Jason Burns — HurcuLeads, and the 2009 record

Hello, this is Gabriel Buck, CEO of ClickPoint Software. We are continuing our interview series with lead companies using the LeadExec platform. Today, you're going to get a question and answer round with Jason Burns of HurcuLeads.

To review, there is a set criterion we use in order to decide who we interview. The companies we interview must have good standing and an excellent reputation in the online marketing industry. We want companies that have a successful model and are willing to share a bit of their success with us in an interview.

The purpose of these interviews is to learn from companies that have already put in many hours of hard work to establish themselves as a reputable company in the industry. As a result of our interview, lead buyers will be able to hear what questions should really be asked of a lead source before doing business with them. Lead companies will hear what it's like to run a successful lead company.

You will also learn what challenges a lead company faces in the current economic environment and what opportunities are still available. With that said, our interview guest this month is Jason Burns of HurcuLeads. The reason I wanted to interview him is simply because I have seen what he's up to.

I think it's personally great. Jason is bringing something new to the table in the lead space that brings value to lead buying customers. And I want both buyers and sellers to learn from Jason because I think he's on the right track.

I think his idea is great. All right. Without further ado, we have Jason Burns here of HurcuLeads.

Jason, how are you, my man? I'm doing good, Gabe. How are you today, sir? Pretty good. Looking forward to a little bit of time off for New Year's.

What about yourself? Definitely. The Christmas holiday was quite eventful. So I'm looking forward to a little bit of a break over the next couple of days and try to get everything in order for the launch of the new year to absolutely crush and take it over, man.

That's good. That's good. So things are going good for you guys over there.

I've been so incredibly blessed, Gabe. As you know, I've talked to you a couple of times over the last couple of months as you've seen it starting to bloom and blossom into something that's just absolutely wonderful. It's just such a blessing for everybody involved.

I've kind of been following you since you first started with your development and your new platform. And it seems like you've put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears on the front end of this thing and really holding off on making money until you actually had this thing exactly the way that you wanted it. So I'm glad to see that it's finally working for you.

Yeah, thanks, man. It's not been an easy road, but it certainly is paying off now, thank God. Great.

Well, typically what I'll do is I'm just going to ask you some typical questions that lead companies are going to want to hear. They're going to want to see how you're running your business, what is your idea, how did you do it. And then also lead buyers are going to want to know what separates you from the competition.

I've already, in my interview series, I go over what the criterion is for a company to make it to the interview stage of our blog. And typically that consists of having good quality providers that we know have a great industry reputation for providing the service and also providing an ethical business plan and an ethical business practice. So without getting too much into that, I'm going to start off with the questions.

And our first one's going to be, what's it like running a lead company these days? What are you looking forward to in 2010, and what's it really like on the day-to-day for you? Well, as you know, with the debt industry, not only the debt industry, but just generally doing leads and trying to run traffic to you and push traffic out, it just seems like it's inevitable that you try to do the right thing, and you're always trying to be the right guy, but you're only as good as the guy driving traffic to you. And when you're driving paper leads and selling paper leads, it's very easy to get in over your head where you've got too many sales and not enough leads. And that usually leads to a person doing things that they wouldn't normally do in the normal course of business.

And the people that are driving traffic to them, they normally will do whatever it takes to make that $10, $15, $20, whatever it is that they're making per lead, and jam you up with stuff that maybe it was sold last week, maybe it was actually non-exclusive, and things like that. And so what I've done is I've developed a way to try to get around that negative aspect of lead generation industry and try to bring some honesty and integrity to the marketplace, where it just seems like it's lacking in most cases. And I'm just trying to bring it to the table with the trusted relationships from providers that you and I both know that some of the people out there are good guys, and some of them just aren't good guys.

