double POSITIVE Marketing Group, Inc.

It seems that two of the fastest growing categories for Hot Transfers are education leads and insurance leads.  These industries seem to be a bit unique in their relationships between the Lead Sellers and the Lead Buyers, and these variations are creating some unique uses of our DoublePositive Platform™.

One of the uses that has been quite successful is the combining of Data Lead Sales with Hot Transfer sales, which has:

- Increased the leads per day a buyer can effectively handle
- Increased the closes per day per sales rep for the buyer
- Decreased the cost per policy or enrollment

This is being done by putting the DoublePositive Platform™ between the Internet Lead Seller and the Lead Buyer.  All leads are imported into the engine in either real time or batch mode.  The Platform then scrubs and scores the leads, putting them in order of most likely to close, to least likely to close.  The top ½ (higher quality leads) are pulled out of the system and sold to the buyer as a regular data lead for the lead buyer’s Outbound sales team to call down. Since the average lead quality is higher, the overall performance is better (contact ratio, qualifying ratio, close ratio). The bottom half is put thru the Hot Transfer engine which uses the DoublePositive call center agents and a sophisticated technology process to efficiently call, contact, qualify, and transfer the LIVE consumer to the lead buyer. This teams ratio’s are high because they have 100% contact with a genuinely-interested consumer, and only need to close the sale.  The combined effect of the Inbound and Outbound teams allows for more data leads to be handled per day, as well as creating an improved ROI for the Buyer.

Another popular use of our Platform in these verticals is to provide the Buyer with the flexibility to switch back and forth between LIVE Hot Transfer Leads, and Voice Verified Leads on the fly.  If they have the man power to take incoming calls, they Turn On the application and their phone begins to ring with interested and qualified consumers.  Should they be unable to take incoming calls for a while, they Turn Off the application and our call centers will continue to call their leads, make contact, confirm interest, qualify, and inform the consumer that a representative will call them shortly.  That Voice Verified lead is then shipped real time to the Buyer, and includes all data captured as well as the audio recording of the entire call center conversation.

We are currently working a few additional uses of our Platform in these and other verticals, and we’ll post info on these as they develop and are tested.  If your using Hot Transfers, or phone based services in a unique way, I’d love to hear about them.

I have been at DoublePositive Marketing Group for almost a year, and the mortgage market has changed so much in that time. Mortgage companies as well as individual loan officers have had to adapt to the changes – especially in regards to marketing.

To give you a little background, prior to working at DoublePositive I was in the mortgage industry for over 6 years. I started back in 2000 and moved up through the years to the point where I was managing the day to day operations for a mortgage company in Baltimore. I spent a lot of money over the years testing out every type of marketing. When I started, rates were over 8% for a 30-year Fannie Mae fixed loan and 2nd mortgages and 125s were the market that we targeted. We purchased internet leads and telemarketing leads as well as dabbled in direct mail. Leads were super cheap and I would burn through them at an alarming rate. Then the refi boom came and so did all the marketing companies with the best leads ever generated. Conversion rates were unbelievable and cost per funded loan was not even an issue. All you had to do was pick up the phone and you were going to close loans. I will get 20 leads a week and I would have ton of apps and would be pitching deals daily. Those were the good ‘ole days!

We now fast forward to 2007 and the market is a mess. Every day the media is painting another picture of how bad the mortgage industry and the amount borrowers that are in foreclosure. Reports come out daily with how much money banks and lenders are losing each quarter and if it will ever end. Remember the good ‘ole days? Well I hate to tell you, but they are gone.

The days of applications flowing like a water from a firehose are over. The $200 cost per funded loan are over. Today is a new day in the mortgage industry and we all need to embrace this if we expect to survive. I speak to clients daily and one issue that has come to the forefront is “expectations.” I speak to loan officers who understand that the market is tougher than ever, but they still expect the same conversions they had in 2002 and 2003. If you think about it, how can they make sense? If less people can qualify for a loan, then you should expect that you would need to speak to more people than ever before to get a loan. When I explain this to loan officers they agree that the closing rates have gone down, but they say that they want workable deals. That simply cannot work under the current market conditions.

Today, the two biggest issues are LTV and credit, and these are issues that the market has not had to deal with in sometime due to the refi boom and basically anyone could get a loan.  For most, this is the first time that loan officers have had to deal with this issue, but for those who have been in the business this is no surprise.