ActiveProspect kicked off its first product-specific webinar of the year with a clear message: The lead generation ecosystem is evolving fast—and trust, transparency, and performance have to evolve with it.

This session walked through three things customers care about most right now:

• What ActiveProspect launched in 2025
• How those launches connect into one platform vision
• What’s coming in 2026, including a major expansion beyond web leads into inbound calls
  

Along the way, the team also addressed a major piece of news: ActiveProspect’s acquisition of Verisk Marketing Solutions (VMS)—a move that signals bigger ambitions for how data, identity, and compliance will power lead acquisition in the years ahead.

Below is a recap of the biggest takeaways—and why they matter for lead buyers, sellers, and anyone building a scalable lead program in 2026.

Key takeaways

• ActiveProspect acquired Verisk Marketing Solutions to combine a software platform + high-quality data—more capability, better ROI, and simpler offerings over time.
• ActiveProspect is building one connected platform (not separate tools) focused on trust, transparency, and performance across the full lead lifecycle.
• TrustedForm is the foundation—capturing independently verifiable lead event data that powers compliance and optimization.
• Bot detection is a top lead-quality pain; new bot detection signals in Insights help identify non-human leads that skew reporting and create TCPA risk.
• Optimization Hub turns signals into action with recommendations to improve lead quality (starting heavily with bot-related guidance).
• Vendor Reports improve partner accountability with clearer, on-demand vendor-level visibility (reducing spreadsheet reconciliation and disputes).
• LeadConduit is the execution engine that uses trusted inputs (consent + quality signals) to filter, route, and deliver leads for better outcomes.
• Closed-loop reporting is expanding via conversion/disposition feedback (Salesforce + LeadPerfection first; HubSpot was the top next request).
• Free buyer accounts strengthen buyer–seller collaboration by enabling shared reporting and easier partner setup from day one.
• 2026 preview: Expansion into calls—including “in-call consent” concepts to capture express written consent and bring call leads into LeadConduit-like workflows.

Now let’s unpack the topics presented above.

A major announcement: ActiveProspect acquires Verisk Marketing Solutions

ActiveProspect’s Founder and CEO Steve Rafferty opened with context on the newly announced acquisition of Verisk Marketing Solutions (VMS), announced on January 8.

Who is VMS?

VMS was a division of Verisk Analytics, primarily made up of two well-known brands:

• Jornaya, a long-time compliance competitor in the TCPA space.
• Infutor, a consumer identity management provider offering data for verification, enrichment, and identity scoring.
  

Steve emphasized that while ActiveProspect and Jornaya competed for years, the two companies ultimately shared a mission: Bringing trust and transparency to online lead generation. But he also highlighted the key difference:

• VMS is fundamentally a data company.
• ActiveProspect is fundamentally a software platform company.
  

That distinction is what makes the combination compelling.

Why it matters

Steve framed the acquisition as a way to accelerate what customers want most: Better inputs, smarter decisioning, and fewer wasted dollars.

At a high level, he described three outcomes the acquisition should drive over time:

1. A more powerful platform: Bringing VMS data into the ActiveProspect platform could help customers better identify leads, price them appropriately, and improve ROI.
2. More innovation: Two experienced teams, two sets of technology, and shared learnings should speed up delivery and improve outcomes.
3. A higher standard of performance: Greater scale and expertise should improve reliability and customer experience—and ideally simplify offerings for the ecosystem.

One connected platform, not a collection of tools

After the acquisition update, the product team turned to the main theme of the webinar: Designing a better lead ecosystem for 2026. The starting point was a clear platform philosophy.

As Product Manager Nicki Baker explained, ActiveProspect isn’t positioning its products as separate tools—it’s building a single platform experience designed to bring trust, transparency, and performance together across the lead lifecycle. The goal is a more streamlined experience where customers can use multiple capabilities without stitching together disconnected workflows.

TrustedForm remains the foundation: Trust first, then performance

Technical Product Manager Christopher Williams described TrustedForm as more than a compliance tool—it’s infrastructure. Because a TrustedForm Certificate captures the lead event in detail, it becomes a foundation for:

• Documenting proof of how the lead was generated
• Verifying compliance requirements
• Unlocking optimization, filtering, and routing decisions
• Powering insights that go beyond “did we get a lead?” into “what’s behind this lead?”
  

