Gabriel Buck - ClickPoint State of the Union

Create more leads, market to the ones you already have!

gabe — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 21:04:00 GMT

I get asked all the time what is working out there in the wild world of sales. I try to really find things that are not gimmicks but will deliver solid results. There have been some really progressive marketing tactics that are actually showing solid traction. Cost Per Click when it first came around seemed like the golden child, but for many of the small businesses owners out there it was difficult to understand and use on a regular basis. I would hear from many clients that they didn’t check their account over the weekend and they came in Monday morning with a huge spike in traffic and a hefty fee. I know you say: “that is their stupidity and they should monitor their account”. I agree to some extent, but most small businesses owners don’t have the time to get over the CPC learning curve. By the time you figure it out you just wasted a ton of cash and now have killed your marketing resources. When you first get started you need simple and effective marketing strategies that you can see tangible results from immediately. For this reason I love the services provided by Mobile Storm. I had tried Constant Contact and some of the other permission based e-mail systems, but I was blown away with the Stun system from Mobile Storm. Not only was it easy to use, it has some of the most effective tools I have seen in one application. If you are not familiar with either of these two companies, their services help you market to your list of clients, subscribers, leads etc. The Stun system lets you create web application forms for your website so you can collect your opt in list. It then lets you create press releases, updates, and sales letters that can be sent once or on a continual basis. You can see who opens, reads, and clicks on links within your e-mail communication, you also have SMS text messaging, direct mail, fax, and permission based Voice Mail communication. I look forward to putting together my new training videos on the weekend and using the Stun system Monday morning to see who opened my e-mails, clicked on the training videos and who hasn’t. It’s pretty cool to get instant results telling you who took the time to read what you had to say. You also know what e-mails are working and which ones don’t.

Ok, so now you know Mobile Storm has a really effective tool to help you keep in touch with your opt in list of subscribers. Now you want to know how to create more leads for yourself and build up that opt in list. Well I have a solution for you here too. The guys over at Redclay media and marketing have helped more than a handful of my clients get off the ground fast. So fast, that individual mortgage offices have recommended them to corporate after seeing the first month of results. Redclay has been working with data for years. They know how to pinpoint the customers you want to find in the geographic location you desire. We work with Redclay to tag all direct mail sent out on your behalf. It used to be that tracking direct mail campaigns was something you did with an Excel report and was very hard to really get a handle on. People would call into your company from a US mail piece you sent them, but what happens if they don’t pass through a receptionist that tracks all the calls? If it goes straight through to a salesperson how do you know they tracked the call? With the new Lifecycle system we work with the direct mail providers so you get tracking on every call. Not only do we track it, we also give you the phone numbers so you can call proactively before the mail piece is sent. Now you have automated e-mail, text messaging, click to call, and power dialing on every single lead you purchase or create. It’s no time to waste money, you need results to keep your boat afloat.

Stop wasting and start spending some weekend time learning how to use tools that help you become a sales professional. The new breed of sales professionals is more equipped then ever to make the big sale. Stop relying on management to provide your every need or hoping your old tactics will still work. This new breed of salesperson and manager uses tools that help them take many small battles right to the door of the customer. You can’t expect the sales to come in like they used to in the mortgage boom of 2002. That time is over, and the only way for you to be successful is to get more out of your marketing dollars. Back in 2002 you would try new lead providers because it didn’t matter who you bought from. Now you can’t afford to waste $500 on a test campaign. Here are the four necessary needs for success of any small business:

ü Selective purchasing

Lead Providers, Marketing Sources

You need to know what marketers are performing before you buy, and you need tools to help you see what sources are working after you buy

ü Company growth

Sales Staff

Staff up and staff down based on phone calls made, closed deals, e-mails sent, and sales improvement. If you can’t measure performance you can’t effectively hire and fire.

ü Drip Marketing

Phone Call, E-Mail, Text Message, Power Dialer, Direct Mail, Voice, and Fax

Without marketing strategies to recruit, retain, and collect customers you won’t last your first year anniversary.

ü Company exposure

Website, Search Optimization, Yellow Pages, Online Directories, and Blog

Image is everything! Stop putting up cookie cutter 1980’s style websites. You want to stand out, not blend in.

