Founded by Howard Yeh and Brad Seiler, both names should sound very familiar to those who have spent time in the LeadsCon ecosystem. Howard was previously the co-founder of BrokersWeb, which he grew to become one of the largest vertical click media networks in just two short years, catching the eye of many companies, one being Vantage Media who purchased BrokersWeb in September 2011. Brad Seiler is the founder of Boberdoo, among the longest running lead management and distribution software providers.

ContactUs.com, as the name might imply, is focused on taking the typical “Contact Us” link and experience and turning it into an end-to-end lead-gen, lead-management, and marketing automation platform. Sounds complex, but it’s all turn-key, offering enterprise level features with consumer internet ease. ContactUs.com is geared towards smaller businesses who haven’t historically had access to the software, processes, and knowledge of those familiar with more advanced online customer acquisition and lead management.

Says Howard, “I met Brad when I was running our online marketing campaigns for BrokersWeb. After leaving Vantage Media post-merger, Brad and I started talking about the larger opportunity for lead-gen. Aggregators play an important role, but for my next business I was excited about the market opportunity to build tools for end-users of leads. Even businesses that have online marketing budgets aren’t doing the basics that we in the performance marketing industry know as gospel. Things like funnel optimization, lead nurturing, real-time delivery, timed call-backs, lead disposition, call-tracking, source attribution and mobile-optimized experiences. From the front-end, those websites aren’t converting enough visitors into leads, and their primitive lead systems and processes aren’t converting enough leads into sales. We thought, ‘What if we could package something together that does all of that, and what if we found a great entry point – like the Contact Us form experience?’ We knew we could define and build a great product and a profitable business model. In ContactUs.com, we’re packaging together what we know is used by advanced online marketers, stripping out what isn’t absolutely necessary, and packaging it together into an easy-to-deploy, easy-to-configure system.”

Official Launch Press Release: http://www.leadcloud.us/leadcloud-launches/
Sales Sheet:  www.LeadCloud.us/LeadCloudBrochure.pdf
Website:  www.LeadCloud.us
Get Connected:   Lead Buyers |  Lead Sellers

PerformLine – Partnership News and Stats
In a release out today, PerformLine announced that Datamark, 2U, Northcentral University and other leading education companies select PerformMatch™ as best solution to handle their compliance monitoring efforts. Read full release here.

It’s been a busy month for the company who in December had another release, announcing stats from the Call Center Monitoring product. The highlights include

• Have over 3.5 Billion observations in their database
• Are processing of 50 Million unique compliance observations a day
• Have transcribed and monitored almost over half a million minutes of recordings (over 600K really now)
  • This is almost 150K actual calls with an average call length of 4:13
• Have monitoring across over 30 separate call centers
• In Decembers alone, they found over 9K potential violations
  • 75% external vendor’s call centers, 25% from own internal call centers
• Have saved over 10,000 man hours of manual QA
• Are monitoring for over 500 banned and required terms/phrases uniquely defined for Call Center channel

Read full release here.

Nick Chapman founded LeadPoint UK in 2005 and over the last 7 years has overseen the growth of company to establish it as one of the largest and most successful lead generation businesses in the UK. During his tenure, the company has won numerous awards including placing in the top 50 fastest growing tech companies in the UK for the last two years.

Initially launching in mortgages and loans in the UK, LeadPoint now trades in over 20 products and supplies over 5,000 leads per day to a range of companies from SMEs to national brands.

LeadPoint UK provides a range of lead generation solutions for lead buyers and sellers. LeadPoint UK currently trades over 5,000 real-time data leads per day in over 20 lead verticals including Mortgages, Loans, Insurance, Debt Management & IVA, Legal Services and Cosmetic Surgery.

Nick Chapman, LeadPoint UK Managing Director said:

“After seven wonderful years I have decided it’s time for a new challenge. I am so proud of what the team has achieved during my time at LeadPoint.

Our phenomenal growth and success can be attributed to the quality and dedication of the team we have built and our relentless focus on delivering value to our customers.

I would like to thank all of our staff and customers that we have worked with over the last few years and I hope that LeadPoint can continue to build on the success we have created.”

Justin Rees, LeadPoint UK Director of Marketing and Partnerships said:

“Nick has been the driving force behind the success of LeadPoint in the UK and it will be sad to see him go. While all the accolades that the company has received during his tenure have undoubtedly been welcome, his greatest legacy will be the culture and team he built over the last few years.

I would like to personally thank him for everything he has done for the company and wish him all the best for the future.”

