double POSITIVE Marketing Group, Inc.

Engineers are always looking to find solutions to a problem – even if no real problem exists.  This is true with all walks of engineers, from mechanical to electrical to computer science.  One thing I’ve noticed over the years is if you tell an engineer that you can create a more elegant/efficient/out of the box solution then them, the first words out of their mouth is normally some form of “you must be joking, and you’re not funny.”  This type of competition can not only find the best solution available but it can be fun as well.

However, realistically speaking there’s normally not the time or resources to have these types of competition within a technology development team.  Additionally, it may not be the greatest idea to pit developers in a team against each other.  Individuals can partake in the many other venues for development competition from grass-roots user groups to the likes of Google, but it’s less personal than a direct competition.

So how can engineers settle such a trivial yet important contest?

Enter Pumpkin’ Chunkin’.  If you haven’t heard about this sport the idea is simple: find a way to throw a pumpkin go as far as possible.  The Science Channel is current showing a program for the 2010 Pumpkin’ Chunkin’ World Championships.  There’s also a website with plenty of pictures/video/information - http://www.punkinchunkin.com/.  If you haven’t seen it, I highly suggest taking a look.

All that being said, I’d like to send out an open invitation.  If you have a team of engineers (actual or self-titled) that want to go head-to-head with the team here at DoublePositive, here’s your chance.  Pumpkin’ chunkin’ isn’t the only venue.  Got a different idea?  Have some other engineering challenge?  Bring it on.

-Chris

Developer, Trebuchet Connoisseur

We wrote about the top insurance industry lead suppliers recently in our white paper (link to: http://bit.ly/dyp3Sv). To recap briefly:

Here’s the DoublePositive Top Lead Supplier List, current as of this writing. Don’t blink – it may change.

1. Bankrate – when they acquired NetQuote in July of this year, Bankrate became the 600-pound insurance lead selling gorilla in the room. They had already acquired the #2 player in the space, InsureMe, back in February 2008, and today are the market leader by far.

2. All Web Leads – a relative newcomer out of Austin, TX, they’ve been on a serious growth trajectory growth over the past two years. Everybody’s got their eye on them.

3. InsWeb – despite the fact that they are the only publicly traded, top volume insurance lead producer, InsWeb has been flying under the radar. We think they may be set for a resurgence. In August of this year they acquired Potrero Media of San Francisco, CA, known to produce some of the highest quality leads available, which appear to be all Search generated.

4. HometownQuotes – out of Nashville, TN, HometownQuotes is another top volume producer, and seems a prime candidate to be acquired, or to make an acquisition of their own.

As the insurance leads landscape continues to shift, our hope is that the top volume producers will grow without sacrificing quality, thus raising the volume of high quality leads for everyone in the ecosystem.

So, given the industry consolidation, can the insurance lead buyer still get leverage?

Watch for the next post from DoublePositive, or read the white paper at http://bit.ly/dyp3Sv.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The Web’s most popular insurance shopping service adds the Market Leading LIVE Hot Transfer service to its offerings.

Baltimore, MD – November 10, 2010 – DoublePositive Marketing Group, the industry leader in LIVE Hot Transfers, announced today that it has formed a private label partnership with Bankrate Insurance, a division of Bankrate, Inc.

Bankrate Insurance, thru its acquisition of Insureme and Netquote, is largest seller of Insurance leads, and the partnership with DoublePositive allows them to add Hot Transfers to their offerings so that their customers can not only purchase the markets best Internet Leads, but also the markets best Hot Transfer services as well.

“The requests for Hot Transfers have increased over the years as the average order sizes have increased. Hot Transfers allow some clients to effectively consume more leads per hour per sales professional, so it was critical that we find the best Hot Transfer solution available to offer to our clients. That search resulted in the selection of DoublePositive” said Bankrate Insurance President Paul Ford.

Bankrate’s customers will still purchase Bankrate leads as they do now, but can now also choose to have the Bankrate LIVE Hot Transfer service turn those data leads into qualified and interested In-bound phone calls to their sales team. This will allow the client’s sales team to do what they do best, sell.

Each customer will have their own private credentials to the proprietary Bankrate Hot Transfer Platform, and here they will be able to listen to recordings, view dispositions, and put their account on hold at any time.

