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Everything we know about the lead business from everyone at the Leads360 family. From online lead providers like LowerMyBills.com to Mortgage Lead Management best practices. We'll tell you what we know and what we've learned.  

LeadsCon 2010 – Well Played

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SPOILER ALERT – This blog post is going to be self serving so stop now if you don’t want to know why Leads360 rocked LeadsCon 2010.

Mirage Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas Nevada – Leads360 and 50 other sponsors of the 3rd annual LeadsCon show proved that the lead generation industry is thriving. About 2000 attendees spent two days learning about lead generation, lead scoring, and lead management among other topics.

Leads360 had a strong showing with over ten representatives bouncing from session to session, panel to panel, interview to interview and at our corporate booth, managing a swarm of interested people until the closing bell. Our marketing approach was simple, thought leadership, best practices, and brand. Of course I’m biased, but we nailed it. But I’m not the only one; Greg Coleman from LeadQual, who provides lead qualification and live transfer solutions, said “…wanted to congratulate you guys for your efforts at LeadsCon. Definitely a lot of buzz about you guys. Clearly Leads360 is positioned as a leader in Lead Management…” – ask just about anyone at the show who made a splash and Leads360 will be top of the list.  We certainly were not the only company to have a good show as we know that our friends at TARGUSinfo, DoublePositive and many other companies we’re thrilled as well.  Big thanks to Jay and Michelle @Leadscon for making it all happen.  Here is how it all went down:

Day 1 (Tuesday) – I joined a panel of industry leaders including Matt Tillman from Adchemy, Mark Fowler from LendingTree, Sheilin Herrick from AIS, Segev Tsfati from Walden University, and half a dozen from the DoublePositive team to discuss the benefits of Hot Transfer Leads, which was a widely discussed topic at the show. Everyone knows the importance of calling new leads quickly, but Sheilin Herrick from AIS made it pretty clear that the easiest way to call in 5 minutes or less was to use a 3rd party call center for live transfers.  AIS uses DoublePositive, of course. Tillman and Fowler both commented on how Leads360’s lead management platform is critical to a successful live transfer program and Joey Liner from DoublePositive reinforced that statement when he explained how his best clients use Leads360 as the “quarterback” for their entire lead contacting strategy.

At noon on Tuesday the exhibit hall opened – there was a mad rush to the Leads360 booth. We had to scarf down our lunch to get back to our posts and field all the questions from clients, partners, and prospects. Ryan McClintock must have given no less than 50 demos on our flat screen and Rob Rokoff funneled in enthusiastic referrals from our network of lead provider partners. The whole exhibit hall was packed and that didn’t stop after happy hour started; the only thing that changed was that both sides of the table had beers in hand as they exchanged strategies and best practices.

Nisheeth Singh, our Director of Strategic Intelligence, was on hand doling out knowledge he’d uncovered from analysis of our 20+ million leads.  Leads360 has been working hard to leverage our very large database of leads and conversion data. Because we have such a large client footprint (of which many where at the show), we can provide industry trends and benchmarks based on key metrics and data points. This is a big part of our thought leadership strategy and it was very well received. In fact on day 2 Nick Hedges was part of a LeadsCon panel that Jay Weintraub put together called “End of the Funnel” where he shared some of the most powerful findings from a recent analysis project (more on that in a minute).

That night the strategy didn’t end. Leads360 hosted another one of our famous dinners where the most successful clients, thought leaders and other industry gurus gathered to swap knowledge. In attendance was Clarissa Shen of Apollo/University of Phoenix, Neil Kaplan from Vantage Media, Phil Baltazar from America Funding (aka the Godfather), Mel Guymon from Google and 20 more influential people in the lead ecosystem.

Day 2 (Wed) – We got things started with a 9AM session called “Extreme Lead Management” where we broke the mold for sponsored sessions.  Over 120 people watched intently as I demonstrated three common, but frequently dysfunctional sales situations.  We created three videos depicting office situations that just about everyone could relate too (watch them on YouTube, click here or the image below).

I’m going to re-record the full Leadscon session as a webinar, which will be available on our site in the near future for those who couldn’t make it to Leadscon or for those that couldn’t wake up. This session was a perfect setup for Nick’s panel that followed just after. It was clear people were hungry for data. They were hungry for best practices. They didn’t want to re-invent the wheel; they just wanted to know what worked and what to do. We made it a priority to do the work to answer those questions in time for the show.

At 11AM everyone filed into the main hall for the “End of the Funnel” session moderated by Mike Ferree (aka LeadCritic) and featuring panelists Nick Hedges from Leads360, Sheilin Herrick from AIS, and Jessica Manna from Residential Finance.  Nick started it all by reviewing the results of our most recent round of data analysis on the performance of millions of leads.  We found important best practices call frequency and speed-to-contact. There is much more to this study and we’re in the process of packaging it like our Six Call Attempts Study which can be downloaded for free here. Look for the call frequency study soon on Leads360.com. More than 300 people packed the room listening and frantically scribbling down on paper what was being shared by the panel.

Following the panel, the exhibit hall opened again and there were no less than ten people in front of the Leads360 booth at any one time. Seriously, it was inspiring – both for our industry, but also for our company. People came up and said “I’m not sure I need your software, but I want to figure out a way to work with you.” The videos from my session where a big hit; people came by to congratulate us and were so excited about the impact they made. There was another company called 360Media who was compelled to come by our booth because they had so many people coming to them saying how much they appreciated our sessions and panel – they had to stop them and say “I think you’re looking for Leads360…”

We had a great show. If you were there; I’m sure you did as well. We’re very excited about the state of our industry and the growing interest in the lead generation space. That’s good news for Leadscon and all of the sponsors, Leads360 included.

If you were at the show and didn’t get to meet us, drop us a line because we would love to work together. That’s our bag. Even if we can’t sell you Lead Management software (although we’ll try), we want to be a useful resource for you, whatever that means.

Pass the Beans!

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