Media enquires:  Justin Rees, Director of Marketing and Partnerships, LeadPoint UK Ltd, 0203 170 7728

The difference between the 2002 – 2008 era and the 2010 – today one could not be more pronounced. The famous short seller and at times rabble rouser Steve Eisman has been an outspoken critic of the for-profit-industry, how much of that is due self interest from his financial positions betting against the education sector and personal beliefs about for-profit-education is hard to tell. One thing is clear, there are some similarities between the housing crisis and what some might consider call an education crisis stemming from a wide variety of factors including overall unemployment, student loan debt, cost of tuition, and overall competitiveness (to name a few).

The challenges facing the education industry are not the result of or unique to the for-profit-sector. These are challenges facing the country, but given the tenuous relationship between education and commerce, the for-profit sector will over index with regards to criticism and scrutiny. Unlike the banking industry, the for-profit education sector cannot and will not cause a major economic collapse. But there are some similarities operationally. Unlike banking, the bad actors were fewer, their positions in the organization much less senior, and the ability to cause problems much more limited in size and scope.

Some of what I learned today:

• Lowering tuition is not as easy as it sounds. Title IV specifies that in the case of for-profit colleges, at least 10% of a school’s funding come from something other than federal financial aid (commonly Pell Grants and Loans). If they lower tuition, which they would have to do across the board, schools would struggle to meet the 90/10 rule. It’s too bad there isn’t the equivalent of in state and out of state that could allow for variable pricing.
• Marketing vs. academic spending. It is unfair to criticize for-profit schools for spending more money as a percent of expenses on marketing than traditional schools. They do not have the public funds that traditional schools do. They do not have the revenue from sports and other activities that drive brand and school funding.
• Speaking of brand, arguably one of the biggest lessons learned over the past several years is the importance of brand. But, it’s hard for businesses that are often judged by very specific metrics to spend money on brand.
• Speaking of metrics, being tied to metrics with less flexibility on spend, meant that many institutions became arguably too reliant on leads. It is a component of the spend, but it should not be the only spend. There is certainly nothing wrong with leads though.
• Speaking of leads, the biggest challenge over the past several years has been transparency, or as some call the great big blender in the sky. During boom times, unqualified leads are less of an issue, but during times of heightened scrutiny across the board (regulatory, student performance, etc.), and greater punishments for improper behavior, unqualified leads is a big deal. The good news is that things are changing.
• Speaking of quality, consistent quality has been the hardest to thing to find, especially at scale. For the same reasons that the environment is no longer as “easy” to operate, it is also helping weed out the good from the bad. There comes a point when the bad guys cannot afford to keep playing, and we are hopefully entering that phase.
• Also regarding quality, we are also entering a period where student success can start to be tied to origin of that student; that along with a greater emphasis of encouraging those for whom this modality is not right to discontinue, will help the long-term success of all parties.
• Finally, despite the at times deserved criticism, similar to banks, for-profit schools serve a group that are not as likely to be served by any other type of institution. Community colleges don’t have the resources, and companies have yet to create meaningful certification programs or vocational training as an alternative.

The road forward may not be getting easier, but at least that doesn’t imply a lack of optimism. The road ahead may be challenging, but it’s the rewarding type of challenge for those who enjoy the mission.

1. LeadsCon Sponsor BMI Elite has upped the ante on rewarding good work. They surprised their head of Finance with a new car. Perhaps a little irony there but a great story.

2. AARP Con Art Story is an interesting read and told from the perspective from one who worked call center driven scams.  The article doesn’t help give Florida a better name, but it does shed light on some correlations that might not have seemed obvious, e.g., the type of people who make for good call reps. Equally interesting from my perspective is that many of the scams actually spent the money to produce an informercial, hire a celebrity spokesperson, and buy television time. I would have assumed most were just robo-call style.

3. FTC Expands Fight Against Deceptive Business Schemes- More Than 70 Actions Brought By FTC and Its Law Enforcement Partners. As the release states, “The defendants in the FTC’s cases allegedly lured consumers with deceptive offers to help them start businesses as mystery shoppers, credit card processors, website operators, and government insurance refund processors.” Earlier federal-state enforcement efforts against consumer financial fraud include Operation Empty Promises, Operation Bottom Dollar, and Operation Short Change. LeadsCon East 2012 attendees heard from a senior FTC official and saw a different side of the agency, one that is by no means anti-marketing.

4. Speaking of enforcement, here is an article from September 2012 from LeadsCon speaker and Venable Partner Jonathan Pompan, titled, “What to Expect When You’re Under a CFPB Investigation.”

5. LeadsCouncil Council Call – the last “Council Call” of the year is taking place on December 11, 2012. It is titled, “Telemarketing, Email and Text Message Marketing: Tips to Avoid Lawsuits.” Contact LeadsCouncil Director Michael Ferree (mferree at leadsouncil) if interested and obtaining one of the few guest passes for the call.