In other words: Once you establish trust, you can begin making smarter decisions.

The biggest lead quality challenge in 2025: Bots (and what to do about them)

According to Christopher, bots are now a major industry problem, and if you don’t think you’re dealing with them, you may just not be seeing them yet.

Why bots create a compliance and performance crisis

The team highlighted a key point that’s especially important for 2026:

• Bot-generated leads can look legitimate
• They can use real consumer information
• But the consumer did not actually fill out the form
  

That creates two major risks:

1. Consent becomes invalid: If a bot completed the form, the consumer never meaningfully consented. That means companies may be acting on “fabricated consent,” increasing TCPA exposure.
2. Optimization becomes unreliable: Bot leads skew reporting, pollute conversion data, and can lead teams to make the wrong decisions about channels, vendors, and spend.

2025 launch: Bot Detection inside TrustedForm Insights

To address this, ActiveProspect introduced bot detection signals via the TrustedForm Insights product—designed to help customers identify “obvious” indicators of automation or scripted submissions.

But Christopher also made an important point: Insights is only useful if teams know what to do with it—which led into the next major launch.

From insights to action: Optimization Hub

A common pain customers shared with ActiveProspect is simple: “You see more lead data than anyone—tell us what we should do.”

To meet that need, ActiveProspect introduced Optimization Hub, which turns lead quality signals into recommendations customers can act on.

Think of it as guided optimization inside the platform:

• Identify issues impacting lead quality (starting heavily with bots)
• Recommend product features, settings, or adjustments
• Reduce guesswork by operationalizing what ActiveProspect has learned since 2004
  

Today, it’s early. Over time, the plan is to expand recommendations beyond bot-related guidance into more categories of lead quality and performance improvement.

Vendor-level visibility: Vendor Reports bring accountability to partner networks

Lead quality isn’t only a lead-level issue. For most buyers, the real operational challenge is vendor networks.

To solve that, ActiveProspect launched Vendor Reports in 2025. The goal is to create a shared source of truth that makes it easier to:

• Compare vendors using consistent metrics
• Spot issues tied to specific sources
• Reduce spreadsheet reconciliation
• Strengthen accountability and partnership performance

LeadConduit: The engine that turns trusted inputs into outcomes

If TrustedForm is the foundation, LeadConduit is the connective tissue.

Leandro Estrella, Associate Product Manager, described LeadConduit’s role as the engine that takes trusted data—consent signals, quality indicators, enrichment data—and turns them into action:

• Filtering
• Routing
• Delivery logic
• Decisioning tied to business outcomes
  

The point isn’t simply moving leads faster. It’s ensuring every lead is routed and acted on appropriately based on trust, quality, and performance goals.

Closing the loop: Conversion and disposition feedback

One of the biggest themes of the webinar was moving beyond “delivered” as the finish line. Lead buyers ultimately need to know:

• Which leads became opportunities?
• Which converted?
• Which vendors or channels produced revenue?
  

That’s why ActiveProspect introduced conversion and disposition feedback integrations starting with Salesforce and LeadPerfection. This enables:

• Closed-loop reporting inside lead operations
• Optimization based on real outcomes (not just CPL or acceptance rate)
• Better vendor evaluation
• Real-time performance feedback that can be shared with sellers

Free buyer accounts: Building a network, not just workflows

ActiveProspect also launched free buyer accounts and a “buyer step” as part of a bigger strategy: Making it easier for sellers to bring partners into a shared ecosystem.

The idea is to make collaboration simpler from day one:

• Sellers invite buyers easily
• Shared reporting is created automatically
• Buyers can configure what they need
• Both parties work from a shared view of performance
  

This is a subtle but important shift: ActiveProspect is investing not just in tools, but in network features that reduce friction between buyers and sellers.

Platform experience updates: Flow Editor, Company Profiles, unified UX

Behind the scenes, the team also invested heavily in platform usability and scalability.

Nicki highlighted updates like:

• New Flow Editor
• Company Profiles
• Unified app experience
  

All three support the same goal: Making it easier for customers to scale and for buyers/sellers to work together inside ActiveProspect.