And it's really hard to find the good guys, and you spend a lot of money trying to find the right guy to do business with you, and every time your phone rings, you just really want so bad for this guy to be the guy that's really the true cat. And it just so often doesn't really happen. So I've had to figure out a way to try to circumvent that in the marketplace and not let the bad guys be involved and really find out who the bad guys are every single time they push a lead to you.

And that's basically what I've done here. Let's talk about a couple of those points real quick. I think one of the most important ones that you touched on is too much traffic.

I think for the guys that are thinking about starting a lead company, or the ones that are even in the business, they'll relate to what you're saying. And I think you brought up a really good point in that lead companies, it's not that they set out with bad intentions when they start a lead company. I think a lot of people get into a situation where they take a lot of time to line up the buyers.

They take a lot of time to line up the sellers. And what they don't realize is when the traffic starts coming in, if they don't have their system configured properly, if they don't have enough buyers across enough sectors of whatever lead type it is that they're producing, then they're stuck with all this inventory. And they have no way to get it out.

And so then that's when things become gray, or when they start selling leads in one category more than they really should, because that's all they have buyers for. And that becomes a real big issue where, again, lead companies that don't set out to maybe intentionally lie to their customers end up doing so because they're stuck with all this inventory, and they have no way of getting rid of it. Right.

Or you've got the same side of that coin on the opposite, that you've got a guy that's got a ton of salespeople that's pushing a lot of leads and just doesn't have the ass to be able to handle all of that volume and push it out to their people. So that's when they start splitting it up into a shared, when it's really supposed to be an exclusive relationship. And the sad part about that is we've all tried to do the right thing from the get-go.

And the wonderful thing about my system is that you can have a very small sales staff, or you can have a very large sales staff. And there's a lot of companies out there that have a large sales staff that continue to roll over customer after customer after customer in the forever, trying to find a new customer to bring in because the old one's left. And it's because of the quality of lead.

If you had good quality leads, nobody's leaving you. And within my system, I've developed a way to not have to have a large sales staff because of the purity of the system. And we'll get into that in a little bit.

But I definitely agree with you. It's really a tough thing to find the right guys to have that teeter-totter, where I've got an X amount of sales, and I've got an X amount of traffic. And when you're dealing with PPC, you can control that a little bit better, SEO a little bit better, and email marketing, not so much.

So if you reach out there into the marketplace, and let's say you do an email campaign, and you just absolutely bust it up one morning, and you generated 200 or 300 leads, but you've only got 70 or 80 sold, then what? And you push those off onto another relationship. You can push leads out to somebody that says that they're taking it exclusively, and then they sell it multiple times, and you've got lead generation companies from one company to another company that are having shared relationships. But there's no reason to have to go that direction if you try to do the right thing, and you manage that teeter-totter.

One of the reasons I have you on this, and one of the reasons why I liked what I saw in what you guys were creating is because, and one of the reasons why we have a partnership is that that's what we've tried to do. We've tried to give the industry a piece of software where you can manage the flow of traffic and the flow of leads a little bit better. And the reason why I wanted you on the show is because you've taken that a step in a different direction, but it also works with LeadExec, and that's great.

But what you're doing is you're managing the flow of leads and your inventory much better, and in doing so, you're ensuring that your customers get a superior product, and it's a win-win for everybody. Not only is it a win-win for the vendors and the publishers that are pushing quality traffic and keeping them honest and making sure that they're creating a quality product, but you're also ensuring that your customers are getting a far superior lead than what would typically be presented to them from an internet lead company. Does that sound about right? Yeah, and to be honest with you, Gabe, my company, HurcuLeads, would not be in business today if it was not for your platform and your company and the service that you guys provide.

If I didn't have that, I could not possibly have launched yet. I appreciate that. We're trying to do our part.

There's so many companies out there that are trying to do the same thing that you're doing, and everybody's got a little bit of competition. And I've used several other platforms in the past, and I used you when I originally got in the industry a couple years back. I used you initially, and then my business partner had decided to go a different direction for a little while.

