double POSITIVE Marketing Group, Inc.

Post By
Rich Dent

We were thrilled to be honored by the LeadsCouncil this month when they announced the first series of winners for their LEADER Awards. DoublePositive was voted Best Hot Transfers Company by lead sellers and Best Hot Transfers Company in the Lending Category by lead buyers.

In my opinion, there is no greater tribute than to be recognized by your clients and peers as the best. Especially now, at such an exciting time in the mortgage industry, where the challenge for lenders is not dealing with a lack of opportunities, but knowing how to capitalize on the abundant opportunities out there.

Why are there so many opportunities in mortgage right now? My colleague, DoublePositive partner Joey Liner, did a great job in his white paper (http://bit.ly/hjwf5W) spelling out the factors that are contributing to the win-win-win climate we are experiencing. To summarize Joey’s main points:

• Mortgage Lead prices are near all-time lows
• Low interest rate environments continue, creating higher lead volumes
• Simply buying more leads will not increase productivity
• Adding LIVE Hot Transfers and a Lead Management System (LMS) maximizes higher conversions and sells more units

Need proof? Check this out:

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

This graph shows that, just within the past year, DoublePositive has seen the demand for live transfers grow rapidly. Mortgage companies are coming back to us saying, “We need more transfers.” We tell them that the only way to do that is to buy more leads. This works because of how well industry giants Lending Tree, LowerMyBills and Adchemy, and others, have been doing in generating leads. We’ve been very impressed by their ability to increase the quantity of leads, without negatively affecting quality. As a result, mortgage companies will continue increasing their marketing budget and buying more leads.

That’s what I’d call a perfect storm. The lead aggregators are winning because they are able to sell more leads. DoublePositive is winning because we are able to call more leads. And the mortgage companies are winning because they are able to receive more inbound calls from consumers who are interesting in refinancing their homes.

There are many benefits to mortgage firms using hot transfers, which Joey talks about in his white paper. Probably the most significant is that the mortgage firms are able to grow at a strategic pace, using hot transfers. They don’t have to overwhelm their loan officers with calling every raw lead, or rush to hire more loan officers. Using hot transfers allows them to steadily turn up the quantity of leads without suffering from a loss of quality or straining resources.

There’s a whole lot more to share about taking advantage of this perfect storm. I will be out West next week, meeting with some great companies about how to win using hot transfers. When I get back, I’ll share with you guys some interesting data about the disposition of mortgage leads that don’t transfer, which will help you make decisions as a lead buyer or lead seller.

California, here we come!

Post By
Brian Ocheltree

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

DoublePositive Wins Two LEADER Awards

HOT Lead Transfer Company Recognized for Excellence in the Field of Online Lead Generation

Baltimore, MD – January 20, 2011 – DoublePositive Marketing Group, the industry leader in LIVE Hot Transfers, announced today that it has been named winner of two important industry awards by LeadsCouncil (www.leadscouncil.com), the largest independent industry organization focused on online lead generation. The LEADER Awards is a new annual awards program designed to showcase the leading companies in online lead generation.

“We are thrilled to be a recipient of two LeadsCouncil LEADER awards,” said DoublePositive Co-Founder Joey Liner. “There is no higher honor than to be recognized by your clients and peers as the best.  It is humbling to be named Best Hot Transfer company in both the Lending and Technology categories.”

For lending companies, DoublePositive contacts, qualifies and transfers online consumers who have requested a quote or information about the company. Companies’ salespeople receive phone calls from live consumers who are qualified, interested and have the highest probability of converting into a sale.

For lead gen technology partners, DoublePositive’s work improving transfer rates increases overall demand for leads in the industry, and provides disposition data that allows lead aggregators to improve their sources.

“Receiving two LEADER Awards is the result of the outstanding effort and dedication of our team,” said DoublePositive CEO Sean Fenlon. “We look forward to working even harder on behalf of our clients and technology partners in the year ahead.”

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 LeadsCouncil

LeadsCouncil is the first independent industry organization dedicated strictly to advancing online lead generation. LeadsCouncil members include lead buyers, lead sellers, technology solutions providers, and investment professionals. The group focuses on best practices, research, education, and networking to provide a more transparent and effective marketplace for online lead generation.

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Post By
Brian Tomasette

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Post By
Rich Dent

It was great to get a nod from Mike Ferree http://bit.ly/9RDG7s about the buzz DoublePositive has been generating lately. Lead buyers are discovering the value of using a live Internet lead transfer service like ours, not just to get insight into the quality of Internet leads in real time, but to share that information with their suppliers, which helps improve the quality of leads for everyone.

For example, take a look at leads generated for the online, for-profit education industry. A certain percentage of leads are not transferring. Why are they not transferring? Does the contact claim that they never filled out the form? Do they tell us that they are already enrolled in another program, or that they are still in high school? Is this happening more often than it should? What can we learn from these responses?