Company Profiles in particular were positioned as a trust-building layer: Surfacing key partner context, improving onboarding, and enabling personalization as network features expand in 2026.

2026 preview: Expanding beyond web leads into calls

One of the most significant roadmap themes was expansion beyond form-based leads into inbound calls.

Product Manager Christian Goss explained why this is a natural evolution: The platform has become strong around web leads, but many customers operate in a blended ecosystem—web leads and calls.

The vision: Bring call-based leads into the same workflows customers use for web leads. That means enabling customers to:

• Capture call leads
• Document consent
• Enrich and route calls inside LeadConduit
• Apply suppression, logic, and decisioning the same way they do with forms
  

In-call consent: Turning a call into express written consent.

Christian also gave a preview of how “in-call consent” may work:

• A call center (or AI intake) triggers a text message
• The consumer receives a link to a page
• Consent is captured via a two-click flow (low friction)
• The business can then follow up by call/text with express written consent
  

The team confirmed they are building a waitlist and recruiting interest for beta participation via customer reps.

Where ActiveProspect is heading: A more trusted, connected lead ecosystem

The final roadmap themes for 2026 were summarized as:

• Expanding into calls
• Deeper partner collaboration
• Growing across social lead channels
• Enabling more flexible seller distribution
  

But the most consistent thread was this: ActiveProspect is moving from a set of products into a unified platform designed to help the ecosystem operate with higher trust, transparency, and performance.

And layered on top of that platform trajectory is the acquisition of VMS—bringing the potential for richer data inputs that can improve:

• Lead identification and pricing
• Filtering and enrichment
• Quality scoring and performance decisioning
• Possibly even bot detection capabilities over time
  

As Steve put it, customers want simplification. The platform direction—and the acquisition—are both steps toward building that simpler, stronger foundation for growth.

Conclusion

As lead generation moves into 2026, the message from this webinar was clear: Growth without trust is no longer sustainable. Between rising compliance risk, increasingly sophisticated fraud, fragmented vendor networks, and expanding acquisition channels like inbound calls, lead programs need more than point solutions—they need a connected system that turns trusted inputs into measurable outcomes.

ActiveProspect’s 2025 launches, platform investments, and acquisition of Verisk Marketing Solutions all point toward the same goal: Building a lead ecosystem where buyers and sellers can operate with confidence, act on real insights, and scale without unnecessary risk.

For teams planning their 2026 strategies now, the takeaway is simple—lead generation success will depend less on volume alone, and more on how well trust, transparency, and performance are designed into every step of the journey. And ActiveProspect is determined to help you do that.

The post Designing a better lead ecosystem for 2026: ActiveProspect’s 2025 recap + what’s next appeared first on ActiveProspect.

This article was originally published by our subsidiary, LeadsBridge, here. 

New leads are the lifelines of businesses both online and offline. That’s why 53% of marketers spend at least half of their budget on lead generation. However, 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. This is where lead management comes in. With lead management, you can nurture leads that did not convert to the point where they can trust your business enough to buy from you.

In this guide, you will learn all about lead management, its processes, software, and strategies – all with examples.

What is Lead Management?

BigCommerce defines Lead Management as the process of acquiring and managing leads (potential customers) until the point where they make a purchase. At some point, your lead volume will grow to a point where it becomes difficult to manage. This could lead to lead leakage, lack of automated follow-ups, and poor lead engagement. By partnering with a managed service provider, businesses can overcome common MSP challenges and implement solid lead management. With solid lead management processes in place, you can capture, nurture, qualify and distribute the leads to respective departments where they can be converted to sales.

But is lead management actually necessary? Read on to find out.

Why is lead management important?

Generating leads can be a difficult and expensive process. Therefore, managing them effectively is important. There are five benefits to having a proper lead management process in place:

1. Lead management helps to get the right leads in your CRM

One process of lead management is called lead qualification. This process helps you identify qualified and unqualified leads you can add to your CRM of choice or a free CRM system. With this process, you can concentrate on high-value leads and maximize sales opportunities instead of wasting efforts on non-qualified leads.

2. Lead management helps you maximize your advertising spend and marketing strategies.

Lead management makes it easy to identify the best platforms providing the best leads for your business. This will help you focus on the platforms, thereby maximizing your advertising spend and marketing strategies.