It always amazes me when we have a new client on that hasn’t really thought about any of these four very important categories necessary for success. Every small business owner should be thinking about these things. Fortunately, there are companies that have a consultative approach that can help you take control of your business and get measurable results.

www.RedClayMedia.com

www.MobileStorm.com

Lead cleansing doesn't have to be as bad as it sounds

gabe — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 05:28:00 GMT

Ok, lead cleansing doesn’t have to sound like you have bad leads on your hands that only Ajax can handle. There are many theories on how to really get the best leads from your lead sources and get rid of the ones that can lead to a nasty outbreak. The simple truth is that if you are getting bad leads from a particular source and you don’t catch it right away, it can be like that nasty little virus your kid brings home and infects the whole family. In today’s world with DNC, CAN SPAM, and many laws regarding the collection of information, can you risk infecting your company with a bad lead source?

The simple answer is that you cannot. So how do you protect your company from an $11,000 DNC fine, a spam law suite, or potential customers sending letters to your state district attorney? There a couple of proven methods we have found to work at ClickPoint Software for our customers.

#1 Call Verification

Step 1: It doesn’t have to be high tech and cost you thousands of dollars to start this preventative measure that could save you some serious marketing dollars. If you call verify your leads as they come in with one telemarketer costing you on average $400 a week, you could potentially save your company from an infection of bad leads. Call verifying your leads also weeds out bad providers, helping your company only work with the best lead sources. Luckily both of our systems support PSTN (standard phone lines) and VoIP telephony solutions to help you call verify your leads. You will save by weeding out bad phone numbers, duplicate leads, non interested leads, and out of criteria leads only passing along the leads your company really desires. In 5 years of working as a marketing company vice president I never came across one mortgage company that practiced call verification regularly. This goes back to my article on waste. I would start this process as the first step as a marketing director at any mortgage, insurance, or similar company that relies on affiliate traffic from Commission Junction, Link Share, or any affiliate network. I would especially start this process if I was buying from internet lead providers. I am amazed that some of these fortune 500 companies will spend $10,000+ on a law suite rather than put this practice into place.

#2 Weed out dupes and non criteria leads

Step 2: Implementing a high tech system that kicks out duplicate leads and leads not meeting your criteria. It also gives instant results to your lead sources.

Approxiamately 50% of fortune 500 companies I dealt had horrible affiliate management systems that were so antiquated they used Excel reports to communicate with their lead providers. If any CEO’s read this please realize if your company is doing this you are missing the boat and losing thousands of dollars if not millions annually. It’s very simple. Let's say your company buys 1,000 leads a day at a cost of $10 per lead. That is equal to $10,000 a day and $200,000 a month on leads. I found working in a marketing company that 20% of leads on average were dupes or leads not meeting criteria. So, were talking about $40,000 of your marketing budget monthly going to waste. It may not be that bad you could be using the antiquated system I was talking about that communicates with your lead providers via 3 marketing professionals working 40 hours a week with those pesky Excel reports. Let’s see, that’s probably costing you $40,000 a year per entry level marketing associate and $60K for the marketing head. With a good system you can eliminate the two entry level positions and at the very minimum save your company $80K a year. Not to mention you have a tight ship and better reports than the ones I got from entry level marketing associates who make lots of mistakes. You could spend a couple hundred thousand creating this system internally. With no real past experience other than your marketing director that has no clue of what it takes to build one of these systems and you could lose out. Or you might want to try trusting the professionals to implement a system they use to cleanse thousands of leads daily for lead companies. Yes, we work with lead companies that make their living on the thin margins of sales leads. 10% - 20% of leads that are not quality is the difference between a profitable lead company and not. So, we work with lead companies to make sure they are profitable and can handle thousands of leads daily that are only the leads they want to pass along to their customers.

So now that you know we help lead companies get the margins they need to stay in business, what more do you need to know? If you want your company to get the best leads, reduce risk, reduce employee cost, and help your company grow by taking in the best leads possible ClickPoint is a choice you can’t overlook.

In a crazy market why buy software or luxery items?

gabe — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 01:42:00 GMT

Ok, here it is from the guys that got into this business because they saw fortune 500 companies handle their lead counts and loan officer performance by using Excel reports.

If you have been buying internet leads, telemarketed leads, or advertising with print and you think you will survive the market downturn without a solid plan, I hope you saved a small fortune the last 5 years. I have watched many mortgage companies close their doors as they feel they simply can’t close loans with the current market condition.