And when I got back into business for myself, there were obviously the other platforms that are still available out there, but I absolutely jumped all over yours, and I'm really glad that I did. You know, one of the things that we really pride ourselves on here at ClickPoint, and I won't go too much into the sales of ClickPoint, because that's the sales model, because that's really not what this is about, but we put culture before profit. That's really what we focus on here, and we treat our customers really well.

We try to treat our service and support teams as our top priority and make sure that our customers stay on and give us the repeat business. So it's always good to hear that. As far as the back end is concerned for the, let's talk about debt specifically right now, 90% of my customers that I deliver debt leads to on a daily basis also use your platform for the debt suite that you offer.

And they're absolutely ecstatic about it. Great to hear that. So tell me, let's get down to the real, tell me really what your service does.

What does your product do that is really separating you from your competition? I guess in a nutshell it would be that as a customer goes to a landing page and fills out a form regarding a specific product or offering, what happens is as soon as the customer fills out that information and they hit the submit button or the call to action, they are actually talking live, chatting live with a debt specialist or loan modification specialist, mortgage specialist, whatever that vertical happens to be. But it's instantly in real time. So as the customer hits the button, talking to a specialist right now.

And the difference between that and a paper lead is, first of all, you know it is without a doubt 100% exclusive every single time. You're going to get a customer that told you, never will you get a customer that tells you, oh, I didn't fill out the form, or oh, I missed, I didn't understand, or oh, I don't even own a computer, or oh, he died six months ago, or any of that malarkey that happens with paper leads. If it's a disconnected phone number, because a lot of people want to hide on their computers, especially in the debt industry, this gives them the ability to not be, most of the people fabricate the information and put in a bogus phone number, bogus name.

Just to see what happens on the form and see what really happens, right? Right. What happens in that case is a customer, I was doing a go-to meeting with a client a couple weeks ago. And the guy was very hesitant about going forward with another debt lead provider, because he's done it in the past, and he's just gotten burned so many times.

And as I was explaining to him through the platform and how it works, I actually had my screen open, and I had leads coming through live in real time. Well, I clicked Accept a New Customer on the button, and the customer's name was John John. His email was john at johnjohn.com, and it was like $42,000 worth of unsecured debt.

And as soon as that customer popped up on the screen that said john at johnjohn.com, the guy said, see, that's exactly what I'm talking about. That's exactly what kind of leads are provided every single day from every single lead provider, and I just don't want anything to do with it. And I said, really, we'll talk to the guy.

What do you got to say? So we started talking to the guy, opened him up, opened him up a little bit more. The guy started divulging more information and more information. Come to find out, the guy, he gives him his Better Business Bureau link, tells him who he is, and the guy, he kept reaching for the guy's phone number, and the guy wouldn't give up the phone.

He said, well, here's my phone number. Why don't you call me? And we're in the middle of the GoToMeeting, and the guy's phone rings in the background. He says, hold on a second.

Well, it happened to be that customer, and he was off the line for about three or four minutes. Come back on the line just to interrupt and say, hey, I'm going to have to call you back. Go ahead and send over the insertion order.

This guy's a done deal. I'm like, see, that's beautiful. That's exactly what this provides for.

People can be at work and fill out their information on as far as a regular paper lead and hit the Submit button. And what happens is your sales staff reaches out to that customer and catches their voicemail or gets a busy signal or something. The customer's not really there, but when they're chatting on live real time, right now while they're sitting at their desk, their boss isn't over the shoulder, they can chat right now.

And you can set your appointment. You can dig a little bit deeper and make sure that this is a customer that is somebody that you can assist. And then you go right on to step two, setting your appointment or jumping on the telephone with the person.

But having that initial knowing for sure that that's a real customer, that's a real lead, and that's a real opportunity for me to be able to do, it's just made a world of difference for my company. Wow. So yeah, I'm going to assume that managing, I had some other questions for you about from the lead seller perspective, how do you manage returns and how do you generate these leads? But honestly, you just answered both of my questions because managing returns and also how you generate them, it seems like it doesn't even really matter.

