The season is long, the cycles are up and down, the player options are endless, the statistics are overwhelming, and the winners seem to be able to consume it all to make the right moves at the right time. Fantasy baseball? No, mortgage lead buying.

Now if you know me personally, you knew it was only a matter of time before I eventually made this analogy work. The bonus to you is that you get great tips for improving your mortgage production and your fantasy league standing.

Pay Attention to Your Team

Any fantasy player will tell you the recipe for a pathetic season is to draft and set your team on auto-pilot. Fantasy competitors will also tell you there is nothing more frustrating than having a manager like this in your league.

When you are buying leads you are outsourcing your marketing. You would never think of hiring a marketing team and then hoping for the best. Why would you do it with mortgage lead providers? After “drafting” your marketing mix–pay attention! Different channels and providers will ebb and flow, they will have good streaks and bad, they will make good and bad adjustments. Don’t leave a consistently bad player on the field or abandon a consistent performer prematurely during an adjustment.

Putting your lead buying on auto-pilot is a sure way to get hit by all the worst of lead generation and guaranteed to frustrate the crap out of your sales force. Also, remember that lead providers, like employees, work harder when you care and support them in improving yours and their performance.

Blend All-Stars with Category Players

No one can afford a team full of players and salaries like Alex Rodriguez and Albert Pujols, but you can combine category players to get just as much, or sometimes more, production out of category players.

Same with lead providers. You may have some foundation players, like LendingTree, LowerMyBills, and NexTag; yet need additional lead volume that your budget can’t support or you can’t even buy into large up-front commitments. No worries, just blend some of the smaller players. Maybe a little pure refinance built off direct and search marketing from ZipSearch, with some solid big California loan amounts from ConsumerTrack, with a more eclectic mix from LoanWeb and Low.com.

Diversify your lead providers to minimize bad streaks and to get the most out of your marketing budget. Another great way to facilitate this mixing and blending, while adding an extra measure of vendor management, quality control, and fraud prevention, is to use a lead exchange like LeadPoint. A lead exchange allows you to maximize you lead dollar with smaller commitments, against more lead sources, and minimize your overhead in managing multiple lead providers.

Streaming Pitchers

Streaming pitchers is a technique that is sparking a bit of debate in the fantasy baseball community. The concept is to drop and add pitchers on a daily basis to take advantage of arbitrage-type characteristics like: favorable match-ups, multiple start weeks, pitcher favorable ballparks, etc. The hope is that you are able to maximize overall pitching stats by seizing these subtle advantages.

This has long been a technique on Wall Street, but is only recently being discussed in marketing and generally only in the context of search engine marketing.

Unfortunately, the technique is a little tough to manage in today’s lead generation market, but I see it as a growing opportunity. The idea would is that as the lead marketplace becomes more open and transparent an active “lead trader” could watch for subtle opportunities and trends to seize real value for their particular need. For example, I may note predictable cycles of application rates that coincide with a lead provider’s campaigns or detect market conditions that make “aged” leads more attractive–like an ARM reset window that hasn’t had enough rate movement to make your reset solution attractive enough yet.

The combination of lead market measurement tools and services like Lead Marketwatch (full disclosure: my company), open discussions and forums like LeadCritic, and exchanges like LeadPoint and RootExchange may make these subtle value characteristics more observable.

Watching the Free Agents and the Waiver Wire

If you want to be a winner in the market you have to tune into the pockets of current and emerging value. The mortgage lead market is much like the traditional stock market–there is as much emotion as there is statistical facts. Lead providers come in and out of favor. Decisions are made based on great sales people as much as great leads. People get comfortable or act like mutual funds (need such large trading blocks [lead volumes] that they can’t move out of certain stocks).

These conditions set up an excellent opportunity to pick up bargains and long-term value plays. Learn more about lead generation and lead providers. Build your own scorecard. Then go scouting for sleepers. (Here are some market whispers: Adchemy, logicalads, QuinStreet, ProspectZone)

Looking at Past Performance

Fantasy leaguers will tell you that past performance is indeed an indicator of future success and consistency. Obviously, it is not fool proof, but it is a solid place to start. As soon as you start buying leads or running any type of marketing campaign, start measuring.

You will notice trends in time cycles, lead tempo, sales tempo, lead types, reject rates, and many others. All of these trends and metrics will allow you to constantly optimize your lead flow in quantity and quality.

Build a Strong Farm System

This has two components: lead suppliers and your own lead generation capability.

Lead suppliers-you need to be constantly looking, evaluating, and learning about offerings in the market.

Lead generation-build your own proficiency at generating some of your own leads. Try various techniques. These skills and experiences will make you a better lead buyer.

Bottom Line

The recurring themes in either of these games is to pay attention, learn more about what makes success on the field, build a statistical framework for decisions, and fundamentally understand the game and what produces results.