- Report: #621866
Complaint Review: Prospect Match - Concord California
Reported By:
peteroh -
Dublin, Ohio, United States of America
Submitted:
Updated:
-
Author Not Confirmed
Why?
Prospect Match
1647 Willow Pass Road #164 Concord, 94520 California, United States of America
Phone:
(866) 452-8354
Web:
www.prospectmatch.com
Categories:
Business Rating:
(0)
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Prospect Match, Javelin Marketing, Sold Fictitious Leads As Actual Prospects Concord, California
Prospect Match lied about the quality of their lead generation service for financial advisors. They charged me $18.00 per lead for what they said were hot prospects who were responding on the internet for booklets on such topics as annuities and IRA/401K Rollover issues. The sales person told me that the leads were fresh (oldest being 7 days ago) and were generated by zip code radius ranging from 5 miles to 30 miles. They allowed you to search your zip codes to see how many prospects were waiting at the time. I chose zipcodes 44133 and 43017 and saw a couple of prospects in each location, which seemed valid. As soon as I paid my $149.00 signup fee per zip code location, I was flooded with leads within the first two weeks, which should have been a good thing. I attended training calls on how to approach the leads, whose content focused on assuming that the person on the phone never responded to you and that you were trying to make a friend and convince them to see you.
Now I see why, because I dont believe the leads they sent us were actually filled out by seniors as they claimed, but actually fictitious leads. I was billed in a little over 2 weeks a total of $1,846.00 (including $298 setup fees), for 97 leads (46 near 43017 51 near 44133). Of these: for 43017 area 54% were immediately bad, 15% emphatically stated they did not order any booklets, 9% said they may have requested, but it was over 2 months ago (Prospect Matchs policy is to guarantee they are no older than 7 days, but supposedly would deliver leads immediately when the client fills out a form on the internet) , 22% were unreachable due to voicemail or answering machines. For My 44133 area the numbers were similar for 51 leads 71% bad leads, 2% stating they had not requested booklets, and 25% unreachable due to voicemail or answering machines. No appointments were able to be made given the poor quality of leads or angry prospects who insisted they had not requested information.
If these were valid leads, there should have been less bad leads and less angry people, and also more reachable people during the day because most seniors are reachable during business hours. Not these leads, so I question whether they were filled out by seniors if anyone at that had filled out the forms. I firmly believe that Prospect Match fraudulently used a list of opportunity seekers or people who may have responded to an ad for a free prize to capture their information or bought a list of people who responded in the past. They then loaded this list into their computer sorted by zipcodes and sent them out falsely as leads to agents who signed up. This once again puts the advisor at risks of violating Do Not Call Regulations and subject to huge fines. Also, how could 54% to 71% of leads have fictitious names, or addresses, or emails, or phone numbers? If they truly wanted the information on annuities or IRA rollovers, they would have entered the proper information so we could mail or email out the information to them. Prospect Match would replace leads that had bad names, addresses, phone #s, etc. but not valid contacts (even if the denied requesting information).
So they would keep replacing bad leads from a database until we had an actual contact who lived at the address with a valid phone - still not proving this is a legitimate lead. This creates a serious problem with Do Not Call Regulations. I cant prove that they responded to me and Prospect Match cant prove that they responded as well. If that was true, then we would not have the huge percentage of bad leads (bad name, address, email, telephone. As financial advisors, if we call a Do Not Call Number without the clients permission, we are subject to fines up to $11,000 per occurrence. Prospect Match is putting us in harms way. On their website, they absolve themselves of any blame if us the advisor is sued. Yet they caused the problem first.
Now I see why, because I dont believe the leads they sent us were actually filled out by seniors as they claimed, but actually fictitious leads. I was billed in a little over 2 weeks a total of $1,846.00 (including $298 setup fees), for 97 leads (46 near 43017 51 near 44133). Of these: for 43017 area 54% were immediately bad, 15% emphatically stated they did not order any booklets, 9% said they may have requested, but it was over 2 months ago (Prospect Matchs policy is to guarantee they are no older than 7 days, but supposedly would deliver leads immediately when the client fills out a form on the internet) , 22% were unreachable due to voicemail or answering machines. For My 44133 area the numbers were similar for 51 leads 71% bad leads, 2% stating they had not requested booklets, and 25% unreachable due to voicemail or answering machines. No appointments were able to be made given the poor quality of leads or angry prospects who insisted they had not requested information.