The lead is true in nature. So you're not really managing a whole bunch of bogus requests. You're managing only accurate people that are actually looking for something.

And they're either going to talk to your customer or they're not. And then returns, you really wouldn't have any returns with this kind of a platform, would you? Well, I don't have a return policy in place. But I do have a button on there that if the lead itself, if the customer didn't chat with you in real time and the phone number is disconnected, if it's Mickey Mouse or something absolutely jacked up, they just hit the button and it goes into my back end.

And it gives me an opportunity to view that conversation because every one of these conversations are in black and white, so nobody can fabricate what was said. And another beautiful part about that is the FTC compliance within that. I have auto preset buttons at the very first button that a customer, that a lead provider, I mean a debt specialist would push, it says struggling.

And it basically states, are you currently struggling with your unsecured debt and looking for some payment relief? If the customer answers yes, you've now opened that gate and you've done your due diligence as far as a business is concerned to be able to help that consumer. And you didn't try to wiggle through it or try to do something sorted or underhanded to them as far as the sales process. You specifically ask them, are they looking for some assistance and are they struggling with their debt? They say yes, bam, it's on.

It's time to have that conversation. But there's another button that I have on there for returns is, as you know, in the marketplace, it's hard to always know exactly where that traffic was truly derived from. So sometimes you get ads that are Obama ads or telling you something that's not true to the consumer.

And instantly, there's a return button on there that if the customer misunderstood the advertisement or the promotion was invalid. OK, I can see that. Or if it was incentivized in some way.

So you're still going to have to deal with some small part of that. But really, where the lead is generated is not going to matter as much if it's CPC versus email versus whatever, because you're really counting the lead on initiation of contact, correct? Absolutely. And as you can imagine, it's quite a large number of people that are getting to talk to a customer in real time.

Obviously, not every single customer closes, but you get an opportunity to talk to them. What I do is I go out in the marketplace, and I advertise for people that are interested in a specific product. Those people that raise their hands, they enter into this thing.

They push the button. They hit the Submit button. And on the other end, I've got people that want to answer the questions for the person that raised their hand saying, hey, look, I need a little bit more information about this.

I'm not providing you with a done deal, but what I am providing you with are customers that are truly interested in that specific product or service and are looking for some assistance. If you've got the right programs available for that specific consumer, then God bless you. We're going to keep rolling and staying in business.

And if you don't, then I guess not. Right. Very cool.

So let me ask you some questions that will help some of the other companies that are listening to this and wondering how do they get off the ground. How do they do what you did? So first and foremost, how do you really pick your marketing partners? What is it that you're looking for in your marketing partners? Anybody that's pushing your traffic or creating those leads? Really, right now, it's been basically through a couple of years' worth of relationships from previous people that I've had that have done a good job. And I make sure to have weeded out those that have not done a very good job.

But taking referrals from it has been a wonderful part of my business. And if it's coming from somebody that I already have a business relationship with, then it makes it real quick and easy. But if not, I'm still open to entering into a new relationship.

And I can turn a customer on or off instantly as far as somebody that's driving traffic. But a nice little thing that I've done with my platform that has enabled me to really grow quite quickly is that anybody that's out there that's generating leads regularly, and they've got their own landing page, and they've got their own buyer base, what I've done is I've allowed them to have a piece of code that I give them that they put that code on their site. And if the customer hits, obviously, they need to let the customer know that they're going to enter into a chat conversation rather than just a regular paper lead.

So the customer is not absolutely surprised when they hit the button. But what happens is if a customer hits the Submit button on their site, that posts over to my database, hits the filter set criteria, bounces available for every single buyer in the marketplace in real time. And that's available for 10 seconds.

