Bill Rice, sometimes contributor here and full time CEO OF Kaliedico sells one button for a living. If you only sell one button, it better be a good one, and his is. The button?
Get my next lead. I have wanted an excuse to use Icosales for a long time, and now Bill Rice, Keith Burwell me, and the Robert Owens for Ohio Attorney General campaign have teamed up to use it to carve through all the people in our database to hit our fundraising goal of 1.2mm in 75 days. The Ohio Attorney generals’s office has an entrenched jerk that I talked about over on Bloodhound Blog. This phrase got me into the race:
Still needed is regulation of yield-spread premiums — cash rebates paid to third-party brokers as a kind of reward for funneling unsuspecting consumers into higher-rate loans
-Rich Cordray, Ohio Candidate For Attorney General, Demonstrating for the record his utter lack of understanding of how real estate financing works.
Can any mortgage broker abide by that? Hell no. I decided to Join Robert Owens and take the fight to this dude (who has cashed nearly six figures worth of campaign contribution checks from bank executives) that is practicing deliberate ignorance. Nobody takes my industry out. So, I got with Bill, who got me with Keith, who got me with Icosales.
Icosales is as cool as it seems—when you get it going. You give it a vast number of leads, you organize them into channels, you prioritize the channels, and it assures you that you and your people are always following up on the most valuable leads. It works with skype, so you can just fly through a stack of viable people and pitch them. With a two monitor setup, you can have the correct script in front of you at all times. You hit GMNL, and then dispense the lead as whatever you want to.
I don’t know what else exists, but for prioritizing calls and ensuring you’re talking to the right people, it is best thing I’ve seen, including Dan Greene’s vaunted My Loan Biz.
Oh–It’s got its warts, and the biggest ones are the fact that it’s underdocumented, and it’s designed for big batches of leads, not smaller uploads. It’s harder than necessary to get leads into its system, and easier than it should be to screw it up. All of this is manageable, because the team has the best communicating tech lead I’ve met in ten years. There isn’t a lot of fault tolerance built into it, and the interface needs more things to do on one screen. Some of that may be design, methinks, but IT is the best call prioritizer out there. I’d guess you can set the logic up to be whatever you want it to be and then execute accordingly.
Bill told me that you can figure out originator productiviy, and lead cost and scale however you want. “The rest is just math.” The seeing your business part of Icosales is pretty nifty, because it fosters competition and does a ton of cool things. You can see leads to call, velocity, productivity, a leaderboard, and more, so your teams stay focused (a big deal for work at home warriors).
Icosales was a mortgage-only (or mortgage-mostly) tool until very recently. When they become “vertical neutral,” as Bill puts it, it’s going to be dangerous because that button kicks ass. That button is the best thing to build a company around, and as long as that button is made into a star, they will continue to matter.
Chris Johnson requests that you donate the legal maximum to Owens For Attorney General If you want mortgage brokers to survive.
