Lead Gen Mixer – June 12th in San Francisco

As many of you know, the lead generation industry is filled with introverted, anti-social nerds who prefer quiet nights at home watching Dr. Who re-runs over interacting with others. With that in mind, Jay Weintraub (founder of the amazing LeadsCon lead generation conference) and yours truly (founder of the LinkedIn Online Lead Generation group) are proud to announce the first of what we hope will be many lead gen mixers!

The event will take place at the Thirsty Bear brew-pub from 6-8PM on Thursday, June 12th. Due to space constraints, we will likely have to limit attendance to about 150 people. In a few days, we’ll be posting a link to where you can purchase a ticket to the event. There will be a very small charge to attend (mostly so that we only get RSVPs from people who are actually intent on attending!), but we’ll also be getting some sponsors to pitch in some dollars (if your company wants to sponsor, contact Jay at jay (at) leadscon.com), which means that the vast majority of your unlimited beer, wine, and appetizers will be covered by someone else.

We’ll do our best to give preference to attendees of LeadsCon and members of the Online Lead Gen group, but I suspect that most tickets will be grabbed by those who act fast.

I look forward to meeting a lot of you there!

 

Lesson from LeadsCon: Leads Are Dying

I just got back from a whirlwind trip to Las Vegas for the inaugural LeadsCon conference – the first conference created entirely for the online lead generation industry. If conference attendance is an indicator of the health of the lead gen industry, lead gen is doing quite well.

To wit, conference creator Jay Weintraub had hoped to get 300 attendees and he ended up turning people away after more than 600 registrants invaded the Palms ballroom (indeed, I also heard that some people at the investment banking conference down the hall were trying to sneak into LeadsCon as well).

So now that lead gen had its own conference and over-subscribed interest, you might deduce that “the lead” as a form of online marketing has finally arrived. After listening to the speakers on stage at LeadsCon and the chatter in the hallways, I’d argue that the lead is dying.

If there was one overarching theme of LeadCon, it was “lead quality.” For example, a major sponsor of the conference was eBureau. What does eBureau do, you ask? Real time scoring of lead quality (sort of like a credit check). This enables lead buyers and sellers to quickly determine the likelihood that a lead will turn into an actual sale, rather than waiting 30 to 90 days to reconcile their data. A similar service is offered by TargusInfo.

There was an entire session on “hot transfers”, which is basically when a lead seller talks to a person who submitted an online lead on the phone to verify that a) the person actually exists; b) that the contact info is correct; and c) that the person is truly interested in the service or product for which they submitted a form. Once the lead is verified, the seller can obtain a premium price from the buyer.

And in my many discussions with lead sellers at the show, the number one answer I received to the question “how are you different from other lead sellers” was “our ability to scrub leads and only deliver qualified leads to our buyers.” Indeed, as one speaker aptly put it: in 2002, buyers just wanted quantity at all costs, today they only want leads if they are quality.

Think about the evolution of online advertising – in 1996, there were page sponsorships (no guarantee of impressions, clicks, leads, or sales); by 1999, CPMs were king (cost per thousand, a guarantee of impressions). Overture and Google made CPC hot in 2002 (cost per click, a guarantee of a click). Affiliate marketing and lead generation (Commission Junction, LowerMyBills, Quinstreet, etc) created a massive industry for lead-based marketing over the last several years (guaranteed lead). Any way you slice it, publishers (in this case, lead sellers) are taking more and more of the risk, in exchange for a greater percentage of the return on the sale from the lead buyers.

The emphasis on lead quality is indicative of a further shift toward greater risk for the publisher and greater share of the return – revenue share marketing. Let’s face it, when a lead buyer expects his sellers to use a credit rating type system like eBureau, develop their own internal filters, and then hot transfer the lead, the lead buyer is really saying that he doesn’t want leads, he wants sales!