If one of my buyers click on that, then they get paid. If one of my buyers don't click on that, then the lead posts either right back to them, or it just gets redirected to whatever path it was going to originally. So it's really allowing every single person in the marketplace that is driving traffic to be able to get paid more money for their traffic for when my customer does grab the lead.

Because obviously, I'm paying a little bit higher than what the market will allow for the opportunity to have had that opportunity for that customer. And when they do, they get paid. And when it doesn't, no harm, no foul, it posts right back out to them, and they sell it off as an exclusive lead, the regular path that was going to go down anyway.

OK. Wow. So for some of the other lead companies that are out there too, I imagine this costs a good amount of time and money to get off the ground.

How long did it originally take you in development to create or to bring this idea from the very first day that you had this idea to actually putting it into practice and making it work? I think it was October of 2007 when I originally came up with the concept. And the reason that I came up with the concept initially was because I was a mortgage broker prior to the lead generation industry. But I had this concept about being able to never be taken advantage of when buying a lead again, as the buyer of the lead.

And I thought, well, if I wasn't getting taken advantage of, that means that I would have to instantly talk to every single customer to push the button. So I came up with the chat portion of it. But as I did, I originally had it built out as where it would be four different chats at the same time, and it was in the mortgage industry at the time.

So it was going to be Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Countrywide, and Washington Mutual, all fighting for one customer's business at the same time. And obviously, as this evolves, it will go into a relationship. I've already had some conversations with Google and Yahoo.

And where it's going to go to eventually will be on the right-hand side of the page, as far as the PPC model goes for, let's just call it Google for now. And somebody types in dishwasher. Instead of on the right-hand side now, where you just see all the contextual ads for dishwashers, what will happen is it'll be on the top right-hand side.

A picture of a dishwasher will pop up. And as that dishwasher pops up, a customer's eye will naturally go to the picture rather than the text. So as soon as the customer clicks on the dishwasher, it will automatically open up at Sears and Home Depot and Lowe's and a mom-and-pop shop in real time.

And a customer will negotiate their best deal for that dishwasher. As soon as they get done, they push print on the entire conversation, because it's always in black and white. And they can walk into Home Depot and say, hey, I was talking to Mike.

Here's the information. Here's the SKU number and everything else. And pick up the dishwasher and be done.

So that's where the evolution of it, I think, will actually go to one day. Yeah, I can see that happening. I mean, I see what you're doing right now.

I mean, I think the biggest lesson to others out there is that, look, the online marketing industry is growing at unprecedented rates every single year. It's in between 10% and 20% annually. It's a growing, thriving industry.

It's still got a lot of obstacles. It's still got a lot of hurdles. But what I'm liking, and the reason why, again, that I'm having you on here, is because you're really bringing something new to the table.

And what I've seen for so long is that people keep trying to do the same thing in the lead industry. And that's why we created our software. They're just trying to do this.

They look at what their friends do. Or they talk to somebody, and they hear some snippet of how they're running their business. And they're not really creating any value.

And so what you have is a lot of watered-down leads. You have a lot of upset customers and companies that it could potentially hurt the industry down the road, because these companies say, you know what? I'm done with lead companies and all. I'm not talking to anybody.

Just like that guy that you had to prove. I think it's pretty close to that right now. Right.

It is getting close to that right now. So there really is a demand for innovation in this space. There's a demand for entrepreneurs like yourself to come into the space and say, how can we make it better? What can we do to create a better product for the end user, the person that's actually buying the leads? And that's where my concept came from as well.

I wanted to clean the leads as best as possible, distribute the leads in real time as fast as possible, give our customers that license our software as many tools as possible to create a more superior lead. Now, you've done it and taken it even a step further and created a real-time chat environment with the customer too. So all these things together, that's why we have these interviews, that's why we form these kinds of alliances with companies that are doing things the right way and doing it reputable, because at the end of the day, we're our best advertisers for each other.

I can advertise for you, you can advertise for me, because we know in all honesty that we're doing the right things to help our customers out. So it's good stuff, man. I love talking to you.