For me, it feels like just yesterday that I was meeting with Michelle Troop trying to convince her that a conference focusing on lead generation not only made sense but that someone other than the two of us would attend.

Neither of us would have predicted that our first event would draw 600 people. Similarly, we wouldn’t have guessed that five years later, our two shows would see almost 5000 people between them.

The industry that we serve has always had its share of challenges. No industry is without them. For lead generation and LeadsCon, one that we have faced since inception is reputational. “Lead generation” for some people is a dirty word, and we even had a panel on the topic during our Las Vegas 2012 show.

The presence of bad players does not make an entire industry without merit. Just think of search, namely SEO. Outside of advertisements for pills, perhaps the biggest single solicitation we receive is for SEO services. These companies have no site of their own. They claim to have found you by “not clicking” on a paid ad, and try to entice you by offering an audit. Their messages are emotional, like fortune tellers, they share solutions to pains any business will have, not just yours. That they look to sell vaporware doesn’t take away from the value that real SEO offers. That’s how I think about lead generation.

Lately, due to pressures faced by the education industry, lead gen, as a term, has once again come into focus. Marketers and institutions have looked to rid their vocabulary of “leads,” preferring inquiry instead. It does not change the flow, but it sounds less commoditized.

When we began LeadsCon, we always knew that the term was a blessing and a curse. It was a blessing in that it effectively described the behavior of a growing group of marketers. These were marketers not looking to buy impressions or clicks but to connect with an interested consumer. Similarly, there was a new breed of marketer who was able to help businesses by working with them on this type of interest instead of charging for their services on a per click or impression basis.

What has differentiated LeadsCon from other advertising events, even those that have dealt with leads, is that instead of trying to connect companies with data, the focus has been on real-time interest. That was the great innovation of the web, that a user could complete a form with information helpful to the business that might service them. And not only could they collect better, more specific information, they could collect it at the time the user expressed it.

LeadsCon in other words has not been about “leads,” even though the name has the letters in it. LeadsCon has and continues to be about how companies and customers connect; the marketing and the technologies that enable fast, better service. One day, we hope that is how others will see the world of lead generation. It is no worse of a term than a user being a “click” on a website. It is an objective description, a B2B term, not a subjective, B2C label.

Below is a list of tech company’s who IPO’d in 2011. Can you plug in the appropriate stock performance?

The choices are:
-0.98%
-37.15%
+40.16%
-0.95%
-20.99%
-33.15%

What is your guess? Notice. Two stocks were relatively flat. Three lost more than 20%, with the average being closer to 30%. Only one was positive and by a lot.

Is your guess something like this?

What if we said the actual answer looked like this?

That’s right. Of all the tech IPO’s including some of the most anticipated and hyped companies, only one had a win, and only one looked like this:

Bankrate (RATE).

Compliance is the ongoing battle to not run into legal hurdles. The downsides of non-compliance are huge expenses. Fraud is the ongoing battle to insure data integrity. It is like Chinese water torture for a lead buyer.

We came across this stat below. It’s from the leading fraud monitoring company, Fraudlogix. While not 90%, fully 15% of leads are fraud. What is fraud? The problem is that fraud can be and usually is real data. It’s more insidious than click fraud, because it’s engages and wastes human capital. Data fraud is zero intent traffic. The person’s whose information is entered didn’t do it, and they have no desire to be contacted. They will pass validation software and could even score well as a lead, but the only customer they will turn into is an angry one.

The Fraud Paradox is what those who contemplate minimizing their fraud go through. They look at the above data and do the math. If they run a $100,000 per month operation, they are looking at losing $15,000. At $1.5mm per month, they are looking at $150,000 PER MONTH in lost revenue. The problem is a simple one. Lead markets are poorly optimized. If a seller cuts out 15% of absolutely non-performing traffic, they do not see a 15% bump in prices to make up for the lost revenue. They could argue for a greater than 15% bump given that there are labor savings as well. The fact is that they won’t see any bump. So, their incentive for using fraud monitoring is limited only to a last resort, where they will lose the business entirely.

The second part of the Fraud Paradox is what happens after someone actually starts to implement fraud monitoring. (The someone in this case is almost always an aggregator, and fraud monitoring, like compliance, only works when the landing pages of where the data is collected is tagged.) When someone starts to implement fraud monitoring, the fear of losing business has them only use the service sparingly…at first. It then become like a radar detector for a car. They start to realize that instead of living in fear, they can actually start to open up their marketing efforts to more sources. The net result – virtually everyone who uses these services sees an uptick in their business over time.

Vantage Media and BrokersWeb Combine to Create Multi-Vertical Leader in Online Customer Acquisition.

