How to Improve Saleability of Leads with Lead Verification and Lead Quality Assessment

Unlike the leads generated via traditional media, Leads generated on the Internet using online lead generation strategies, methods and tools are highly susceptible to quality issues. If you are lead seller or vendor, then Quality issues lead to customer dissatisfaction and might result in loss of business over a period time.

If you are direct user of the leads generated, then you will be wasting your sales team’s time and efforts with poor quality leads. Implementing Lead Verification as part of your lead generation, capture and distribution will help you control lead costs and improve the lead generation methods.

Business to Consumer (B2C) leads are prone to much more misuse and quality issues, when compared with Business to Business (B2B) leads. However, Lead verification can be used for both type of leads. As an aside, you may take a look at an earlier post on 10 Tips to Improve Lead Quality in Lead Generation, if you have not seen it earlier.

Lead Quality Improvement

The quality of leads reaching the sales team or the lead buyers can be controlled to a great extent by employing multiple methods. These include:

• Lead Scrubbing
• Lead Validation
• Lead Verification

Note that these are post-capture processes and hence you cannot control the quality of leads at the point of sign-up, registration or generation. Let us discuss the Point of Lead Capture quality considerations in other posts.

Lead Scrubbing

Lead Scrubbing is a simple lead cleansing process. A set of words or text strings generally used by the online fraudsters are used as a reference point and the key properties of incoming leads are matched against the same. Any matches are marked as such and scrubbed. The following lead profile properties are used for scrubbing:

• Email Address
• First Name
• Last Name
• Company Name

Lead Validation

Lead Validation is the process of validating the lead data for correct format and layout. Examples of lead properties used for Lead Validation are:

• Email Address
• First Name
• Last Name
• Phone / Fax Numbers
• Zip / Postal Code
• State / Province Code
• Country Code
• Numeric Data fields

The lead distribution and management system can validate the formats and flag the leads, if found to be invalid. Note that most of these validations can be performed on the landing pages and hence you can save a bunch of money if you can implement these checks at the point of sign-up! However, if you are buying leads from affiliates and publishers, and not directing traffic to your own landing pages, then you may not have much control on your landing pages. Post-capture validation is the only option in such cases.

Lead Verification

Online Lead Verification is the most valuable and intensive quality assessment process which comes to the aid of lead generation companies and distributors. Again, this is a post-lead-capture process and hence you can not prohibit the bad leads hitting your marketing / leads database. However, by deploying suitable Lead Verification process, you can verify the lead parameters and then make a decision whether to pass on the lead to the lead buyer or your sales team.

As the name suggests, the lead verification is carried out generally online and hence can be used in real time lead generation and distribution situations. Once the lead information is received from the landing pages, the lead management system will subject the key data elements to dozens of tests and determine the quality of the lead.

The following lead parameters are used to verify the lead. Obviously, if the lead captured does not contain all these data elements, then the quality assessment will be less accurate.

• First name

• Last name

• Email Address

• Address

• Phone Number

• Gender

• Date of Birth

• IP Address

Based on the input values, the verification process will return the corrected values as well as a set of useful quality parameters (which may vary from system to system). Most of useful will be Overall Quality score, Overall Quality Result, and type / technology of telephone numbers provided. It may also provide alternate telephone number and address. Let us dedicate any post entirely for Lead Verification processes and services.

At the highest level, the Overall Quality Score can be used to take an instant decision and treat the lead accordingly. For example, if the score is leass than 50, probably the quality may not be very high and hence you may avoid selling it to your high value customers.

Since Lead Verification involves comparision with millions of publich and proprietory database records, the verification services are generally provided as a per transaction fee based service. The typical cost per transaction varies from 25 cents to 35 cents based on volume of leads verified on monthly basis.

Conclusion

Choosing and employing the lead quality assessment strategies is a scenario specific one. What is highly recommened for a specific scenario may not be suitable for another business case. Hence you need to weigh your specific use and determine the optimum deployment. If you can offord the cost and resources and required inputs are available, certainly employing more than one process is recommended. As a note of caution, employing the lead verification process does not mean that you can rest easy; you have to constantly reassess the lead sources, processes, and results and improve the procedures as required.