Coffee for Closers | Leads360 Sales & Marketing Blog 

Wall Street started the session today racing toward gains however the latest economic data helped confirm investors’ fears that the economy is falling into a recession.  Investors were looking for data that would be help to stave off a sharp economic slowdown, and at the same time still warrant further cuts of the federal funds rate. Investors pulled the plug on trading for gains when a report from the Philadelphia Federal Reserve showed manufacturing fell more than forecasted. This manufacturing reading is the Conference Board’s gauge of leading economic indicators and it is used to predict which direction the economy is headed. It has posted its fourth straight drop.

As a result traders are already pricing in another interest rate cut, as much as an additional half a percentage point, after minutes from the U.S. Federal Reserve’s last policy-setting meeting were released indicating that the central bank will remain aggressive in regards to  fending off recession. Most economists realize the cuts to the federal funds rate take months to work their way through the economy and may not stop the economy from weakening further.

The Dow, the NASDAQ and S&P 500 all fell sharply as a result of today’s economic news. And finally for the good news, treasury bonds improved today as we see the 10yr note improved by 3.40%, or by -0.133, closing at 3.784. Of course you know this improvement will be reflected in tomorrow mornings rates. Tomorrow may be the right time to lock, however we may see things improve more as the next Feds meeting draws near and the FOMC, Federal Reserve Board, is scheduled to meet again on the 18^th of March. The last meetings notes forecast for slower growth and continued risks to the economy from housing and credit markets.

Now is the time to talk up this market information using our drip marketing feature in your LMS. Also redistribute your old leads and prepare to work them with improved pricing. Realize you need to move quickly as the market has been extremely volatile and has moved as much as 9.0% and back again in a 12 hour period recently. In the last two and a half weeks the 30 yr fixed at par went from 5.125% back to 5.875%. Chances are tomorrow we’ll see 5.75% and possibly 5.625%.

As you prepare for the influx of applications be sure to contact us so we can help! Thank you for reading and have a great evening!

Hello, and welcome to Friday. [APPLAUSE]

It is President’s Day weekend. Some of you will be at work on Monday, and some of you won’t. To those of you who won’t…Lucky. To those of you who will…Smart. A good amount of people will be off work and at home on Monday. Your task for this weekend is to set up your system so that you can reach out to all of them, and I am going to tell you how.

First and foremost, you need to identify the leads in your system with a loan amount between $417,000.00 and $729,750.00 within the United States Metropolitan Statistical Area that you paid for, but never closed. With a good lead managment system, this should be easy. With us, this is simple. If you are a Leads360 client and need assistance, call us TODAY, because this is due by Monday! When you identify these leads, go back one to two months and everything previous, truncate the logs, and throw them into your shark tank. Do an email marketing blast to them talking about how they may be able to benefit from the recent change to the conforming loan amount limit and low rates. Then on Monday morning, or Tuesday for those of you who don’t like to close business, when your loan officers come in, direct them to the shark tank and all of the new leads in it. New leads in this case of course being leads that you paid for in the past but did not close.

The loan officers love the shark tank because they have a ton of new leads to call. Tell your loan officers that you have already sent an introductory email and that they ALL need to be called immediately. Our clients who do this experience a surge in applications every time, and this is without the email marketing, and messaging the facts surrounding the conforming loan limit increase. I’m a huge proponent of the KISS principal. This is a simple task that takes minimal outside of the box thinking, and it shows results.

So, brokers, this is your homework. Whether you are using my LeadManager, or someone else’s, get to work! This is due on Monday, don’t forget.

This is great news! The time is NOW to capitalize on this and close business! Call Leads360 today to discuss how our Enterprise LeadManager software will help your company close more loans. Drip email campaigns for old unclosed leads, and best practices techniques to capture new business, we can help you WIN it all. We’re fired up, and you should be too, this is good for all of us!

…when your competition has to drop your name left and right, and use their version of facts to justify their claims. When I first came to Leads360 I decided to take some time to get to know the competition. A simple Google search brought many of them to the surface. One in particular actually has Leads360’s features listed in comparison to theirs. Of course, theirs is full of green check marks, and Leads360’s is full of red X’s. It’s a blatant falsehood, but the mention of Leads360 on a competitors website says something. I asked why we don’t send a cease and desist and my inquiry was met with a smile and a laugh. I guess it’s not a huge deal. I can live with it.

