Shameless LeadsCon Plug – Call Verified Leads
Almost six months have passed since our last series of articles profiling key themes in lead generation. Our well meaning articles did contain a slight bit of disingenuity, as they specifically covered themes that correlated with topics being discussed at LeadsCon. We described the process by saying, “Imagine a thought provoking article about a topic of interest, but it just so happens that the piece in question ties really nicely into a not to subtle plug to attend an event covering similar topics. If you can’t imagine that, don’t worry. This is what such an article looks like. So shameless are we, that each week leading up to the event, we’ll focus on a different aspect of lead generation being covered.” Well, it’s that time again. At least it comes with a discount at the end.
Call Verified Leads – Lead Laundering or Long-term Gem
The phone has always played a significant role in the world of lead generation. When we look at the flow of dollars, the vast majority of lead spend goes towards getting a user to hear what a company has to offer. It is not surprising then that many of the advances within the lead generation space have some element of telephony involved. DoublePositive was one of the first companies to make a name for itself trying to improve upon the phone experience. Their initial business had two components, but both focused on a then unexplored notion – hot transfers.
The hot transfer was a simple but powerful iteration – get a user on the phone and transfer them right to someone who could help. People dialed leads then, but generally, they did so only to validate and confirm. The transfer not only made for a better user experience, it also made for a better conversion. As a result, transfers could fetch a far superior rate, easily over a hundred dollars for certain segments. It had, and still does have, one problem – scale. Getting people on the phone is not easy. Getting them on the phone and then having someone to transfer them to is even harder. It’s a coverage issue. It’s much easier to sell leads and then let buyers call when they want. It probably makes sense then, that people would start to decouple the process. They would leverage automated and/or inexpensive call centers to get people on the phone, but instead of having them transferred, the leads would end up as a data submission.
Embarrassingly, it took me longer to understand the concept than it should, especially as it’s just arbitrage – labor arbitrage. The same reason that hot transfers can work is the same reasons these can work. If it costs $10/hr for a call center worker (cheaper overseas), that person needs to submit one lead per hour for the company to make money. As it costs money for the leads in the first place, the phone rep needs to do a little better than one per hour. The cheaper the data, the lower the lead per hour success rate needs to be. The process confused me initially because I couldn’t understand why someone would call a lead, have it end up as data for a buyer only to be called again. It seems so inefficient. It still is, but that’s why the name call verified has stuck. The first part of the process uses the phone to get partial to no intent data turned into the lead. The seller is “verifying” the data using the phone. It can work for almost anything. I’m surprised someone doesn’t pick up a phone book to sign-up groupon email addresses. Get three deals per user to earn $10/lead total, and you could easily have a profitable call verified deal.
The daily deals example highlights the real issue with call verified. More and more, the phone is used to sell people. They aren’t call verified, they are call sold leads or call persuasion leads. They aren’t verified but taken from no interest to enough interest to move them along to the second step. That’s not to say that all call verified leads are bad, but for many of the more developed markets, like education, they probably are. People know about education already. The latent demand has been filled. Getting traffic is harder and harder as a result. That leads people to take more aggressive tactics with less and less qualified traffic.
The abilities of the phone and the difficulty in generating organic traffic explain the rise and reemergence of the reg path. For buyers, they wouldn’t buy a lead from a reg path. Have that lead go from reg path to call center to buyer’s form, and voila, the buyer buys the reg path. The buyer doesn’t know if the person is really interested or qualified. It just looks like a lead. Even more challenging, the buyer doesn’t know what was said on the phone. They don’t know what promises might have been made. Call recordings often exist, but no buyer has the bandwidth to go through all calls (not that sellers share). That, more than the issue of quality, is the risk for call verified leads. If they stick closer and closer to the notion of verified, they work. Once they start turning into sold or persuaded leads, the system breaks down.
Want to hear more? Shameless plug time. Go to LeadsCon East – August 24th and 25th at the Hilton NY. Click here to save $150. Curious who is exhibiting? That’s here. View the full conference program here, and see the list of 600+ companies attending here. Looking for more shameless plugs? Don’t worry. There is always next week.