Your ideas are fresh. This is probably one of the best tools that I've seen hit the marketplace in quite some time. Wow, I sure am glad to hear you say that, Gabe.

I've really worked a long time, and it cost a lot of money to get to this point. And because of the amount of money it has cost to get to this point, and because I believe that that is the way that the future is going to go with regards to being able to instantly contact your consumers, and the time frame between just initially when a customer fills out a form and hits the Enter button, eight minutes later, you've got basically a 50% chance of closing that customer. 20 minutes later, you've got a 70% less chance of closing that customer. So as soon as the customer hits the Submit button, they're at their highest peak and the highest point of interest.

They're absolutely there in real time. And another thing that I wanted to mention to you was the integration between HurcuLeads and the ClickPoint software. I'm really looking forward to that in the coming, obviously as quickly as we possibly can, but to be able to provide that.

I didn't know you were going to throw that in there. We're working on it, Jason. It's coming, I promise you.

I know a lot of people are anxious to see it. We are working, just so everybody that listens to this, we are working on an integration with the HurcuLeads platform so that not only LeadExec licensees can use it, but also our debt settlement, our mortgage, our insurance customers that use our lead management solution will also be able to access that system through our web-based lead management system. So we do have a partnership moving forward.

And I think that that's going to benefit our supplier's side on the LeadExec side. And it's also going to benefit our consumers. Obviously, any one of our lead buyers on our lead management system here in this interview would see the immediate value of going with the HurcuLeads and LeadExec combination.

It's really a win-win. And not only just for the HurcuLeads solution, but I don't know if you know some of our new lead distribution methods, but some of the pool-based methodology that we use in our lead management system, I mean, it's amazing to not only have HurcuLeads where you're waiting for your screen to pop open and say, you have a potential lead that you can be talking to right now, but then also we have the pool-based methodology in our lead management system where they're also saying, give me my next lead. And it's literally taking lead conversion times down to a couple of minutes on average.

And it's amazing. So you take the combination of those two in a good lead management system, and you throw in some digital signing technology where their contracts get signed instantly with our debt settlement platform, and you throw in the calculations and all these other tools that we put into that system, and mortgage brokers, debt settlement agents, insurance agents. It's a different world than when we first came into it, man.

It's, now they've got some products and some tools where they're closing businesses as close to real time as possible. All right, man, well listen, we're gonna wrap this up. I'm gonna finish it off with one last question.

Is there anything you want to tell anybody that's listening to the interview out there, anything else about HurcuLeads or how they can get involved with you? Well, you can take a look at HurcuLeads.com, H-U-R-C-U-L-E-A-D-S.com. You can do a two minute and 15 second video from there. Once you've done that, if you wanted to go ahead and sign up, I'll be happy to give you your first lead on HurcuLeads.

Obviously, I'll offset that cost over to Gabe from ClickPoint, make sure everything's good there. I appreciate that. Once you see how the process actually works, you'll get a little bit of that insight when you watch the video.

But as soon as you take your first lead and you walk your way through that, obviously as soon as the customer hits the submit button, that lead blinks on every single person that's in the system at the same time that has met with that filter set criteria. It blinks for 10 seconds on every single person's screen. The first person to click that lead gets that lead, and it drops off of everybody else's system.

And obviously, there's another one right behind it. But the same process continues to happen. Regardless of the vertical, we're here to help grow out HurcuLeads, the ClickPoint platform, as well as new relationships.

I'm open and honest on everything that I do, and I look forward to talking to each and every one of you individually or as groups. And if there's something that you want to do as far as a white label platform for yourself, we're also working towards that. So please reach out to Gabe, and perhaps he'll be able to have some more information for you on how to better get involved with that.

I appreciate your time, Gabe. God bless you, brother. Continue the good work that you're doing, man.

Thank you for your time, and have a safe and happy New Year's Eve. Bye.