3. Lead management enhances the buying experience.

The data generated from lead management is helpful in sending educational materials that can help leads to make informed buying decisions.

4. Lead management increases marketing and sales productivity.

When you know the quality of your leads, you can segment and prioritize them, and decide on the appropriate messaging and channel to communicate with your customers through. This helps to increase the marketing and sales teams’ efficiency.

Ok, so lead management is important. But what actually makes a successful lead management process? There are five basic steps every marketer should follow:

1. Lead Capturing

Lead capturing is the process of collecting contact information of prospects in order to generate leads. You start by placing a call-to-action (CTA) button on an image or text on your website, blog, or social media channel. Once a user clicks on the CTA, they are taken to a page where they can enter their personal details, such as their email address, phone number, and name.

As your business grows, your lead volume will increase, which means you’ll need to automate your lead capture system to make it easy for you. This is especially true if you use Co-registration, Facebook, LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms, or Google Ads to generate leads for your business. Without automation, you’ll have to collect it manually from the platform and then copy it into your CRM. 

The good news is, you don’t have to do that! ActiveProspect provides easy plug-and-play API integrations that allow you to capture leads from any source and deliver those leads into any end point or preferred system of preference. 

2. Lead Tracking

Lead tracking is the process of monitoring lead activities from the initial touch to sale. With it, you can manage and track all your marketing channels, such as the blog and the social media campaigns.

Lead tracking tells you where leads are coming from so you can appropriate your budget to the best channels. Leads can be inbound or outbound. Inbound leads come from organic searches such as Google search, phone calls, blog content form fills, etc. Outbound leads come from your cold email campaigns, cold calling, direct mail, and display ads.

Lead tracking helps to:

1. Gauge how engaged a lead is or how close a lead is to buying. This helps you to create processes that will quickly turn the lead into a customer.
2. Avoid losing leads along the sales funnel
3. Make pipeline projections with the data collected from lead tracking
4. Fine-tune your marketing campaigns in order to focus on the strategies that are working well.

3. Lead Qualification

The truth is, not everyone will be the right fit for your product or service – and those who are may not be ready to buy from you immediately. To find out, you need to qualify the leads that enter your system. Unfortunately, few businesses engage in lead qualification. 

Lead qualification is important because:

1.   It helps to improve sales and marketing efficiency
2.   It saves time, energy, and money in pursuing wrong leads
3.   It helps to create a more personalized promotion for prospects who are ready to purchase
4.   It improves revenue

Once your leads are qualified and scored, it’s time to sort out which leads are ready to buy and which still need more nurturing. 

4. Lead Nurturing

A study by Marketo revealed that 96% of visitors who come to a website aren’t ready to buy yet. That’s true, but there is something you can do to encourage them to buy your product or service: lead nurturing.

Lead nurturing is the process of sending relevant content to leads and customers at different levels in the sales funnel.

Lead nurturing is important because:

1. Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales leads at 33% lower cost per lead.
2. Targeting users with content relevant to their position along the buying process yield 72% higher conversion rates.
3. Companies that maintain consistent communication with prospects help buyers to make an informed purchase decision.
4. Well-nurtured leads have a 23% shorter sales cycle.

Lead nurturing is one of the best ways to convert your lead into customers. This is the reason 74% of companies say converting leads into customers is their top priority. Capitalizing on lead generation and impactful nurturing strategies with a conversion rate optimization tool is therefore a must for any ambitious organization. This is not only about bringing prospects in and converting them into customers, but also understanding what works, and what doesn’t in this context.

5. Lead Distribution

Lead distribution is the process of assigning leads to different marketing channels or sales teams. This will enable you to match leads with the messaging and channel best suited to convert that lead into a customer. . Lead distribution can be automatic or manual, but it involves gathering leads from different lead generation sources such as your website, social media, events, emails, etc, and distributing them to any endpoint or system of preference based on custom rules and logic. 

Proper lead distribution helps companies:

1.   Improve speed-to-lead. This is very important because leads who are contacted within five minutes are 9x more likely to convert.
2.   Produce high-quality leads because only qualified leads make it into your sales or remarketing funnel.
3.   Creates room for more accurate targeting.
4.   Makes it easy to attribute revenue to the leads generating the most revenue.
5.   It reduces the response time.