The following graph represents the top three dispositions of contacted non-transfers:

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

Supplier A and Supplier B are delivering pretty good results. But Test Supply is badly off the mark. The buyer can take this data and go back to Test Supplier and say, “Almost 10% of the leads we contacted told us that they never filled out the form. Can you provide us more information on how you are generating these leads? What is the message you are delivering to the consumer through search or display? Could it be because they are being offered some kind of incentive that makes them fill out the form, even if they aren’t interested in our program?”

Another disposition that occurs too frequently in the Test Supply is “No degree/GED,” because students who have not completed high school are not good prospects for online education. Some will fill out the form out of curiosity. Generally, 2% seems to be the industry average – but here we see Test Supply is generating almost 20%. Again, go back to your supplier. Ask, “What is the message and what can we do to change the message so we are not attracting people who are still in high school?”

One last point, and it’s important: Don’t assume that your supplier is trying to cheat you. We all work together here. The only way we can improve the product is if the buyers are willing to share more of the information with the sellers about what’s happening with the leads. After all, we want suppliers to generate more leads because that will drive up more transfers. It takes everyone working together.

That’s it, everybody. That’s the guts of contacted non-transfers. Next time, we’ll share some data on non-contacted non-transfers – or the leads we never make contact with. Until then, let us know about your experiences in the comments below.

Oh – by the way, our in these posts focus has been on EDU lately. I have not forgotten about my Mortgage and Insurance friends. I will share some findings with all of you soon. Please check back regularly.

Post By
Brian Ocheltree

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.

Post By
Brian Ocheltree

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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Post By
Rich Dent

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.

Post By
Brian Ocheltree

I wanted to post a whitepaper we just developed on the recent consolidation within the Insurance Lead Supply industry.  You can read the full version below, or download a PDF version here.

Insurance Lead Supplier Consolidation

How Having Fewer Supply Sources That Are Difficult to Add Impacts Lead-Buyers in Need of More Lead Volume

Summary

• The Insurance Lead Supplier market is consolidating
• One supplier now holds major market share
• Buyers can negotiate during transition
• Though current options for high volume suppliers are limited, new options are emerging
• The typical Technology Integration hurdle for Lead Buyers looking to add new suppliers is aided by new Quick-Connect options

When Giants Collide

Every insurance carrier and large agency knows the value of getting inbound phone calls from contactable, interested and qualified consumers who are ready to talk to an insurance-sales professional. Insurance carriers also understand the value of having multiple Lead Suppliers to allow for optimization to the best performers.

What few carriers know, however, is how a consolidation in the Lead Supply market will directly affect them. The number of high volume Lead Supply options is limited and getting smaller. Furthermore, the effort and cost to connect physically to the pool of small to mid-sized Lead Supply sources is excessive and can take months or years for many Lead Buyers.

The State of the Current Supply Market

Never before has there been such a shake-up in the supply of Internet-generated leads for the insurance sector. When Bankrate acquired NetQuote (the leading insurance lead seller) in July of this year, they became the 600-pound gorilla in the vertical. Bankrate had already acquired the #2 player in the space, InsureMe, back in February 2008. These deals have positioned Bankrate as the market leader by quite a margin.

Behind this new Bankrate market giant seems to be a relative new comer, All Web Leads, out of Austin, TX. They have experienced fantastic growth over the past two years, and are being watched closely by all.

InsWeb, another top volume producer and the only publicly traded player in the group, hasn’t gotten as much press as the others lately but may be set for a resurgence. In addition to some leadership changes internally, they announced in August of this year the acquisition of Potrero Media of San Francisco, CA. Although a relatively small transaction, it is an intriguing one, for sure. In our experience, Potrero Media produces some of the highest quality leads available, which we believe are all Search generated. A challenge for Potrero, however, has always been a lack of volume. We respect InsWeb’s insight in finding this high quality producer, and truly hope they can apply InsWeb resources to help grow the Potrero volume without too much of a sacrifice in quality, thus raising the volume of high quality leads for everyone in the ecosystem.

HometownQuotes out of Nashville, TN rounds out the top volume producers, and you have to wonder if they are not in someone’s acquisition sights, or looking to bolster their position with an acquisition of their own.

The Impact Consolidation on Lead Buyers

What does this mean for Lead Buyers? The news is both bad and good. On the one hand, before the mergers, there were only five or six suppliers who had substantial daily lead flow. Seeing that number decrease hurts the buyer, who loses the advantages of competitive pressure. Ideally, every buyer will have as many suppliers as they can, allowing them to optimize their lead flow to the top performers. Less competition yields less optimization capability.

On the other hand, buyers still can claim some negotiating power, especially if they are buying from both companies being merged. They may be in a position to demand the better rate between the two former competing suppliers, which could lower their current cost per lead. As time passes, however, rates will adjust, and this window of opportunity will close.