“Bankrate is setting the standard for lead suppliers today,” said DoublePositive VP Brian Ocheltree. “We’re proud to have been selected by this Industry Giant, and our partnership should provide massive growth and ROI improvements across the entire Insurance Lead Ecosystem from which we all will benefit.

About DoublePositive Marketing Group, Inc.

DoublePositive was founded in 2004 on is the market leader for LIVE Hot Transfers.  DoublePositive’s LIVE Hot Transfers utilize a DOUBLEconfirmT process, which delivers LIVE, interested consumers who have the highest probability of converting into a sale. DoublePositive specializes in LIVE mortgage leads, education leads, insurance leads, automotive leads and real estate leads. DoublePositive is headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland. For more information, please visit www.doublepositive.com.

About Bankrate, Inc.

The Bankrate network of companies includes Bankrate.com, Interest.com, Mortgage-calc.com, Nationwide Card Services, Savingforcollege.com, Fee Disclosure, InsureMe CreditCardGuide.com, Bankaholic, CreditCards.com and NetQuote. Each of these businesses helps consumers to make informed decisions about their personal finance matters. The company’s flagship brand, Bankrate.com is a destination site of personal finance channels, including banking, investing, taxes, debt management and college finance. Bankrate.com is the leading aggregator of rates and other information on more than 300 financial products, including mortgages, credit cards, new and used auto loans, money market accounts and CDs, checking and ATM fees, home equity loans and online banking fees. Bankrate.com reviews more than 4,800 financial institutions in 575 markets in 50 states. Bankrate.com provides financial applications and information to a network of more than 75 partners, including Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO), America Online (NYSE: AOL), The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times (NYSE: NYT). Bankrate.com’s information is also distributed through more than 500 newspapers. Bankrate, Inc. was acquired by Apax Partners, one of the world’s leading private equity investment groups, in September 2009. Apax operates across the United States, Europe and Asia and has more than 30 years of investing experience. For more information on Apax, visit: www.Apax.com.

Press Inquiries

For inquiries related to Bankrate Insurance or either of our two companies- NetQuote or InsureMe – please contact:
Amy Graham
graham@netquote.com
303-382-8221

For inquiries related to Bankrate, Inc, please contact:
Kayleen Yates
Senior Director of Corporate Communications
kyates@bankrate.com
917-368-8677

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In our last post, we said using an Internet lead transfer service like DoublePositive gives you insight into the quality of Internet leads in real time, before you spend thousands (tip of the cap to Mike Ferree for starting this conversation http://bit.ly/dcSQk4).

Here’s a look at how DoublePositive does it.

Once an Internet lead is generated and posted to us, our call center contacts the lead within seconds. We attempt to transfer the live lead on the phone to you, and provide real-time information about what happened. For example, here’s the lead disposition graph again:

Let’s say Supplier A sends us 1000 Internet leads. In this example, we contact 680 and discover that 375 are interested in talking about the product. We would say, “This is a great source – let’s ramp up and get the leads out to our sales force.”

Or we might find, as in the Test Supply Source above, that very few of the 680 Internet leads are truly interested or qualified. In that case, we might say, “Pass. This source is not legitimate.”

But not always. Using Mike’s suggestions could give us insight that the source deserves another chance. In that case, we may recommend moving to performance-based payout, determined by whether the lead turns into a transfer or not.

Using the lead transfer approach helps lead buyers make quicker decisions on which way to go. It could save a lot of money and time as well as preserve the sales team’s emotional state.

Again, I tip my cap to Mike Ferree. His approach helps you vet the source of Internet leads, which is important and valuable. Our approach helps you vet the leads themselves.

It gets more granular than that, which we’ll hit in the next post, after Thanksgiving. I’ll be in Maui for few weeks with my wife, getting some much needed R&R. I know. I am lucky, for sure. I can’t wait.

Meantime, let’s keep the conversation going. How do you figure out what leads to buy? Let us know in the comments below.

Here at DoublePositive, the technology team recently decided to implement a business rules engine. Being that we have a mostly Microsoft oriented architecture, one of the logical places to begin our research and development was with the Microsoft Business Rules Framework. We also reviewed some tried and true BRE products, including BEA, Jess and Drools (Java Based). What we found about the various products in a head to head comparison was not that much different from prior unrelated software comparisons. There were benefits and deficiencies associated with each product. And, there was no clear winner that made an easy choice for us. In the end, it came down to cost and ease of implementation / integration with our current environment. The Microsoft Business Rules Framework was our winner. Your mileage may vary.