Lead Management Strategies

It is imperative for businesses to have lead management strategies in place. This will help you know how your leads come in, how to organize them through scoring, nurture, and convert them to paying customers. Below are some lead management strategies you can use for your business.

1. Use different lead generation content

Most online businesses use one form of lead generation content, which is usually an eBook or whitepaper. You hardly see video or other forms of interactive content. To stand out, you need to mix up your lead generation content. Add videos to the mix to enhance the reader’s experience. In fact, 86% of marketers report that video helped in their lead generation. Also, diversify the content on your website by using interactive content that will engage your website users.

2. Integrate your lead management platform with a third-party app 

Leads are more likely to convert when you contact them within minutes, not hours or days. Contacting prospects immediately after they opt in will help you to sustain their interests in your products or services, and it will be easier to nurture and convert them to customers. One way you can do this is by using integrations. ActiveProspect provides direct integrations with lead generation publishers and platforms like Facebook Leads Ads, Google Lead Form Ads, and LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms. ActiveProspect’s LeadConduit platform also provides a multitude of integrations so you can validate leads in real time, while filtering out bad leads from your CRM.

3. Clean up your company’s contact database

Did you know that 30% of the data in your CRM goes bad each year? This can happen for many reasons, like your contacts changing their emails, getting new telephone numbers, moving, and many more.  Outdated contact information in your database can lead to failure in your marketing activities. Customers’ data are assets for your business and you need to keep it active and alive. To clean your database, ensure you remove all duplicates and bounced or opted-out emails, and verify new data. ActiveProspect’s platform allows you to validate and de-dupe data in real time, as well as set rules-based logic that drives real-time lead acceptance and rejection decisions based on your criteria.

4. Up-sell and cross-sell by sending emails through automation workflows

Up-selling is the process of convincing a customer to buy more expensive items from you. Cross-selling is increasing the value of sales by presenting different products to a customer. A study revealed that product recommendations can drive between 10 – 30% revenue. Upselling and cross-selling can help you grow your revenue tremendously.  

Use automation workflows to help you upsell and cross-sell your present customers, use automation workflows to give them offers similar to the ones they already purchased. Also, tag your contacts based on the products they have bought from you and use automation to recommend products that are complements to the ones they bought.

Conclusion

Lead management is important if you want to grow your leads, nurture, and convert them to customers. There are five different processes involved in lead management – lead capture, lead tracking, lead qualification, lead nurturing, and lead distribution. You need to follow these processes to create a robust lead management system that will benefit your business. However, you don’t need to do it manually, thanks to lead management software such as Salesforce, Zoho CRM, Freshsales, HubSpot CRM, and AgileCRM, which you can use to manage your leads effectively.

Using proper lead management strategies, such as keeping your data clean and accurate, automating lead capture and delivery, upselling and cross-selling customers, and integrating with platforms like LeadsBridge and ActiveProspect will help you generate better results when acquiring and taking action on your leads. 

The post A Complete Guide To Lead Management appeared first on ActiveProspect.

For years, marketers have been using third-party cookies as a way to better understand and track their target audience. But all of that is about to change, thanks to the cookie blocking rules being implemented by major internet browsers including Google, Firefox, and Safari.

Consumers have grown tired of unknown entities tracking their behavior across the web without their knowledge or consent and, therefore, demands from consumers for more privacy surrounding the use of their personal data have grown stronger.  This has resulted in increased privacy regulation (GDPR, CCPA, etc.) which have forced the ad tech ecosystem to update their approach. While Firefox and Safari have already permanently blocked third-party cookies, the biggest blow to marketers came when Google announced it would also be phasing out third-party cookies and alternate identifiers on Google Chrome due to these privacy concerns. 

As a quick refresher, third-party cookies work by collecting data from website visitors which allows companies to track their behavior around the internet, even after they leave a website. These cookies have been critical to helping marketers understand their target audience behaviors and how to bring back their potential customers with targeted display advertising.

