Hot Transfers, Outbound or Inbound?

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Hot transfers are increasingly appealing to mortgage and debt businesses. After all you are buying a live, qualified, and ready to buy customer–well, maybe not always. Did you know that all hot transfers are not the same?

Like Internet leads, the marketing methods behind the lead often produces a different lead. And like Internet leads, you should be asking two very important questions: “Where did these leads come from and how did they get on the phone.” These two questions certainly will change your sales approach, and may affect your conversion opportunity.

Most hot transfer companies are call centers that generate your hot transfers from outbound calls. Often these outbound calls are made on Internet leads, often aged Internet leads. These outbound calls are cheaper and easier to generate than inbound calls.

Inbound calls typically require more expensive marketing, targeting the consumer via radio, TV, or even direct mail. As a result, the consumer is possibly more motivated to be transferred and less likely to have been called by multiple lenders. My premise being that if you are going to spend $60-100 per hot transfer you might prefer this marketing approach to generate that transfer.

Let’s look at the alternative–outbound calling. Hot transfers that are the result of outbound calls are, as I mentioned earlier, often sourced from Internet leads. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but you need to know what you are getting and feel that those transfers are priced fairly. Here are some of the characteristics of an outbound generated hot transfer that might make it less valuable:

These less consumer friendly and often confusing practices may yield you a hostile customer–the screamer.

All of this is not to say that hot transfers are a bad product. In fact, for many debt and mortgage businesses that lack the experience in managing and converting Internet leads they can be a smart option. However, make sure you understand what you are paying for and what cost per closed deal you need to back into. My advice would be to only spend $60-100 per transfer if they are inbound transfers and to only buy outbound transfers if you can get them in the $30-60 range and ideally get them from US call centers.

TrueProspect is the only company that comes to mind offering inbound debt and mortgage transfers and so they might be a good place for you to start.

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