Before we began to go down the BRE road we had already began to implement BiztTalk as a core part of our business. We already had a few successful projects under out belt when the BRE project was brought to the table. As stated earlier, one of our key deciding factors was ease of implementation. Because BizTalk was installed in our production environment, the Microsoft BRE was already installed as a part of that package. It doesn’t get much easier than that. But the story only begins here.

So, why implement a BRE in the first place? The most significant factor for DoublePositive was the speed of change in our business. The rules that ran our business were being changed, and changed again at record pace. A sizable portion of these rules existed in our database where they were easy to modify, but a nightmare to manage. The rest lived in our compiled code where they were difficult to modify and not much better on the management side. Small changes in rules were causing us to have to write code… recompile… test… deploy… and test far too often. It was time for our architecture to mature a little more.

Rapid change was our catalyst, but there were many other benefits that we could not ignore. Among them are…

1. Centralization of business rules management
2. Visibility of rules to key business policy makers
3. Minimization of new coding
4. Simplification of coding through rule abstraction
5. Enhancement of rule performance

There are many other reasons why your business might choose this design avenue. These are the ones that rang true to us.

Next, we picked a project and decided that for it no rules will exist inline. We also want to create a SOA framework that would make our BRE available to any of our applications, not just BizTalk applications. Creating this SOA layer was more challenging that we originally anticipated, but once done we were off and running. (I will write about our experiences there in a later entry.) Writing the rules was a lot more straight forward. We still had to watch our for various pitfalls of this BRE such as deterministic rules vs. non-deterministic ones. As well as, navigating our way around Negation as Failure. (Also not discussed here). After cementing our design we got the SOA stack in place, rules written and then we were ready to roll it out.

We deployed our new architectural styling to our production environment without much pomp or circumstance. This was one of those projects that the rest of the business does not necessarily celebrate with the rest of IT. It’s benefits are realized by all, but are not as tangible to most of our business users. The true celebration came the next day. A change request arrived. Policy Maker, “We need you to change rule 57 from Fruit = Apple to Fruit <> Orange”. Developer, “Oh my, that is the most horrendously difficult thing you could have asked me to do. But for you, I will make it happen”. The developer went back to his office and changed the rule in the new Rule Composer in a little under 30 seconds. He tested the rule and published it to production in another 15 minutes. The applications utilizing the BRE automatically and seamlessly picked the rule change . The Developer spritzes his forehead with water and runs into the Policy Makers office announcing, “I gave her all I had captain. The warp… I mean BRE engine has been updated with the latest rule”. Then he collapsed on the floor for extra drama. But there we were; our business was able to react instantly to our customers needs with minimal cost, resources, time and risk. All of IT was BREathing fresh air.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Growing Internet lead supplier to offer LIVE Hot Transfers to meet demand for more lead volume

Baltimore, MD – November 10, 2010 – DoublePositive Marketing Group, the industry leader in LIVE Hot Transfers, announced today that it has formed a private label partnership with RateElert, a growing Internet lead supplier.

Formed to meet growing demand for insurance leads, the partnership differentiates RateElert in that RateElert will now be able to offer LIVE Hot Transfers to their customers who want to optimize the use of their staffs time while also more effectively consuming more RateElert leads.

“DoublePositive’s LIVE Hot Transfer service gives our clients a way to effectively consume more leads per sales professional per hour.” said RateElert CEO Brian Hannigan. “It’s the improved efficiency they’ve been asking for to allow them to process more, and improve the return from our high quality leads.

RateElert’s customers will still purchase the normal RateElert data leads as they do now, but can now also choose to have the RateElert LIVE Hot Transfer service turn those data leads into qualified and interested In-bound phone calls to their sales team. So in effect, the customer’s sales team can spend 100% of their time doing what they do best – Selling interested consumers over the phone. All of the dreaded out-bound dialing work is removed. And, since all of the time spent leaving messages and getting no answers goes away, the customer can consume three times the lead volume that they could before.

