Sparkroom was awarded the Best Lead Management in the education vertical by LeadsCouncil on Thursday, January 6th, 2011. See the press release from LeadsCouncil here. What a superb way to start 2011. We are thrilled to have our product recognized by our clients, prospects, partners and industry experts as the best solution for schools to automate, manage, and optimize all student inquiries from a single, integrated platform.

You can find the Sparkroom press release here.

Happy New Year!

Dave Datars and I will be representing Sparkroom at the BMO Back to School Conference next Thursday, September 16th in New York City. It will be extremely interesting to take the temperature on the market-funded education industry after a year of radical change on the regulatory and rhetoric front.

Reach out to either Dave or myself if you are interested in meeting at the conference.

The Sparkroom team will be exhibiting at the Career College Association Annual Convention & Exposition aka CCA in Las Vegas from June 9th to June 11th. Come find us at booth #904. We are looking forward to connecting with customers, prospects and great friends in the industry. And to hearing Bill Clinton speak on “Embracing Our Common Humanity.”

We are exciting to be heading to Las Vegas later today for the king of all lead generation trade shows, LeadsCon (www.leadscon.com). It will be great to connect with customers, prospects, partners and friends in the industry. Huge hats off to Jay Weintraub for organizing what is always a great two day conference.

We are exhibiting this year. Come find the Sparkroom team at booth 213 at the Mirage.

Sparkroom announced two very important milestones today. Firstly, and most importantly, we announced that Premier Education Group (PEG) is now working with Sparkroom. PEG’s brands include Branford Hall Career Institute, Salter College, The Salter School, Seacoast Career Schools, Suburban Technical School and Harris School of Business. We are thrilled to be working with Tony McPeck and his team and are excited to help them solve some of their most pressing sales & marketing issues.

Secondly, we are pleased to announce Sparkroom Lead Deliver, which PEG is implementing. Lead Deliver performs real-time lead capture, scrubbing and distribution and is integrated with leading CRM platforms in the EDU vertical. Tony captured the essence of the product when he said:

“We have always managed our vendor relationships in-house but we have lacked a technology platform that can aggregate, validate and distribute our leads quickly and efficiently. We selected Sparkroom Lead Deliver to solve those problems.”

See the press release here.  We look forward to a great partnership with PEG and to continued adoption of the Lead Deliver product in the marketplace.

Earlier this year, we launched Lead IQ for the education vertical. Yesterday, we announced a milestone relationship for our company with U.S. Education, which operates its schools under the Apollo College and Western Career College brands and is a division of DeVry Inc. We met Jason and Andy earlier this year and were immediately impressed by them as smart direct marketers and business people. The good news for us is they liked what Lead IQ could do for them. Andy said it best in the press release: “By implementing the Lead IQ platform, we expect to make better business decisions and drive increased operational efficiency, ultimately allowing us to scale our business more quickly.”

We look forward to a long and fruitful partnership with US Ed.

We will be demoing some new product at LeadsCon (www.leadscon.com) next week in Las Vegas. The show begins Wednesday, March 4th and ends Thursday, March 5th. We are being featured in the Private Company Spotlight on Wednesday, March 4th at 11:45 AM. Looking forward to catching up with the industry next week.

Sparkroom is doing our first webinar in the higher education space. Get details and register here. The date is Groundhog Day – February 2, 2009 at 2 PM EST. Looking forward to sharing our EDU platform with you then.

UPDATE: Thank you to those who attended the webinar. For those who missed the live event, simply email events@sparkroom.com for a link to a recording of the webinar.

Nine months ago, we announced the release of Sparkroom Lead IQ 1.0, a lead performance optimization platform customized to the needs of marketers and lead buyers in the mortgage industry. Today, we launched Sparkroom Lead IQ 2.0, a lead optimization platform for the higher education industry. Read the full release here. It has always been part of our vision to extend our platform across multiple lead generation categories and today we make that vision reality.

Schools like University of Phoenix, Capella University and Career Education pioneered online direct response marketing and continue to be among the largest buyers of online media. To market efficiently and effectively, schools need sophisticated software platforms to manage and measure their lead sources. Sparkroom Lead IQ delivers that platform. As we have been out visiting with schools over the past month to share our progress and get feedback on the platform, the feedback has been unanimous the product is “ground-breaking”, “generations ahead of existing solutions”, and my favorite, “thank you.”

We look forward to talking more about our work with schools in the coming months.

ps more blogging is a New Year’s resolution that we plan on keeping!

Today we announced the launch of Sparkroom Lead Market Analytics. Read the full release here. We believe that this new product is important. Why? Because it begins to deliver transparency to an opaque and confusing market. Information is power. Transparency is inevitable in an online world where there is lots and lots of data. What Lead Market Analytics does is simple. It provides lead buyers with the tools and data to benchmark their performance vs. an aggregated industry data set. This is important because it helps buyers figure out what they are good at — where their competitive advantage lies.

A couple of key points to make:

1. To get access to the data, you have to contribute data. We call this community. You have to participate to gain the benefits.
2. Your data will always be anonymous. Competitors will not be able to identify any individual lender. This is the power of having data aggregated across an entire market. Very powerful.

Lead Critic covers it here.

Let us know what you think. We are at the LendingTree Summit in Charlotte this week and the Targus Online Lead Quality Summit in Vegas next week.