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Tricks by some Telemarketing Firms offering Live Lead Transfers

Please Note: The vast majority of the companies that offer Live Call Transfers or Live Lead Transfers are legitimate lead generation companies that provide a high-quality service. However, just like there are a few unscrupulous loan originators and lenders that give the mortgage industry a bad reputation, a few bad apples give the lead generation business this same negative thought. In an attempt to educate you, we offer some various different types of how a few companies are using (or, rather, abusing) “live lead transfers” and not delivering a quality product.

Do you know of a lead generation scam? Please submit the method here to be included on this list.

“You won a free laptop computer…”
… Or a $1000 Visa gift card, or a trip around the world, or some other great prize of value. In order for people to win these prizes, they’d have to agree to receive newsletters, hear sales pitches, and make a few small item purchases. Included are, not one, but TWO different pre-qual forms they’d have to fill out and agree to “hear how they can save money on their mortgage.” So, they actually will listen to your sales pitch for a couple minutes just so they can get a chance to win the prize. These are sold off as “leads” and live transfer companies call these “real-time leads.” Feel sorry for the consumer on these. By the time they fill out information on “requesting a lower mortgage payment,” they would already have about 10 hours invested in trying to win these nearly-impossible-to-win prizes; they’d have so much time and money wrapped up in it that they’d listen to anything. The promotion companies then sell these to dozens of companies. If there is a plus side, the telemarketers get first crack (and pay the most for these) because they can so easily convince the consumer to talk to a “mortgage professional.”

Affiliate Websites
Without naming names, the vast majority of the largest lenders and Internet-based lead companies pay affiliates up to $70 each for every pre-qual app filled out from their website (source: cj.com). Webmasters then place these links on their websites and have hundreds of their friends (or people they pay) fill out these forms so they can get the huge lead feed. These professional scam artists use cell phones to answer the bogus “lead” they generated. Telemarketers and Internet lead companies unknowingly purchase these. Once again, when the live transfer is made, they answer the phone and act interested for a few minutes before offering an excuse to get rid of you… just to collect their $5.00 from the $40-$80 you paid for this “lead.”

Bogus rates and payments
Any mortgage broker knows that these are a royal pain yet day after day people solicit the rubbish to pass it off as a “lead” to you.

“I’ve got a secret”
We aren’t talking about the funny TV game show that was on the GAME SHOW NETWORK either! Under pressure to deliver as many leads as possible, the telemarketer shares a secret… one that is total rubbish. “Don’t tell John I told you this, but I saw him refinance a house yesterday at 1.9% and the customer got $25,000 cash back out of their mobile home! So you can imagine what he can do for you!” Yeah right… I want to talk to you, too. I have a 1968 Winnebago sitting on my property that I’d like to remodel as a rental property!

“In order to get you the best loan program available”
A common problem found with some inbound call center leads. Customers have no idea what their credit scores are. They’re automatically informed that their credit scores have just skyrocketed just from calling in. That negative equity also amazingly transforms in minutes to around $25,000 just in time to transfer that lead to you!

I won’t propagandize our services here to you. We’ve done enough of that throughout the website. We would love to hear your feedback though and other interesting stories you have to share on your lead experiences. Examples provided here were general scenarios and were not implicitly depicting any company, companies, or direct competitors.

Leads Direct Marketing would like to thank RELibrary.com for honoring our website with their “Pure Gold Award.” The award is issued based on design, uniqueness, and value as an information source for the real estate industry. Thanks so much! You can view the pure gold award on our website at leadsdirectmarketing.com

(EMAILWIRE.COM, April 19, 2007) Lead generation is the lifeline of numerous professional businesses and it’s no wonder this niche is one of the most highly searched set of keywords on the Internet. According to the Yahoo! Search Marketing tool, Internet surfers typed in some form of lead generation terms over 315,000 times during February of 2007 alone. This has led numerous companies to try to find innovative ways to drive traffic to their websites. For example, SalesGenie.com, one of the largest lead providers in North America, used highly creative television commercials that aired during the Super Bowl this past year to attract new clients and visitors to their website.

The Leads Warehouse launched their beta version today.

Pete Tolman, founder of The Leads Warehouse is a mortgage professional who also operates his own lead generation company. “I spent hundreds of hours each month searching for the best mortgage lead programs I could find as a mortgage write,” says Tolman. He hopes that, by creating an old fashioned co-op where lead generation companies combine their advertising resources and market to the masses, professionals like him will be able to save valuable time yet still be able to receive all pertinent information on the various lead generation tools available.

David Webb, managing partner of ChiangWebb, who is designing and marketing the site, envisions an “Expedia.com-type experience.” When people search for hotels, they start with a major hotel site. Every bit of information is available without ever having to leave the site for nearly every hotel in America. “We want the searcher to be able to find all the pertinent information in regards to how to get the best lead programs for their respective business,” states Webb.