Each customer will have their own private credentials to the RateElert Hot Transfer Platform located at: http://RateElert.Hot-Transfers.com. Here, they can view full lead data, listen to call center recordings, view negative dispositions, put their account on hold, and much more.

“We’re excited about our private label relationship with RateElert,” said DoublePositive VP Brian Ocheltree. “It gives us the opportunity to fuel the entire ecosystem with more volume of high quality leads, and we are excited to partner with one of the industry’s innovative leaders .”

About DoublePositive Marketing Group, Inc. :

DoublePositive was founded in 2004 on the belief that the traditional method of buying "leads" as a marketing solution had become costly and inefficient.  DoublePositive’s LIVE Hot Transfers out-perform other lead generation solutions because every DoublePositive lead passing through a DOUBLEconfirmT process, which delivers LIVE, interested consumers who have the highest probability of converting into a sale. DoublePositive specializes in LIVE mortgage leads, debt settlement leads, education leads, insurance leads, automotive leads and real estate leads. DoublePositive is headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland. For more information, please visit www.doublepositive.com.

About RateElert.com:

RateElert is based out of Clinton Township, Michigan and is a valuable resource for shopping and comparing insurance rates online. Created with the vision of helping agents compete for the growing number of consumers shopping on-line and provide the greatest ROI to their Nationwide Network of Insurance Agents. To learn more about RateElert leads visit http://www.RateElert.com or call 1-800-736-4907.

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Large Internet lead buyers bear most of the risk today. They constantly need new Internet lead suppliers who have quality leads. They can’t afford to spend money testing these new sources – and they can’t afford not to.

In his helpful blog post (http://bit.ly/dcSQk4), our friend Mike Ferree over at LeadCritic.com offers three suggestions for Internet lead buyers to vet companies before spending thousands of dollars testing them out.

In this post, we’ve got a 4^th option for keeping a firm grip on those thousands.

Mike’s options are great for determining whether companies are telling you the truth about how they generate leads. In sum, Mike says; 1) Request the domains of the sites they generate leads on; 2) Go to compete.com and find out the traffic history for each domain; 3) Go to SEMrush.com for more specific data around their organic rankings and paid search spend.

These methods will help you determine the intent of the Internet lead source. But they won’t tell you about the quality of the Internet leads themselves.

The 4^th option is to route test leads to a company like DoublePositive, which does live Internet lead transfers. We try to make contact and convert the folks we do contact, and we feed you real time data about what we are experiencing. For example:

Graph provided by, Tim Watts, DoublePositive Director of Data Analytics

The test supply had a decent contact rate, which is consistent with what we’d expect. But there is a problem. Very few of the test leads were interested or qualified to buy. A dismally low percentage of them converted compared to Suppliers A and B.

How to correct the problem is the supplier’s job. Your job is to know there is a problem – and to know it in real time, not thousands of dollars later.

And to our good friends who supply Internet leads – wouldn’t you rather know first?

Back to Mike’s point, everybody wants the new lead source to be successful. That’s what’s great about our industry – it can be a win-win-win. But I believe that winning is all of our responsibility.

In our next post, I’ll give you a look under the hood to show you how DoublePositive does its part.

Meantime let us hear from you in the comments below. Do you have an option #5?

A TV show, a movie, and a video game.

All three are seeing huge search query traffic, and one is growing like crazy.  All three also are literally infused with music.  Anyone who types or reads these queries would agree.

Hmmm. I wonder.

Perhaps music is not being abandoned after all.

Perhaps it’s just being re-named. :-)

I’m Glee-ful.

SPF

p.s. I intentionally did not include American Idol on the search query list because the American Idol search query volume is so overwhelming that it would’ve rendered this chart above too-hard-to-read.  I took particular notice of American Idol this year when Harry Connick Jr. joined the team for a moment.  HC Jr. is one of my heroes.  Nonetheless, I do reserve the right to blog about American Idol in the future. ;-)

Probably an unfair if not misleading headline, but true.

Google queries for “music” are down almost 50% from their highs over the past few years:

Google forecasts the drop in music to extend even further into 2011.

It’s a shame that the live music capitols of the world (Tennessee, Texas, New York, etc.) are leading the way in the drop off.

Maybe this is just one of those “it doesn’t matter what Google data says” search queries, but I doubt it.  I’m definitely biased in the other direction.

SPF