As I mentioned in a prior post, I recently left eBay and joined Leadpoint as VP of Marketplaces. Leadpoint is the first B2B marketplace for lead generation – basically bringing efficiency and transparency to the lead generation business the way eBay brought it to business and consumer trading. I have to confess, before I started talking to the Leadpoint team, I didn’t have a ton of understanding about what lead generation actually was and how it worked (feel free to skip the next paragraph if you know all about lead generation already).

A lead is essentially the opportunity for a company to sell a consumer its products or services. Leads, especially online leads, are qualified by asking a potential customer a few questions. For example, in the case of the mortgage business, a consumer may be asked how much they want to borrow or information about their credit rating. On the Internet this qualification process usually takes place via forms. This is a big business, but prior to Leadpoint it was quite inefficient.

For example, buyers of leads (e.g. mortgage lenders) didn’t have the ability to openly bid for leads based on criteria (for example I only want consumers with excellent credit that live in Hawaii and I’m willing to pay up to $20 per lead). This meant buyers had to buy leads that just didn’t meet their needs. Also, the sellers of leads (e.g. aggregators) haven’t historically been interested in offering this type of flexibility and transparency as it would break their fixed price per lead model and therefore potentially impact the revenue they make.

The Leadpoint model changes all that: now buyers of leads can bid for exactly what they want and sellers of leads (e.g. portals, SEO/SEM players, bloggers) can focus on bringing traffic to their sites. Leadpoint will take care of the rest (platform, processing of payments, building demand, etc). We recently had our best day ever (no coincidence on the day I joined J) by working with a creative seller who secured placement on MSN.

In my role as VP of Marketplaces, I will be responsible for ensuring the success of our existing categories (e.g. mortgages, student loans, etc) as well as new categories (e.g automotive, education). I’m pretty excited to be working with a proven team including former executives from LowerMyBills (acquired by Experian), Commission Junction (acquired by ValueClick) and AutoByTel. I love the platform we’ve built and am especially excited about the launch of our voice product (more on this in another post).

I’ll keep everyone posted on our progress.