LeadsCon Conference: Lead Management System Panel

LeadsCon Conference, Las Vegas (April 2nd through April 4th) - Friday Morning Panel: Lead Management System – Lead Gen’s Killer App

The members of the panel included Raj Parekh of LeadROI, Jeff Solomon of Leads360, Rick Doyle of Lead Mailbox and Bill Rice of Kaliedico with Michael Ferree of of ZipSearch moderating.

It was a very interesting session and no doubt the best of the conference (probably because they were asked to shake it up a little bit by the conference director). Each LMS provider wanted to tout their unique features and take subtle shots at the others. It was all friendly though. FYI, I have a very high regard for each of these panelists (they all have great companies).

The most contentious issue addressed: sharing data with lead aggregators and being able to provide “analytics” with quality data. Most panel members admitted that their data might not be perfect, and that they didn’t really know how to answer or address the question of how to provide bi-directional data with the lead aggregators.

As they attempted to address this issue I believe they were missing the larger need (at least in terms of what “C” level execs want): a more comprehensive view into their world, including data-supported ROI information on their campaigns and initiatives and clear analytics that will lead them down more profitable paths.

What I find interesting from their responses is their lack of looking at the big picture as well as other pertinent data elements. From my understanding, not many of the LMSs contain the most important data of all, closed-loan data. This is because once the LMS does their job it is primarily tracked in the LOS, and today very few lenders pass the closed loan data back to the LMS. Other missing elements include: phone data, pricing data, web analytics and lead generation data (like what banner ad this lead clicked to fill out the app). The LMS is not the killer app today because it’s missing these other (really) important data elements.

Once a company builds a solution that delivers all of these data elements (and complete “analytics”) it will be the “killer app”. As for SoftVu we have been working on a data warehousing solution with a business intelligence reporting (BIR) engine since Q4 of 2007 and we plan to showcase the solution later this year. We’ll see if we can show the panelists what “analytics” really are.