you have a good outcome that is produced by a good process. If you invest in a stock on a whim and it happens to produce a great return, you should not consider yourself a great investor–you should think of yourself as a lucky gambler. Similarly, if you are using a proven system that works, and you get a bad outcome sometimes, you shouldn’t feel too bad. Over time the right process will produce good outcomes more often then the bad process.

The mortgage industry will get better.  In fact, almost everyone agrees that the mortgage industry will improve.  We have heard our President and economists claim our country’s financial health is stable but isn’t that kind of like saying “It can’t get any worse”.   Surely it can’t get worse, could it?  Are we somehow missing the signs of economic improvement?  Are we deaf and blind to the signals and signs of a recovering mortgage industry? 

The enterprise platform space has been crowded for a long time, but Salesforce’s AppExchange platform model has been allowed to reign relatively freely, until recently. Today Erik Schonfeld blogged that Intuit has announced that they are opening their Quickbase platform to developers for small business applications. Intuit joins a growing list of enterprise platform contenders including big dogs Google and Salesforce. Read the article here.

So what? Well here’s the what. Competition in this space is very interesting because of three main factors:

For those who missed it, the outrageously well-funded online real-estate “start-up” Zillow opened the doors on its Mortgage Marketplace this week.

It’s a very interesting model and one that has the potential to cause a mini-revolution in the mortgage lead industry. Why? Primarily because they are handing out free leads to almost anyone who wants them. This is how it works:

For the lender:

• The lender signs up and pays a $25 sign-on fee
• Zillow verifies that the lender is bonafide
• The lender is ready to start receiving “free” leads

For the buyer:

Today we announced that Ed Ojdana, the former CEO of Experian Interactive and founder of ConsumerInfo.com, has joined the Leads360 Board. We are excited to have Ed’s considerable experience and insight to guide us. Click here to read the press release or click here to download a pdf version.

If you are attending Leadscon this week, don’t miss Ed’s keynote address tomorrow. We’ll see you there.

No one who has been paying attention to the mortgage implosion would be surprised by today’s New York Times article about KPMG.  Accounting firms have clearly been complicit in allowing lenders and banks to mask the risks of mortgage packages and mortgage-backed securities.  But, this is nothing new.  As we saw with Enron, WorldCom, and myriad other examples of corporate malfeasance, accounting firms often act in the interest of the current management of a company, rather than in the interest of long-term shareholders, employees, or even common sense.

Here are some highlights:

We live and breathe lead management but we often run into prospects and partners that seem a little lost when they try to get their heads wrapped around what we do. It’s not their fault. Lead Management is still a new world and the basic concepts are just starting to get some mainstream business penetration. Leads360’s own Noel Collins has written his first post in a multi-part series explaining how to evaluate a Lead Management Software or Solution. Please visit Lead Critic to check it out.

People, you heard it here first, okay maybe second, or third, but you heard it here nonetheless. As of now, you should be marketing to all of the old leads in your database so you can capture business that you missed out on in the past. There are strategies to make you successful doing this, they are called Best Practices, and we would like to share them with you.

TechCrunch points us to more news about the growth of internet advertising:

Two reports are out today on the size of the Internet advertising market. The Interactive Advertising Bureau has a preliminary estimate of $21.1 billion for U.S. Internet ads in 2007, a 25 percent increase over 2006. (For the fourth quarter of 2007, it is estimating $5.7 billion for the size of the industry, up from $5.2 billion in the third quarter).

Meanwhile, the Kelsey Group puts U.S. Internet advertising at $22.5 billion for 2007 (IDC, as previously reported, is at the high end with $25.5 billion). Click here to read more.