I have news for you folks that are scared. I talk to probably 50+ brokers weekly and the ones that I work with are confident. They are confident because they have a good plan, good people working for them, and they know they aren’t wasting money. I saw so much waste these past 5 years in the business, it made me wonder when this industry would come to its senses. How can you spend money on marketing and have no clue if it’s really working? How can you hire and fire loan officers not knowing how many phone calls they make daily? How many calls, e-mails, notes, and trigger e-mails they send to each lead? How can you continue to buy leads if you don’t know the CPFL for each loan officer you supply leads to? How can you know if leads are better than direct mail campaigns?

Guess what, if you don’t know the answer to any of this it may be too late for you. But If you still have some money in the till, I urge you to get with it and get into the habit of finding the answers to these questions daily. If you can’t tell me what your (Cost Per Funded Loan CPFL) is per loan agent, you don’t have your finger on the pulse of your business.

We created this software because I used to run a marketing company. It used to amaze me that the company I helped run wouldn’t invest in simple tools to show each customer what their real results were from the marketing we were providing. My company said to leave it up to the customer to figure it out. Well, 5 years later I still don’t know many companies that consistently figure it out.

There is hope because I see it. With good loan officers, specialty programs like FHA, marketing metrics, call metrics, and solid marketing sources you can have the confidence I see in my customers. It doesn’t take much to get this confidence. Usually, it takes about a week to evaluate what you currently have in place and what we can do to help. We will show you step by step how we can navigate through turbulent times with the confidence needed to recruit the best talent. There is always opportunity in down markets. Many investors are now entering the market as they see opportunity with the lack of competition. There are 160 major lenders that have closed their doors and many home owners still needing to refinance or purchase. Bank of America and Wells Fargo can’t be the only solution. I encourage you to think twice though if you think you can enter this market without a strong confidence in your ability and with even stronger tools to help you close more business.

Recruiting only the best talent

gabe — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 23:26:00 GMT

By Gabriel Buck

Check out our site for more information

www.ClickPointSoftware.com

The other day I was on a flight coming back home from Virginia to California and like every trip I purchase three magazines for the flight. The top three magazines I find have the best articles are Inc., Success, and Business 2.0. I can usually get 1-5 good articles that relate to the way we do business or advances in technology. The latest article that grabbed me was contributed by CEO Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek software. It was a great article about recruiting the best talent specifically for the software industry. I have to say that I thought I had thought of everything but this article was great. Check out Inc. Magazine May 2007 pg. 81. Fog Creek pays top dollar to find the best schools in the country that produce the best computer science graduates. They then woo these top candidates with a paid internship that gives them time to evaluate these top candidates and pick only the best. In software getting the best talent is something that can make or break you. First, you have to start with your CTO and build a culture of recruitment not “trolling Monster for resumes or expecting to post a job and get the best”. If you want the best you have to go get it. I started ClickPoint with this philosophy. I never expected to find top notch programmers by posting jobs on Craigslist.

Having the best programmers has paid off big for us not only because our software is better, but because top notch programmers are not one dimensional and they help the company as a whole. They aren’t just good at one thing. Top notch programmers are in a league of their own often reading new code, staying up to date on the latest innovations, and being able to address multiple projects at one time. A top notch programmer is so much different than a mediocre programmer that once you have one working with you there will be an immediate moment where you realize the differences. It all starts with recruitment and the company philosophy. If you want to compete and play to win you must absolutely adopt the philosophy of starting with recruitment.

Joel Spolsky

www.joelonsoftware.com/

The difference between lead management and CRM

gabe — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 23:15:00 GMT

By Gabriel Buck

Check out our site for more information

www.ClickPointSoftware.com

Alright, for once and for all let’s get this straight. CRM is not lead management it is Customer Relationship Management. Notice how when you use CRM from Salesforce, TechExcel, Oracle, Netsuite, or one of the big companies you import your opportunities or you have a custom API built and you manage your current customers. Lead management is a little different because it focuses on leads and lead distribution long before they have become clients and it typically is not included with your CRM unless you pay for a custom system. One big focus of a lead management company is to automate the process so that the leads are posted using XML, FTP or some posting method so you don’t have to import your leads manually. I see on some of the CRM company sites a testimonial from a mortgage company marketing director that is so happy they can import thousands of leads with the click of a button. Well lead management tries to bypass that whole import process that can be quite difficult depending on the data integrity. They also focus on turning the prospect, suspect, or whatever you want to call a lead before it becomes a customer into an opportunity. Things like drip e-mail marketing, automated performance based distribution, predictive dialing, power dialing are all features of a good lead management system. You focus on turning that lead into a client/opportunity. But what happens when the lead does become a client? Do you forget about that lead that you so carefully nurtured into becoming a customer?

