February 27, 2015 marks the sixth birthday of eGenerationMarketing. The past six years have been an incredible learning experience, during which we have generated well over one million legal case leads and taken a basic idea into a company on which 200+ legal firms rely for a steady stream of new cases. When we initially started generating Social Security Disability leads six years ago, the legal lead generation landscape was notably different.

In 2009, there were few companies generating Social Security Disability leads. Honestly, I do not think it was on anyone’s radar. Marketers simply did not know that there was a demand for disability leads.

When eGenerationMarketing entered the Social Security Disability lead generation market, we had one major competitor and one minor competitor. Over the next six years, many companies have experimented with disability lead generation, but today we have the same two competitors. This is likely due to the fact that it is fairly easy to generate legal case leads, but it is very difficult to generate legal case leads that convert into cases.

We have found that lead quality is pivotal to success. Looking back, we have generated legal case leads from hundreds of sources, but today we generate case leads from about twenty high quality sources. In order for us to arrive at our twenty high quality sources, it was necessary to test out leads from hundreds of sources and determine which ones yielded cases for the attorneys.

This might sound straightforward, but it became particularly difficult to receive feedback about millions of leads that were sent to hundreds of attorneys across the country. To make it easier for the attorneys to indicate which leads turn into cases, we developed a lead and case management system, in which the firms can not only mark the result of each individual lead, but also perform many other time saving actions. It appears that many of the companies that are no longer in the space did not have a lead attribution model and, thus, produced lower quality leads.

As a result of the lower quality leads that many companies produced over the past six years, many attorneys have become increasingly skeptical to sign up with lead generation companies. Even though attorneys seem more skeptical than ever, they seem to respond well to the leading companies that are able to provide consultation regarding best practices, as well technologies to increase lead conversation rates and productivity.

In the future, the companies that have made a name for themselves will continue to develop tools that increase efficiency while also increasing lead quality. Further, as the government continues to tighten the Social Security Disability budget, it is imperative for lead generation companies to help attorneys decrease their cost per retained case and remain as profitable as possible.