Megaphone: Leaders of Lead Gen

Jornaya’s Megaphone shines a light on some of our most successful Publisher Partners. Each one of them has specific elements that make them uniquely valuable to their clients that deserve to be recognized by our industry. Through Megaphone, we’ll sit down with trailblazing Publishers to explore their stories, highlight their offerings, discuss challenges they solve, hear their market predictions, and learn what’s next in store for their businesses.

Interview With Cassie Carlon, Director Of Business Development at NextGen Leads

NextGen Leads drives targeted and validated sales leads to carriers, insurance agencies, and independent agents in the health, medicare, and auto insurance industries. Based on his personal experience with buying insurance leads, NextGen CEO Chris Kelly founded the company to improve the insurance lead buying process from beginning to end.

In this edition of Megaphone, we sit down with Cassie Carlon, Director of Business Development at NextGen Leads. Carlon oversees strategic accounts and is passionate about optimizing and maximizing the sales success of her partners. We spoke about NextGen’s mission, unique position, and what they’re looking forward to in 2021 and beyond.

Jornaya: NextGen has built a strong reputation in the lead generation space. Tell us about your approach and your role.

Cassie Carlon: We really pride ourselves in the quality of our leads because all of our leads are generated internally through our company owned and operated websites. Our mission here at NextGen is to leverage our cutting-edge technology to provide our customers with a seamless buying process so they can focus less on prospecting and more on selling policies.

As far as my role here as a director of business development, I’m responsible for NextGen’s ever-growing buyer network. This responsibility is broken down into two main counterparts, which includes acquiring new partnerships and nurturing existing ones. With that, we work on a variety of different customer acquisition efforts to onboard new buyers and I work closely with the account management team to ensure those buyers’ success with our leads. We understand that leads are not a “one size fits all,” so we value feedback and disposition data to maximize buyers lead performance additionally. I also oversee our key partnerships with carriers brokers and most.

Jornaya: The fact that you accept disposition data from your clients is no small task. It speaks to how you’re invested in your client’s success. This leads us to the next question: What makes NextGen unique as a company and with  your product offerings?

Cassie Carlon: Our turnkey technology, unmatched customer service, and internal lead generation efforts are the key contributing factors to connection success and what sets us apart. Our in-house development product and marketing team gives us a unique ability to take strategic partnerships to new levels by creating new products and solutions tailored to their business models.

Jornaya: What challenges and opportunities have you seen in 2021?

Cassie Carlon: The most recent challenges that we faced are the increased advertising regulations for some of our top sources such as Google and Facebook. Thankfully, we were able to remain resilient with these changes and quickly adopted to the rapidly changing advertising landscape. We plan to stay ahead of the game and ensure we are buttoned up on those ever changing terms and compliance regulations.

Jornaya: What else is in store for NextGen in 2021 and beyond?  Any new product offerings, partnerships, or verticals that you want to highlight?

Cassie Carlon: There’s always something on the radar there, and my main focus for 2021 includes scaling our carrier and FMO partnerships on the Medicare side of things.

We’ve been successful and are offering new products, such as whitelisted platforms for those FMOs so they can manage and distribute leads to their downline of agents, as well as continuously growing our carrier relationships inside and outside of AEP (Medicare Annual Enrollment Period).

As a result of that success we’re working on building out a new funnel to target by Medicare Advantage leads, so we can help these partners maximize their policy sales on all fronts. And we’re also working on other exciting new features and products to help improve and optimize the buying experience. So stay tuned for what we have to come.