That’s the title of the release that hit the wires this morning. It’s an announcement that, in some ways, is long overdue. BrokersWeb had begun a process (the term used for a company hiring a bank for fundraising or m&a) earlier this year to seek a strategic acquirer, but it was pulled from the market relatively quickly. The company, though, did not take in any money or change their strategy, i.e., desire to be acquired. At the same time, months and months went by without any word about the not-abandoned process. Until now that is.

Had I been asked to guess which company would most likely acquire BrokersWeb, I’m not sure I would have guessed Vantage Media. In fact, I’m pretty sure I would not have guessed them at all. I would have looked to one of the two public companies in the space – QuinStreet or BankRate – as the most likely acquirers. Both QNST and RATE have core products offering vertical click marketplaces, and while each already has their own auto insurance click marketplace, buying BrokersWeb could have helped them essentially lock up the market. For QNST, buying BrokersWeb would have helped them consolidate a competitor that in the last 16 months has gone from non-existent entrant to serious pain in their side. Were I asked to guess what company Vantage Media might buy, with the hint being it could be a big acquisition, I probably would have put BrokersWeb up high on the hit list.

Vantage Media may not be a household name, but the company is anything but an upstart in the online customer acquisition space. The DiPaola brothers started the business more than a decade ago, discovering paid search when doing some almost accidental affiliate marketing for Crutchfield, and then becoming one of the earliest players to focus on education. Vantage Media focused exclusively on for-profit education via search, and the span of a few short years became a $30mm+ player at a time when very few companies had achieved such scale. The brothers sold a majority of the business to venture / private equity firms four years back, and the new management team looked to take the business beyond education. Vantage never left education, but they started to position themselves as a search marketing agency that took principal risk. Earlier this year, the company underwent a transition again with a new CEO taking over, Patrick Quigley, one of, if not the first employees of QuinStreet.

We have covered BrokersWeb a number of times on this site. The company began as a health insurance play, leveraging its suite of organic domains and a select group of partners. As QuinStreet’s auto insurance click marketplace started to take off (thanks for its acquisition of SureHits), BrokersWeb decided that they would focus their efforts less on health insurance and build an auto click marketplace. The move made sense, especially in light of the changes taking place on a policy level with health insurance with new laws lowering how much agents made on new policies. The move paid off big with BrokersWeb posting ridiculous growth, numbers like $2mm to $16mm to $40mm+. The only downside to this growth was that their overall headcount didn’t increase during their exponential growth, meaning the company didn’t have an infrastructure that would allow them to confidently continue that growth. They knew they had the proverbial bull by the horns, but they also knew it could buck them off if they didn’t take action.

Combining BrokersWeb with Vantage brings together an interesting set of disciplines across multiple verticals not to mention a company that should do well north of $150mm in 2011 with $200mm+ a realistic target for 2012. Also of note, this was less about an asset, e.g., acquiring an agent base, and all about acquiring a team. Vantage saw what the BrokersWeb team could do, and obviously views this as a chance to aid them as they look to repeat the success of auto insurance into other verticals (education anyone?). That BrokersWeb didn’t look to find just the largest buyer (Vantage is big but not that big) tells me the team at BrokersWeb cared less about the money and more about building a big business, which is great news for the industry. Congratulations to both companies.

Those who have been in the lead generation space for any appreciable amount of time will know Jordon’s work even if they don’t know his name. Alongside Luciano Rammairone, Jordon led ClassesUSA from concept to sizable exit to Experian Interactive all while teaching others in the space how to think about the online education lead generation business. Luciano is the Chairman of one of the largest online and offline education lead businesses, CollegeBound Network while Jordon has dedicated the last several years to doing what he does so well – breaking down barriers. Keltz made an early bet on the senior living space at a time when the buyers were just getting comfortable with pay per move-ins not even leads. I’m sure he and the team have some stories about their efforts to facilities happy with local print ads to leads. (“What? They don’t just walk in? We have to call?”)

Similar to senior housing, the market for green lead gen is in its infancy. It’s much smaller than senior housing is today and has some built in limitations. Solar lead generation is the biggest sub-segment.

• Solar panels though are only good for homes that see enough sun to offset the high cost of installation.
• They rely on government subsidies which could go away
• They don’t have a large organic demand, i.e., people aren’t thinking about them
• There is some built in competition from existing home improvement lead gen sites as it’s a similar buyer base (think how mortgage loan officers pivoted into debt when the market changed)

No industry is perfect, and if solar / green lead gen looked so easy, we would already see many competitors. The hardest part for any vertical is building the market – both the user demand and the buyer base. The good news here is that, like senior housing, the long-term fundamentals are there. Given that Jordon has been spot on twice before has me thinking, that in 18 months time or less, we’ll be seeing many more companies paying attention to the green lead gen space. While I don’t necessarily wish more competition, it would be great for the industry as a whole to continue to service new sectors.