This morning, another one was brought to my attention. My jaw dropped. I couldn’t believe it, then again, this is business and sometimes, some companies need to…umm…reach down to a…lower level, to distract business from us.

One thing I am proud of, is the business we turn away. Yes, the business that we turn away. Not because the company is not good enough to do business with Leads360. Hardly. Because the company, we feel, is better off working with a competitor based on a full analysis performed on their operation, their hardships, and their needs. I know that our competitors read this blog (hey guys what’s up?!?!), and I know that they can name clients of theirs that we have referred over. Let’s play nice together, we’re all here to help companies close more leads and there is enough room on this mountain for more than a few of us. Just be a little more classy…I’m not saying…I’m just saying.

We’ve taken business from competitors, of course, but not by groveling and throwing out “my dad is better than your dad” schoolyard low blows. Our Sales 2.0 method assures that business won is based on merit, not Sales 1.0 tactics of deceit, and throwing competitors under the bus.

To prospective clients who read this blog, I would recommend that you do your homework. Identify your pains, and then find the doctor who is a specialist in that specific area. You can only do this by talking to all of the top Lead Management companies. My advice would be to sit back and listen to what everyone has to say, and find that one company who can cure your problem. We all do it a little differently.

To our competitors who read this blog, don’t mislead consumers about Leads360 or other companies. If you cannot win business based on what your company has to offer take that as a queue to make your product better. Don’t take that as an opportunity to create false facts about Leads360’s LeadManager. For the record, we practice what we preach, and we took those opportunities to make our product and our service better. There is a reason we are the number one LMS in the industry, and it is not because we lie to prospects to win their business.

…substantially, and soon.

What will you do when that happens? If you are on top of your game you will run a report in your LeadManager to identify all leads in the system with a loan amount above $417,000 and up to whatever the conforming loan amount limit will be. You will then create an email marketing campaign discussing the recent changes and urge them to contact you to discuss potential money saving opportunities that it will make possible. You will also start a call campaign to touch these individuals, aggressively.

But you don’t have to, if you don’t want to. You can sit back and wait for them to call you if you want…cuz, you know, that’s the way it happens anyway, right?

Get proactive, capture business.

Our own Noel Collins put up a blog a few days ago on LeadCritic talking about LeadsCon 2008. It’s at the Palms Casino & Resort on April 2 – 4. I know, most of you are already booking your plane tickets now, huh? Your friends at Leads360 will be there and we would encourage our clients and partners to make an effort to be there as well. It is always great to be able to put names to faces, and this should be an excellent opportunity to network. We look forward to seeing you there!

Congrats to all of our hard working and very smart friends over at Adchemy.   According to Lead Critic, Adchemy has taken a pretty sizable $19 million funding round.   As advertising, lead generation, lead management, and the entire sales cycle moves online, we will see more and more support forming around the Lead Ecosystem.

I’ll make this short and sweet. An old lead, today, is a new lead. Why? Rate drops make old prospects new again. There is money to be found in your old leads, and frankly the amount of work that it takes to find that money, is less than the amount of work it takes to find new money. The question is, what are you doing to take advantage of all of the new opportunity? Within the question, for most, lies the challenge. The challenge is that you, like many, probably aren’t doing enough, or anything period.

Don’t get me wrong, if you are, then more power to you. But if you are not, then we should chat about Best Practices and how they will help you capture NEW business, out of OLD data. Don’t waste time, don’t hesitate, start finding that money now.

An interesting blog post popped up on the Lead Critic today. It concerns the monetization of leads by lead providers. The spotlight is on BigMortgageLeads right now. In question is their apparently new(er?) lead form. A traditional mortgage lead form has around 30 fields of basic information and is sold to a mortgage company. The BML form takes this and expands it a little bit, but this is hardly the first time we’ve seen this. For example, the form asks the question “Are you behind in payments” in regards to your mortgage. If you select “Yes”, it prompts a few more questions that prod a little deeper. One of which is “Would you consider selling your house to avoid foreclosure?” If you answer Yes, it will once again prompt more questions about your home.

