Companies ยท Lead generation
A lead-generation exchange built by an operator who has run every side of the business, from physical call centers to the software that powers them.
Online Lead Exchange is Joe Delfgauw's lead-generation exchange. He built it the way he builds most things, out of years actually running the operation it now serves.
In 2017 Joe was running six physical call centers in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Rooms full of people meant nonstop hiring, turnover, and overhead, and he got tired of it. So he shut the buildings down and figured he was done with call centers for good.
I thought I'd never be in the call center business again. Ten years later, we own the software that runs it.
That isn't how it went. His companies never left the space; they just own the tools behind it now, from the dialer and the texting platform to email and lead management. Getting out of the buildings turned out to mean getting deeper into the software.
Around the same time, Joe put one of his people on a single job: build a lead company. She spent months on research and it led them straight into the personal-loan space, where the number of people applying every day was staggering. That was the first time the team really understood what a lead is worth, and they're still in it heavily today.
Today the business generates leads and buys and sells them, acquires customers, and runs the paid media that feeds all of it, with more than two dozen lead partnerships behind the operation. It works alongside Joe's media-buying agency, Pink Slushy Media, and his local-SEO web shop, GoodRep Media.
It all traces back to those six rooms. Closing them was never about walking away from leads; it was about building the machine that produces them and routes them to the people who work them. That machine is Online Lead Exchange, and it reflects how Joe reads lead generation generally. A lead is worth whatever you manage to do with it, which is the whole argument for owning the process end to end.
See how the leads get routed and worked at LeadBranch, or read more about who Joe Delfgauw is.
Visit the company at onlineleadexchange.com, or read why Joe started Online Lead Exchange.
Routes the right lead to the right buyer, instantly.
How Joe Delfgauw thinks about acquiring and converting real buyers.
The operator behind the portfolio and how he got here.