So the question I know your thinking of already is why hasn’t anyone combined the two?

Good question!

We have.

We take the leads from many top rated lead providers using a post right into your ClickPoint Lifecycle system. You can then prospect using our power dialer, predictive dialer, drip e-mail marketing or direct mail campaigns. So as far as I know we are the only company to combine the two and ultimately give you three main systems that combine to form our Lifecycle system. We call it Lifecycle because our system focuses on the complete lifecycle of a customer.

1 2

Prospects > Opportunities

Clients

I. Prospects = Leads are posted into one big database use the Power Dialer, Predictive Dialer, Drip E-Marketing, Direct Mail to turn Prospect into >

II. Opportunity = forecasting and pipeline reports are used to monitor and predict closed opportunities.

So, now that you know you can have your cake and eat it too, let's focus on the burning questions. You want to know why we are so special that we have been able to accomplish something where others have failed. It’s not that others have failed rather most company’s focus on one or the other or they don't want to be responsible for setting up posts from lead sources. Setting up the posts can be time sensitive and they'd rather give you the tools to have your internal staff do it yourself. I personally think that the entire sales cycle in one easy to use application is the best way to go for our customers. At ClickPoint were a little different in the way we work with our customers. We want you to close more business and we don’t mind giving free advice. We help you not only in prospecting, qualifying, and closing but we also help you with your advertising. We include with every account a free mortgage, real-estate, or industry specific website that you can edit. We designed these sites to be search optimization friendly.

ClickPoint – The Beginning

gabe — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 23:10:00 GMT

CRM – Customer Relationship Management Software

By Gabriel Buck

Check out our site for more information

www.ClickPointSoftware.com

I wanted to start our blog off with the story of how we became ClickPoint. I think it’s always important to get a good feel for an organization before you do business with them. In all truthfulness I never imagined that I would be running a software company. I always envisioned myself working as the head of an ad agency, marketing company, or some kind of organization where I could use the creative side. It all happened about 6 years ago when I got my first real experience working with programmers and developers on small projects for a marketing company where I was vice president. I immediately saw that although you have to be much more patient with software there is tremendous opportunity to use your creative attributes.

The first time you see something you thought of come to fruition is amazing. With software you not only get see it as it comes to life but then you get to see how the people using it react. I started to get the feeling that with the right team of creative and technical experts we could contribute something to the business community. Finding the need wasn’t hard. Working in the online marketing space which hasn’t fully matured was and still is an industry full of opportunity. Literally every week you hear from someone that they wished their software could do something that would make their lives better. Picking exactly which direction with so many to choose from is not as easy as it sounds. You have to listen to what customers, friends, colleagues, and industry experts are telling you. Most importantly you have to do the research and come to your own conclusion.

My conclusion was that existing CRM, sales, and lead delivery software were much too complicated for the average sales person. Not to say salespeople can’t understand it, but most of what I was seeing just wasn’t practical for salespeople. In my opinion most early CRM companies were designing software with the decision maker in mind forgetting that if the salespeople weren’t happy with the application they would lose the business. You have to remember who the software is intended for and I think a lot of the early companies missed the boat. Maybe they were originally sought out by marketing directors, IT, and high level management that gave their input to the perfect system. I’m not sure but I could tell by listening and using these applications that they weren’t working.

Google and Apple have shown us over the years that simplicity can be the best weapon when selling technology. People want ease of use in their life not clutter. We heard from sales agents in the online industry, finance, education, insurance, and retail that they were ready for a change. The most important things to salespeople were efficiency and ease of use. It was after seeing the need and knowing we had a great grasp of how lead management should work that ClickPoint was started. I knew several programmers that were running their own companies but one had done amazing work for us on projects from time to time. I immediately sought him out to make the move to ClickPoint in early 2005. Michael Sawyer our CTO and I embarked on building practical sales tools for the finance industry. After getting user reviews and a steady referral base we sought out funding and were able to secure it on our first pitch. It seems that even our investors understood the need for easy to use practical sales software. So just like that ClickPoint was born. Now we are faced with making our software unique and remembering why we started in the first place. Simplicity was demanded and it was only a matter of time before the right entrepreneur listened and took action.