Independent of the number of options available to you, we still recommend that Lead Buyers diversify their supply sources as much as possible. This not only gives you more volume to draw from as needed, but also allows you to create a Champion/Challenger environment where the top performer puts pressure on the weaker performers. We have found suppliers to be very receptive to receiving their performance (cost per sale, for example), as long as they are given some conversion data to help them optimize on their end, based on what converts the best. This is especially true if they know this could raise the lead volume that you purchase from them.

New Suppliers Come Forward

Unfortunately, as stated above, the community of volume-capable suppliers was small before the recent consolidation, and is even smaller now. However, this is changing as we speak.

The demand for insurance leads is at an all-time high, creating a lot of attention from new firms eager to break into the space and grab a piece of the growing pie. We have seen very capable lead generators from other industries with strong brands enter the space this year, like LendingTree and LowerMyBills. We have also seen a rash of new startups enter the space this year with leaders with impressive resumes. AgileClicks,a relative new comer to the space, is generating significant volume of insurance leads already, we believe through their affiliation with the rocket scientists at Adverplex, which drives many of the EDU lead generation platform out there today. CoverHound, a new Auto Insurance Lead Supplier, was founded by Basil Enan, son of InsWeb Founder Hussein Enan. And another InsWeb alumnus, Jaimie Pickles, has a new startup in the space. Pickles, formerly the President of InsWeb, is now the Founder and CEO of Canal Partner, LLC.

In time, the pool of high volume insurance Lead Supply options will increase, so large Lead Buyers should keep their ears to the ground for new activity.

Connecting with Suppliers Gets Easier – Third Party Connectivity Services

As we have mentioned, we recommend that all large Lead Buyers connect with as many Lead Supply sources as possible, providing the ability for buyers to optimize lead flow to the top performers. However, we have seen firsthand from many carriers that getting connected to new suppliers is quite difficult. It can take months, if not a year or more, due to the technical and testing requirements with each data feed. This level of complexity and cost prevents most carriers from engaging with any but the largest of Lead Suppliers, at least initially, thus limiting their supply diversification.

One solution to this problem is to utilize a third party connectivity platform. These are basically platforms that have already built XML connections to the suppliers. They can handle the connectivity and translation issues required, typically much more quickly and cost effectively.

For example, DoublePositive offers their Lead Funnel for this express purpose. The Lead Funnel was designed to solve this exact problem, and consists of robust physical connections to all Lead Suppliers, combined with a proprietary Translation E
ngine that handles the entire custom data mapping per supply source. By building one connection to the DoublePositive Lead Funnel, a carrier can be connected to virtually every supplier, large and small, overnight.

In addition to reducing the time and cost of connecting to new supply sources, this type of third party platform allows large Lead Buyers to justify building connections to smaller suppliers, thus increasing the pool of available supply sources.

Add New Suppliers Overnight by Eliminating the Data Feed

As we have indicated, Lead Buyers are facing a Catch-22. You know you need lots of supply sources to give you room to optimize to the best performers, but because it takes so long and so much work to connect, you can only justify the effort of connecting to the biggest of the big. Another idea to consider is simply testing new supply sources through your inbound call center before bothering to build a feed to each of them. This can be set up overnight, and requires no data feed to be built. All you have to do is use a third party Hot Transfer service to convert the new suppliers’ leads into inbound phone calls.

For example, DoublePositive is currently connected to virtually all of the active insurance Lead Suppliers, and can turn any of their leads into inbound phone calls in minutes with their Hot Transfer service.

There are two ways this can be accomplished. The first is to use regular long form leads, and have your sales professional look the lead data up in the Hot Transfer companies lead interface. They then can re-enter the data into your quoting engine as they verbally review it with the consumer.

The second method is to request short form leads from your suppliers. With these short form leads, the consumer has only provided contact information, so when the transfer is made, there is no need for your sales professional to use two systems. They simply capture the information for the first time from the consumer over the phone. You could argue that these short form leads are of lower quality, since the consumer hasn’t had to spend as much time or effort to complete. However, the volume should be higher, cost lower, and when combined with the Hot Transfers company’s ability to provide a layer of filtering at the call center level, they may convert just as well.

Review

Where does the market consolidation leave the insurance leads buyer? Let’s review the facts.

1. The acquisitions have happened. Buyers have fewer options for Lead Supply today.
2. However, the wisdom of maximizing your lead sources remains. Putting plans in place to do so may be worth it as new supply sources seem to be right around the corner.
3. Though building connections to new supply sources is costly and difficult, new options are becoming available all the time to help, such as the DoublePositive Lead Funnel, and the Short Form/Hot Transfer bundle. Therefore, we recommend that all large Lead Buyers continuously search for new supply sources to consider.

 

Download a PDF version here