It was announced yesterday on LeadCritic and officially announced today over the wire that Kaleidico is taking the requests of lead providers to heart and driving action. Going back more than a year, lead providers like ZipSearch! have requested the ability to receive positive and negative feedback from their buyers with no response. The tipping point that pushed Kaleidico to drive this implementation came from a number of repeated requests from lead providers at the recent LeadsCon convention. On a side note, if you missed attending LeadsCon you truly missed a great opportunity to gain relationships that could grow your business and of course missed the chance to listen to our CEO David Schneider and myself pretend that we aren’t as dumb as we look. I, quite frankly think we pulled it off!

One of the ongoing topics at the convention was quality and feedback and that the fact that they are both tied together at the hip. Without feedback from buyers, driving quality leads becomes something similar to pin the tail on the donkey. (Yes, some of us are pretty darn good at playing pin the tail on the donkey because we have been doing it for such a long time.) The feedback that we receive from buyers is something similar to pulling up the scarf covering our eyes and allowing us to take a sneak peak at the donkey picture on the wall. With that insight we are able to nail our marketing efforts with only one tail and not three.

Enough talk about donkey’s. The bottom line is that this is really positive news for the industry. Yes, of course it is going to benefit the lead buyer, if you choose to allow your feedback data to be sent to your partners, which I would strongly urge you to do so, but it will also help the LMS companies, lead providers, title companies and of course your employees. All these players and many others will benefit from your higher conversion ratios. Now, this in no way is a silver bullet, but it will help lead provider generate better leads for you.

One big question or concern that comes up from lead buyers is that once a lead provider sees how well you are doing they will raise prices. I guess this is a valid point, BUT…I think it is very short sighted. In fact, I actually begin to get a little frustrated at that comment. Has a lead buyer who used to buy 400 to 500 leads a day I considered my lead providers as partners and I was aways willing to give feedback to them, good or bad. Many times the provider would be able to pin point issues in the campaign that could be optimized in my favor. I am not making this up. If you had the the chance to ask any of the major lead buyers in the space they would tell you that they absolutely give feedback to their lead providers.

The fear of a price increase doesn’t seem to be a reasonable arguement to me. Currently there are literally hundreds of different sources for leads and the market is very competitive. Unreasonable price increases by a provider would not stick.

Quick example:
What if you have a lead provider that received feedback from you in real-time and was able to optimize your account to the point where your conversion ratios increase by a half percent. This would subsequently increase your revenues too. A month goes by and the lead provider comes to you and say’s “Joe, we are going to raise your price from $20 to $25.” This is a risky move on the provider, but ultimately you have two choices. 1. You can accept the price because it may seem reasonable to you and you want to reward your partner for generating high quality leads. 2. You the provider to hit the road and you either transfer volume to a current provider or go out and find a new one. In either cases you benefited from the increase in conversions and made more money. I really can’t foresee a down side.

The good news for non-Kaleidico users is that ZipSearch! is on the forefront of this movement and will be implementing the same feed with LeadROI and Lead Mailbox. We have yet to come to an agreement with Leads360 but that will happen soon. I will keep you posted.

I personally want to say thank you to Kaleidico for taking the initiative on this issue.

Do you disagree with my opinions? Is this bad for lead buyers?? Let me know if you think so.