The beta version is now up and operating. The co-op will purchase advertisements in leading trade publications, target several high-traffic sites for banner ad placements, run a PPC campaign on the major search engines, and mail 5,000 heavy lead buyers every month. For more information regarding the co-op, you can visit the website at http://www.theleadswarehouse.com or contact them by phone at 800-726-0640.

Well, here we are in another year in the life of sales. We either sell shoes, cars, real estate, insurance or whatever. It’s NEVER the same. Every client is different as we all know. I guess, in a way, besides the money, it helps make it more entertaining. I’m going to share one of my favorites. I have been in the mortgage industry for quite a while and have had some doozies.

In my earlier years, I made sure I went to every loan signing, no matter what the time or where it was at. It really helped build up a good image with my clients. I would meet with the notary at the client’s home normally in those times. Well, one night I had a loan signing at the client’s home around 9pm on a Friday. The streets in that part of town were definitely not ones that most people would feel was safe to walk down at night even with another person, let alone by oneself. In the middle of the signing, I hear a rat-a-tat-tat that was extremely close to where we were. It sounded like an Uzi machine gun!

Of course, it scared all the goose bumps completely off my body. The client, a 60 year old single woman, who was in the middle of the signing off the loan docs, just kept signing like it was just another day in the park. Then, I heard the same sounds again with some screaming and yelling added to it. At this point, I definitely knew that this was real and it was no more than a house or two away from where we were. I was waiting for the worst. Looking across the table, I saw the client still signing, like it was just another day. She looked up, saw my obvious concerns, and, with a smile, merely said, “Oh, those boys are just playing with their toys again.”

She finished her signing of the loan docs within the next 10 minutes in the middle of more shooting. I could actually here the bullets ricocheting off cars and other things. The woman never flinched. She was actually trying to have a conversation with me throughout the whole ordeal. To this day, I still have no idea what she was talking about; I was too petrified to really pay attention to what she had said.

I would love to hear some crazy sales stories from anyone who writes blogs here. Share the funnies, so we can all have a good laugh.

I thought I would share a humorous story I stumbled across that also shares my beliefs. Feel free to add you comments!

Top Speaker & Best Selling Author Says - “Telemarketing is B A C K”
By Gary S. Goodman

Like that scene from the horror flick, “The Shining”, when Jack Nicholson axes his way through Shelley Duvall’s bathroom, telemarketing is just as dramatically asserting:

“I’m B A C K!”

Taken for dead, this incredibly useful yet widely misunderstood and abused medium is assuming its rightful place in the pantheon of promotional tools.

And why shouldn’t it?

The Web, for all of its sweeping grandeur and cascading impacts, simply isn’t nearly as effective in SELLING as the humble, real-time, person to person phone conversation. As I’ve said elsewhere, and as so many would-be dot com moguls can attest:

YOU MIGHT BUILD IT, BUT THEY STILL WON’T COME.

This is to say INDIRECT marketing is problematic for a few reasons:

(1) Well, duh, it’s INDIRECT, for one thing. Wormholes aside, the shortest distance between two points is still a straight line. And if there was ever a medium filled with more curves, detours and dead ends, it’s the Internet. Hoping that the right clients will find us we do all kinds of bizarre, labyrinthine things, like seeding search engines with meta-tags, tons of articles, and anything else that will get is Googled at a high ranking.

Isn’t it a whole lot easier to identify a qualified prospect and then to pitch him?

(2) Passivity doesn’t pay; it costs a lot. Time is money, and while we’re hoping to be discovered, like an aspiring movie star sitting at a drug store soda fountain, others are beating the bushes and finding paying work to do.

(3) The phone creates clarity. You know whether you have a live one or have to cut bait in nanoseconds. If you prefer results over mere activity, then the phone is for you.

There has never been a better time to prospect or to cold call.

How come?

Fewer people are doing it now, proportionate to the population, than at any time in memory. Moreover, because of the Do Not Call Registry, eliminating tens of millions of names from telemarketers’ lists, the ones that do get called today have less sales resistance, at home or at the office, than ever before.

Given how cheap calls have become, landed and wireless, who can resist the call to REACH OUT & SELL SOMEONE for mere pennies?

—

Dr. Gary S. Goodman is the best-selling author of 12 books and more than a thousand articles. His seminars and training programs are sponsored internationally and he is a top-rated faculty member at more than 40 universities, including UCLA Extension, where he has taught since 1999. Dynamic, experienced, and lots of fun, Gary brings more than two decades of solid management and consulting experience to the table, along with the best academic preparation and credentials in the speaking and training industry. Holder of five degrees, including a Ph.D. from the Annenberg School For Communication at USC, an MBA from the Peter F. Drucker School of Management, and a law degree from Loyola, his clients include several Fortune 1000 companies along with successful family owned and operated firms across America. Much more than a “talking head,” Gary is a top mind that you’ll enjoy working with and putting to use. He can be reached at: gary@customersatisfaction.com

Article Source: Dr. Gary S. Goodman
Top Speaker and Best Selling Author Says - “Telemarketing is B A C K”