If these were valid leads, there should have been less bad leads and less angry people, and also more reachable people during the day because most seniors are reachable during business hours. Not these leads, so I question whether they were filled out by seniors if anyone at that had filled out the forms. I firmly believe that Prospect Match fraudulently used a list of opportunity seekers or people who may have responded to an ad for a free prize to capture their information or bought a list of people who responded in the past. They then loaded this list into their computer sorted by zipcodes and sent them out falsely as leads to agents who signed up. This once again puts the advisor at risks of violating Do Not Call Regulations and subject to huge fines. Also, how could 54% to 71% of leads have fictitious names, or addresses, or emails, or phone numbers? If they truly wanted the information on annuities or IRA rollovers, they would have entered the proper information so we could mail or email out the information to them. Prospect Match would replace leads that had bad names, addresses, phone #s, etc. but not valid contacts (even if the denied requesting information).
So they would keep replacing bad leads from a database until we had an actual contact who lived at the address with a valid phone - still not proving this is a legitimate lead. This creates a serious problem with Do Not Call Regulations. I cant prove that they responded to me and Prospect Match cant prove that they responded as well. If that was true, then we would not have the huge percentage of bad leads (bad name, address, email, telephone. As financial advisors, if we call a Do Not Call Number without the clients permission, we are subject to fines up to $11,000 per occurrence. Prospect Match is putting us in harms way. On their website, they absolve themselves of any blame if us the advisor is sued. Yet they caused the problem first.
1 Updates & Rebuttals
ThatGuy
California,United States of America
Here is my take
#2Consumer Comment
Thu, July 15, 2010
Thanks for posting this. I wanted to share my experience as well as give suggestions. And of course mention that am I am not an attorney. It is my understanding that your claims about being at risk to getting fined because of the Do Not Call registry are false because it is pretty clear that when a consumer opts in to an ad like these are, you are free to call for up to 90 days as stated on the DNC website found here https://www.donotcall.gov/faq/faqbusiness.aspx
I have worked the leads from this company for quite some time so I can understand exactly what you are stating. I think to start we should be clear in understanding the nature of the internet especially when it comes to finding investment clients. Their are certain factors within our control and of course factors completely outside of our control and we should only focus on what we can control.
I've worked internet leads outside of the investment business as well which include automotive and mortgages in the past and one thing that will never end is hearing " i never requested, ordered, inquired this..." from the prospect. So now we know this is a factor we cannot control and it has nothing to do with the quality of the prospect so naturally, we also cannot control the opening attitude of the prospect when we call them because we have no idea what is going on in the daily life of someone we don't know. So knowing this basic information any decent sales person should already know, you have to be able to ask the right questions and furthermore, I believe asking the right questions can provoke any thought process you would like in an individuals mind. What I mean is, don't get hung up on talking about what they filled out online as this is not what makes you money and quite frankly, will just irritate anybody you are talking to. I hardly remember anything I ever fill out on the net. Simply ask the right questions in order to find out where they are financially and raise some concerns in order to get an appointment. I have a response for everything I know I may hear from the prospect and its followed up by a question that will compel the person to tell me what I want to know. This is a strategy that unfortunately most planners don't really understand but it is so basic when it comes to getting appointments.
Now this is all assuming we have a decent prospect to call so the way I see it is simple, I know a few advisors that I have networked with who use Javelin leads very successfully so I squashed the idea that may come to mind that the quality is not good because knowing others are getting continuously good results, there should be no reason I wouldn't get the same results. I've referred friends of mine who failed at using Javelin leads but they didn't even bother to allow to time to understand the process and why. So now because they didn't even bother to learn the basics of phone sales, they probably will never take a referred lead source from me again. Sad but true. Why should you believe someone who consistently out-produces you?
So given I understand question based selling and that I've gone through as much training as possible through Javelin and use as many resources as I can that they have to offer, I convert anywhere from 8 - 13% of my leads into new clients. Sometimes more.
Being that their is no way for me to know exactly how you went about working the system, I can only assume you did my friends did and not really work the system the way it is designed as it designed that way it is for a reason and got hung up on stuff that didn't matter. More then anything, I think it is important to learn phone sales and learning how to be more compelling and never get hung up in minutia like talking about whatever they filled out because nobody cares and neither should you. That will never make you a single penny. Consumers are getting smarter so we should be getting smarter as well. So the bottom line is, people are paranoid and believe everything is scarce so it is your job to learn how to strategically create comfort in someones mind over the phone. I really think this is our job as sales people in any industry. So you have two choices and they be to either sit around and wait for the universe to deliver referrals, or you can learn to sell. This is the difference between the 5% of people who succeed as advisors and the the 95% of those who fail.
I think this is why I never meet anybody who uses Javelin just get "ok" results because it doesn't happen. From what I've seen, you either do very well, or you completely fail. Nobody is in between. I in particular just work it the way its designed except that I use my own materials for compliance reasons and pretty much use the same script they have provided everyone else when calling and I get results.
