This past weekend, Underground Elephant’s James Riebel attended LeadsCon 2014, a prestigious performance-driven marketing conference in New York City. He provided thought leadership for industry experts on a panel titled “Case in Point: Building a Central Marketplace for Distributed Leads.” He was also featured in a recent LeadsCon article, “Making the Case for a Central Marketplace for leads.”
James points out that a consolidated lead marketplace provides agents with instant access to several suppliers (such as the Allstate Lead Marketplace with its 16 lead vendors), empowering agents with more lead options and marketplace filters. He adds that having a central lead purchase marketplace eliminates inconsistent costs, boosts efficiency, aligns incentives lead providers and agents, and reduces industry compliance issues. It is similar in nature to eBay and HealthCare.gov, except it is for leads.
Another benefit of a streamlined marketing strategy is the elimination of time-consuming processes for Underground Elephant’s clients, such as plugging numbers into excel. Avoiding opportunity costs such as these free up additional bandwidth for sales agents, who can now spend more time contacting high-intent customers.
Centralized marketplaces for leads is not the norm right now; it’s the exception. Amidst business-as-usual practices, the insurance lead market as a whole is currently fragmented, which is causing:
increased solicitations and costs for consumers
reduced lead quality and efficiency for individual sales agents
suboptimal corporate marketing spend and unnecessary competition within insurance companies
James elaborated on how this fragmentation in the lead market inhibits insurance agents from reaching their full sales potential. Problems for agents include uncertainty regarding which lead generation source to choose and why, price variability, inconsistent ROI, lack of oversight, and the absence of analysis with important metrics that measure lead quality and performance.
Thanks to our strong partnership with Allstate, Underground Elephant developed the Allstate Lead Marketplace (ALM) in an effort to both identify the market-based challenges and empower Allstate agents to reach their full sales potential. Allstate’s David Williams, supports this view, highlighting that the marketplace created by the partnership between Allstate and Underground Elephant “simplifies the overall marketing strategy of the agents”, as they now have “instant access” to numerous high-quality vendors. David continued by emphasizing that Allstate sales agents–thanks to ALM’s capabilities–make their lead selection decisions based on the actual performance of insurance leads, thereby incentivizing lead providers to enhance the quality of their products and customer service.
Underground Elephant thanks James’ fellow LeadsCon 2014 panelists, Allstate agent David Williams and Goji’s Blair Baldwin.
A bit more about the Allstate Lead Marketplace
“We challenged Underground Elephant to help execute our vision for addressing the quality and efficiency concerns expressed by our agency owners as they increasingly rely upon online leads to support their sales efforts,” says Mark Madeyski, marketing manager at Allstate. “The early indication we see from the Allstate Lead Marketplace is that it could be a game changer for our agency owners, ensuring their timely purchase of leads for consumers searching online to meet their insurance protection needs.”
A bit more about Allstate Insurance
The Allstate Corporation (NYSE: ALL) is the nation’s largest publicly held personal lines insurer, serving approximately 16 million households through its Allstate, Encompass, Esurance and Answer Financial brand names and Allstate Financial business segment. Allstate branded insurance products (auto, home, life and retirement) and services are offered through Allstate agencies, independent agencies, and Allstate exclusive financial representatives, as well as via www.allstate.com, www.allstate.com/financial and 1-800 Allstate®, and are widely known through the slogan “You’re In Good Hands With Allstate®.”