In selling financial services, qualified leads are the name of the game: You want to connect to customers who are either in the market for your services or at least interested in your pitch at the moment when they’re ready to become your customers.
Regent Financial Group is an Omaha-based mortgage lender with branch offices in Wichita, KS, Davenport, IA, and Tulsa, OK. These four offices serve the entirety of their home states and also range far afield, to Missouri, South Dakota, Colorado, Florida and Minnesota. Regent vice president Jason Rowe says the company does about $10 million a month in business, making it one of the biggest residential lenders in the Omaha metro area.
Regent gets a number of its customer referrals from local agents, but the company has also pursued a number of avenues to actively generate those leads. These include direct mail, telemarketing in selected areas (outsourced) and buying lists of e-mail addresses from third party providers. In combination, they’ve worked fairly well, says Rowe.
But both the price and the timing issues involved in dealing with list brokers were bothersome to Rowe, who oversees the marketing functions for all the Regent branches. “We had to contact the list company and buy a limited number of names for so much per lead,” he says. “I was at their mercy when they said they could sell me 5000 names with such-and-such demographic criteria for $1500. And every time I wanted to do a new mailing or telemarketing campaign, I had to call again, wait for the e-mail file and hope it got to me on time.”
Toward the end of last year, Rowe saw an ad for infoUSA’s Sales Genie data service offering unlimited lists in twelve categories—including several suited to Regent’s business—for a flat $250 monthly fee. He called to ask about the catch—“I always assume there’s a catch”—and found that there didn’t appear to be one.
The Sales Genie service lets Rowe and his branch managers access the lists via the Internet, and filter them by a number of useful criteria, including bankruptcies, area codes and ZIP codes. Regent can pull an unlimited number of names per month. And filter them according to relevant criteria. “I can break the lists down demographically the same way a list provider would do,” Rowe says. “Do the names have a mortgage? Have they been living in their home for two years, or for seven years? I can select by age, marital status, or family size. Anything they could do for me, I now can do it.”
The big difference is that Rowe can now amass these names on his schedule and doesn’t have to worry about forcing a quick response from a list broker. “I can sit in my pajamas in front of a Huskers game on TV on a Saturday and get as many names as I want,” he says. “Then I just e-mail them to my loan officers and tell them to call or mail to these people and follow up with a phone call. The difference is that I can now do this at my leisure, without having to rely on anyone else.” Branch officers are able to use Sales Genie’s online contact manager feature to keep track of what customers were contacted, what the response was and any requisite follow-up.
Rowe say that Regent is still dealing with list managers for some types of consumer data, mostly “pre-screened” financial data that includes detailed information such as the current mortgage holder, the approximate balance remaining, revolving credit card debt. Using that data, Regent produces highly customized direct mail letters every three or four months—about 5,000 per month for the Omaha market alone. Recipients can respond using a toll-free number; those who don’t call are likely to get a second or third mailing in the cycle.
Even here, the Sales Genie data has a part to play, Rowe says. “Parts of south Omaha have heavy concentrations of Hispanic consumers, and we’re using the Sales Genie service to target those homeowners by ZIP code and send them letters in Spanish,” he says. Toward the end of last year, Regent also began sending customized letters to consumers in its market who had filed for bankruptcy, pointing out ways they could still qualify for loans.
The response to those efforts has been strong, and Rowe says the price for the customer data that fuels them is definitely right for his ROI. “That same list of bankruptcy names that I can get for $250 a month from Sales Genie would cost $3,000 to $4,000 from a list manager,” he says. “I think it’s a steal, and our profit margins are going through the roof.”
