Just a heads up that we are going to be presenting at Finovate Startup in San Francisco on Tuesday, April 30th. You won’t see our logo or data on the website as of today but that is only because we were just invited on Friday. Thanks to Ken Lin at CreditKarma for pointing us to Eric and the gang organizing the show. We will be presenting in the afternoon. Come watch our demo and swing by our table after the demo.

If you are looking to connect at Finovate, email me at jmcdonald at sparkroom dot com and/or Jamie Shulman at jshulman at sparkroom dot com.

1. Power to the people. The consumer lead generation experience on the Internet is broken. Not many consumers want their phone to ring three times a day for seven days in a row from four different lenders when they submit their information on LendingTree or LowerMyBills. By making the lead anonymous to the lender, Zillow does a great thing by putting the power to request contact or to pick up the phone in the hands of the consumer. When the consumer does call a lender, you can bet that will be a very valuable phone call.

2. Transparency. We love, love, love the Loan Request Search. The ability to see what quotes consumers are requesting and how lenders are responding to those quotes is so smart. For our lender customers, we can easily see the lead flow in their sweets spots and see how much competition there is against those leads. Why doesn’t LendingTree do this? It would be valuable for both consumers and lenders.

3. Free leads. That is a very low cost trial for lenders and a very good strategy by Zillow to drive liquidity in their marketplace and to inflict pain on all the established lead providers in the industry. All it costs lenders is the time and energy required to quote the leads.

We haven’t read all the lender feedback on Zillow but Owen Raun from RMC has positive things to say. Read it here. I particularly like Owen’s suggestions for how to make the service better. Look for Zillow to provide an API to automate the submission of quotes for large lenders in the coming months.

Disclosure: I used to work with Rich and Lloyd at Expedia and I have a huge amount of respect for them and their team. Also, I have a very small investment in Zillow.

A bunch of folks on the Sparkroom team spent the last few days traveling to see customers and to talk with some potential customers. The pattern that we have been recognizing recently is that every lender we meet is good at something different. The lenders who are doing the best in this tough market are the ones who recognize what they are good at and commit to being the best at what they do. They don’t try to do everything well.

I like sports metaphors because everybody understands them. There are companies in every industry who “follow the puck” and there are those who skate to where the puck is going to be. Following the puck in a commodity business that is going through a downturn is a recipe for mediocre results or worse. So our advice to our customers, and to our future customers, is to try to figure out what you are good at and make sure you are better at doing those one or two things than anybody else in your industry. Yes to best practices. Yes to innovation. And yes to measuring everything. But remember that you have to be great at something. Figuring out what that is drives business success.

Thanks to all the bright people we met with this week who inspired this post. Great conversations this week.

Some Insider posted the last entry in his opus on the “ever-elusive ROI” on LeadCritic last night. Read the full post here. He has this to say about Sparkroom:

“If you are not good with data, or don’t have the time to do the mining yourself, LeadCritic did a write-up on new company, Sparkroom, that can actually do this for you (this is an unsolicited endorsement, for the record. I have clients that are currently using the product and so far I have liked what I have seen). Not only can their product mine the lead data and bridge the gap between costs and income, but they make that data actionable and tell you what to do with it via a consultative approach. Now, it still remains to be seen if their advice will be good, but I certainly am in favor of the concept.”

First of all, thanks to Some Insider for the unsolicited endorsement. Our only bone of contention with the endorsement is the qualification that “if you are not good with data”, use Sparkroom. While we do have clients who ask us to do everything for them, we also work with highly quantitative customers who really get data and the power of quantitative decision making. Those customers understand the power of having end-to-end reporting on the entire lead lifecycle and optimizing against the metric that matters. These customers also have amazing feedback on how to make Sparkroom Lead IQ better as well as the account management service that supports it.

One of the key themes for us coming out of LeadsCon is that what we do is hard. Doing hard things is a good thing — in business and in life. Some Insider talks about the difficulty that the Lead Management Systems have in delivering income data back to their customers, but it is also hard to accurately track cost data and to assign it to the right lead and the right filter. Add in the challenges around LendingTree CLO fees and it is no wonder that lenders don’t do a great job of accurately tracking cost or income.

The final problem is that once you have an accurate end-to-end view on cost and income of your lead buying program, you have to figure out what to do. This is hard too. More good news.

Ed Powell, Sparkroom’s VP Sales, and I spoke with Owen Raun from RMC Vanguard last week about Sparkroom. Owen is not only one of the most progressive and innovative buyers in the mortgage lead generation space but he also hosts the industry’s leading podcast and writes a great blog (http://www.mortgageonlineblog.com). Read the post or click here to listen.

Sorry our posts have been light since LeadsCon but we have been swamped. Lots to talk about coming out of the conference. Huge thanks to Jay Weintraub for putting the show together.