First-party data, on the other hand, is the data collected directly from visitors to your own website. It includes data volunteered by your prospects such as contact information like email, phone number and address (also referred to as zero party data). Consumer data given directly to the brand with consent is true marketing gold. While this first-party information is very valuable, it offers a narrower view of consumer behavior, tracking only visitor activity on the advertiser’s website, rather than across the web.

So, how can marketers plan for the loss of this behavioral data when Google fully blocks third-party cookies and alternate identifiers in 2022?

Since marketers will no longer be able to compile data via cookies from third-party sites – and considering that their retargeting efforts will also be considerably diminished by cookie blocking, marketers will have to uncover new strategies to learn about and re-engage their audience.

Marketers must embrace strategies that put the consumer in control of their data
The consumer privacy trends are pretty clear: Each new law grants consumers more control over their data. Ultimately, we’re all consumers, so we should respect that this is a good thing. As marketers, why fight it? We must get ahead of the trends and adopt strategies to succeed in this new environment.

Capturing first party data with explicit consumer consent will be the best way to engage prospects in the future.   

As Marnie Levan, Maybelline’s VP of Integrated Consumer Communications, recently said, “Personal data that somebody is opting to give us is better quality information than making assumptions based on who visits the website or goes to a makeup foundation page, and then we retarget them.”  Ideally, marketers only reach out to consumers who have given their prior express written consent to be contacted. There is no better quality of data than that which is voluntarily given with consent. We refer to this practice as “consent-based marketing”. 

Consent-based marketing respects the rights of consumers and fosters a closer one-to-one relationship between the advertiser and consumer — one that’s founded on trust and transparency. Creating direct relationships with consumers can also help advertisers learn and solicit information about customer preferences with accurate first party data – not inferred behavioral data. If done correctly, consent-based marketing can be a very cost-effective and scalable channel for pulling in new customers from across the web.

First-party data is great, but let’s face it: acquiring it at scale is really hard.

After all, your own website offers only a limited opportunity for collecting first-party data. For example, a consumer packaged good company might want to engage in a direct-to-consumer relationship with their customers utilizing first-party data. Companies often try to leverage loyalty programs for this purpose. However, their target customers typically have no reason to visit their website. Marketers must go to where these consumers are online to establish the initial relationship. 

Working with partners is essential for scaling consent-based marketing campaigns to capture first-party data.

As great as your site might be, it will never have the traffic of a media site. Face it: If you want to engage with consumers online, you have to meet them where they are, such as major ad platforms like Facebook and Google. Both Facebook and Google offer Lead Ad products that allow you to capture first-party data with consent from the consumer directly within these platforms. Other platforms like LinkedIn and TikTok also offer these types of ad units. These ad units are more cost-effective at capturing first-party data than trying to drive the consumer directly to your own website.

In addition to the major ad platforms, there are hundreds of specialized media companies that generate first-party data / opt-in leads for specific categories. Think LendingTree for mortgages, Everquote for insurance, and HomeAdvisor for home services as examples. The ActiveProspect platform allows marketers to directly access and integrate with these companies for real-time data capture. This makes it easy for advertisers to capture new opt-ins from any lead source across the web and deliver them directly into their marketing automation platform to take action on that data right away — no third-party cookies needed! 

How do we target potential audiences without cookies?

Lookalike Audiences are another key to the cookie-less future. Many great media partners that target consumers based on email address use lookalike audiences on Facebook to find prospects similar to their current customers and continue acquisition optimization. But without third-party cookies, targeting lookalike profiles will also be harder to create — unless you’re using a platform like ActiveProspect. 

With our Lookalike Audience solution, you can include the lifetime value of your clients or leads to create a value-based Lookalike Audience. That audience will then be made up of the people most similar to your highest value customers, while a regular Lookalike Audience can find people similar to all your clients/leads, enabling you to focus on an audience similar to the clients who spend more money in the long run.

Looking ahead to a future without third-party cookies can seem overwhelming to marketers, but this evolution is necessary for the increasing privacy demands from our consumers. By embracing first-party data, audience syncing, and new partnerships, marketers will be able to create more one-on-one relationships with their audience and, therefore, have the ability to remarket to them in a way that restores their privacy and gains new trust.

The post In A Cookie-Less Future, Marketers Need First-Party Data – Here’s How To Get It appeared first on ActiveProspect.