Lead sellers are no longer able to grow their businesses by opening up their offers to thousands of anonymous affiliates and dumping thousands of questionable leads at the door of a lead buyer. “Direct post” relationships – where a lead buyer lets a partner host his lead form on the partner Web site – are also becoming rarer, again as a way of protecting lead quality.

Just as many merchants are now wary of affiliate marketers, many lead buyers – burned one too many times – now prefer to deal with a few dependable lead sources rather than taking their chances at more volume with more partners. A few years ago, The University of Phoenix – one of the largest lead buyers in the world – did exactly that, reducing their direct relationships from hundreds to just a few.

I think all of this is good for the lead gen, er, rev share gen industry. Focusing on the leads that drive sales rewards honest and innovative publishers as well as rewarding buyers who have perfected their inbound sales processes. Any fly-by-night operators who once made a killing sending old, misled, or outright fraudulent leads to buyers will soon find themselves out of business.

So thanks Jay for the conference – it was enlightening and I’m excited to attend the next one – but you might want to register the domain name RevShareCon.com for the future . . .

 

A Lead Gen Conference – A Long Overdue Idea

A few years ago I drove down to the Googleplex on a mission: convince the Google Quality Score team that there was a difference between “affiliate marketing” and “lead generation.” I opened up a PowerPoint deck and showed the team a graph plotting the continuum of Google advertisers. At one end were parked domains and “made for AdSense” or MFA sites. A few inches to the right were affiliate marketers. Next on the list were lead generation companies. And at the far right were the big brands and retailers.

I made several arguments to the Google folks that I thought clearly demonstrated the value of lead generation companies, ranging from multi-leading (more choice for consumers), lead quality management (better experience for consumers and merchants), and expertise in marketing and user experience (resulting in the ability to pay higher CPCs and hence more revenue for Google). In all, I argued that lead generation was a win-win-win for consumers, merchants, and Google, and that Google should treat lead generation companies differently than your run-of-the-mill affiliates.

Well, suffice to say, the Google team smiled and nodded politely, but my arguments didn’t have much of an impact. While there are still plenty of opportunities for lead generation companies to advertise on Google, Quality Score has definitely had a significant and detrimental impact on the lead generation industry, and it’s unclear to me that many people inside Google really understand that there is a difference between lead generation and affiliate marketing.

I use this anecdote as a (very roundabout) way of supporting the inaugural LeadsCon conference, premiering in early April at the Palms in Las Vegas. While it’s true that you can go to an affiliate conference and find a few sessions about lead generation, and lead generators will also get thrown a few bones at Search Engine Strategies or PubCon, this is first event where the focus is all lead gen, all the time.

The list of sessions should make most lead generators’ mouths water. There’s discussions of legal issues, incentivized marketing (appropriately titled “more harm than good?”), lead quality, technology, and distribution channels. The mere fact that words like “hot transfer” and “lead quality” are showing up as entire sessions tells you that this conference is by and for lead generation professionals.

Full disclosure here: the conference is being organized by my friend Jay Weintraub. But here’s some more full disclosure: if anyone should be organizing this conference, it should be Jay – he’s been around the lead generation industry for years, he knows everyone, and he is intimately familiar with the issues that lead generators face everyday.

One final postscript related to my anecdote about Quality Score. A few months after my Google meeting, I ran into an ex-Googler at a conference. I told him about my Quality Score discussion, and he shared his viewpoint. In sum, he told me that had the lead generation industry “self-regulated” itself (i.e., restricted incentivized marketing, banned advertisement of multiple Web sites from the same company on the same keyword, and so on), Google might not have applied Quality Score so harshly to so many lead generators.

Getting leading lead generators in the same room isn’t going to solve world peace, and I don’t expect to a conference to bring about a revolution in self-regulation. But you gotta start somewhere. The simple fact that there is now a conference for lead generation is a meaningful step forward for the industry. Here’s hoping that the discussions and ideas that come out of the conference are yet another.

See you in Vegas in April!