I’m sure that you can see where this is going. I would assume that initially, a consumer would think that they are filling out a lead form to be matched with a lender. As they proceed, if they answer questions that prompt more questions, it quickly becomes evident that there are other service providers that this information can go to, and at the bottom right before the submit button, there is an acknowledgement of that.

So the question is…is this bad for the consumer, the lead buyer, both, or neither. I guess that depends on who you ask. I cut my teeth in the mortgage industry selling mortgage leads for a few years. I started at the bottom and worked my way up to management. In doing so I had a lot of view into how leads are generated, and even more importantly, how they are monetized. This is where it gets interesting. I guess most people wouldn’t think of it, but this kind of data is a goldmine and is worth $$$$ to lots of people. Where there is a way to make money, there are people who will make it.

So is this a bad thing? That depends on how you do it, mainly. BigMortgageLeads isn’t the first lead company who has done this and certainly will not be the last. From my experience, the way that BML is doing this, namely by putting the information in front of the consumer as they are filling out the form and then telling them that the lead may be sold to other service providers, is much cleaner than some that I have experienced.

At the end of the day, the numbers will speak for themselves. I am sure that we have some readers who use BML leads and I would urge you to share your experience versus more “traditional” sources.

Furthermore…and this one is maybe playing devil’s advocate here…perhaps this is actually better for consumers than other kinds of lead forms. Why? Well let’s take a look at the past, say, 3 years of experience in the mortgage industry. 3 years ago when a consumer was in any kind of financial trouble, what did they do? They mortgaged their house and used their enourmous home equity like a checking account. Now fast forward and take a look at the state of the industry today, and see where that kind of practice left us. Now take a look at BML’s process. A consumer may be exposed to not only a mortgage lender, but a tax advisor, a real estate agent, a debt counselor, etc. And the operative word here is “may”, because not all leads will spill onto the desks of all providers of course. What does this do for the lead buyer? Does it degrade the quality of the lead? Perhaps. Does it enhance the consumers ability to get the RIGHT help? I would argue yes.

If I owe $25,000 in back taxes and I am uneducated on the subject, maybe my first thought would be to refinance my house and take out cash to pay it off. Is this the right solution for me? Maybe. Maybe not. But without really digging into the subject and talking to multiple people, I may never know. So you could make a valid argument on both sides of this subject and be right I think, but at the end of the day, I think the consumer may actually be better served given the option to take advantage of different avenues if they so choose.

This of course is going on the assumption that even if a consumer fills out the portion of the lead saying that they are behind on payments and want to sell, that the lead is still being sold to a mortgage company. I tend to think that this may not be the case, however.

My two cents, take it as you will.

Image courtesy of GapingVoid 

Anyone in the “Lead Ecosystem” knows that it is a complicated world. 

Lead Providers have a complex formula for generating, pricing, filtering, and distributing leads, in addition to all the integration headaches of providing leads to customers by email, spreadsheet, or through one of many Lead Management Systems.

Meanwhile Lead Management companies have to work with the Lead Providers to make their mutual clients as profitable as possible, while keeping everything running smoothly.  Lead Management companies have to work with hundreds of lead providers, client self-generation and importing of leads,  and exporting those leads to a 3rd party software, such as a Loan Origination System or a client management system.

As convoluted as life is for Lead Providers and Lead Management companies, it’s worse for clients and consumers.

Companies that buy leads, use a lead management system, and otherwise integrate their operations with the “Lead Ecosystem” have a steep learning curve to contend with.  Companies which are used to doing in-house marketing, generating their own leads, gathering referrals, and distributing them on paper, suddenly have to contend with managing multiple vendor relationships–which are all intertwined.  Also successful Lead Buyers have to adjust their workflow and sales process to fit the requirements of working with Internet leads.  That is a lot of learning that a client has to do, before being able to reap the benefits of the Lead Ecosystem.

Consumers often have it the worst.  Consumers have little or no idea about what happens to their data when it is submitted to a lead provider.  They are often totally unprepared for the sales process which they will be exposed to, uneducated about the products which they are interested in, and unequipped to make intelligent decisions.   An unqualified, paralyzed, traumatized, frustrated, or otherwise unreceptive consumer is always going to be the toughest sell.

How do we simplify the Lead Ecosystem for everyone involved?