Safeguarding Against Threats: How Fraud Impacts Your Sales Pipeline

Is fraud eating away at your sales pipeline and hurting your bottom line?

As fraudsters become more sophisticated, protecting your call center from revenue loss and compliance violations is more challenging than ever.

In the webinar "Safeguarding Against Threats: How Fraud Impacts Your Sales Pipeline," industry experts explore the critical strategies you need to defend against threats. Understanding these risks and implementing the right tools can help you secure your business and strengthen your sales pipeline.

Host James Hanson, Chief Operations Officer & Partner at Current Marketing Solutions, welcomes webinar guests:

• Rich Kahn is Co-Founder and CEO of Anura. Anura identifies and eliminates fraudulent leads, protecting your sales funnel from the growing threat of fraud.

• Meg Mananian is Chief Revenue Officer at Convoso. Convoso provides powerful tools that support compliance and optimize your dialing campaigns.

These experts provide valuable insights into how you can protect your sales pipeline from fraud and maintain the integrity of your marketing efforts.

Understanding the threats

Fraudsters are constantly evolving their tactics to infiltrate your sales pipeline, making fraud in call centers more complex than ever. To protect your operations, you need to understand the specific types of fraud targeting call centers today.

One common scheme involves human fraud forms. Instead of relying on traditional bots, fraudsters use real people to fill out forms, bypassing security measures like captchas and basic bot traps.

They often combine this with aged-lead data, recycling old, cheap leads and reselling them as new. This deceptive practice wastes your resources and corrupts your data.

“We're constantly tracking new levels of fraud that are coming through, and the iterations are happening faster and faster,” Kahn says.

He attributes this to the rise of AI. Fraudsters are increasingly turning to AI-driven fraud.

They use artificial intelligence to create more advanced and adaptive bots that learn and evolve continuously. Kahn highlights the rise of tools like "fraud GPT," software available on the dark web that can write bots that "get smarter and smarter every minute of every day."

This rapid advancement in AI-driven fraud makes it challenging for businesses to keep up with these ever-evolving threats. By staying informed about the methods fraudsters use, you can better equip your business to detect and prevent these threats before they cause serious harm.

The cost of bad leads

Bad leads don't just waste your time—they have cascading effects that impact everything from your bottom line to agent morale.

"In the short term, it leads to wasted resources and decreased performance. In the long term, it really undermines the data integrity," Mananian says.

You can’t draw accurate conclusions about campaign or agent performance when fraudulent leads are skewing your data. This leaves you in the dark about what strategies are truly effective and where you should focus your resources.

Beyond data integrity, bad leads also create significant compliance risks. "You have TCPA violations if you're making these phone calls...The person making those dials... is the one on the hook for a TCPA violation," Kahn says.

This means that, whether you generate your own leads or buy them, it's critical to verify that they're good leads. If they aren’t and you dial them, your company is the one that suffers the consequences.

But the damage doesn’t end there.

Fraudulent leads also take a toll on agent morale. When your call center reps dial bad leads, Kahn says they end up dealing with angry people who insist they never consented to being contacted.

By the time an agent finally connects with a legitimate prospect who wants to hear from them, their morale is already shot. They aren’t at their best, and they’re much less likely to close the sale. And this doesn’t just affect your conversion rate—it also leads to costly agent turnover.

When you invest in generating or purchasing leads, you expect those leads to convert into sales. But if they turn out to be fraudulent or inaccurate, all the money and effort you’ve invested goes down the drain. Worse still, bad leads can damage your brand's reputation and expose your business to serious legal risks.

To support your efforts in maintaining compliance and boosting company morale, you need advanced tools to eliminate fraudulent leads before they reach your dialing system.

Integrating fraud detection and compliance technologies

Fraud is so pervasive in today's sales environment that attempting to manage it on your own quickly becomes both costly and inefficient. Instead, it’s more cost-effective to leverage specialized tools that tackle fraud and support compliance across your sales process, such as those provided by Anura and Convoso.

“When you start adding up the costs to really do [fraud detection and compliance] right inside your company–and you're going to have to do it right sooner or later–it becomes cheaper and more efficient to buy or to lease technology like what [Anura and Convoso] offer, versus trying to go out and build it yourself,” Kahn says.

So, how do these two technologies work together to protect your outbound campaigns?

Anura operates at the top of the sales funnel, identifying and filtering out fraudulent leads before they enter your dialer system. This ensures that only genuine leads are passed on to Convoso, where they are further managed and processed.

Once the leads are in Convoso's system,”you're able to really customize the strategy to ensure that, not only are you providing the right set of leads to the right agents to dial, but also making sure that you're compliant and that can all be done through our workflow automation and our StateTracker tool,” Mananian says.

The seamless integration between Anura’s fraud detection and Convoso’s compliance tools means you can have confidence in the quality of your leads and the integrity of your operations.

Enhancing sales compliance and efficiency

Compliance is a cornerstone of any successful outbound sales strategy, especially when it comes to mitigating the risks associated with fraud.

Convoso offers tools specifically to support compliance with regulations like the TCPA. For instance, the StateTracker™ tool helps you manage the complexities of state-specific regulations.

It allows you to create automated checks and balances within your campaigns, such as limiting how often leads can be contacted based on area or zip codes or enforcing call-time restrictions. This reduces human error and supports state compliance.

ClearCallerID Pro™ enhances your caller ID management. It reduces the chances that carriers flag your calls as spam, automatically removes flagged numbers from campaigns, and offers real-time analytics to monitor and manage caller ID reputation. This not only helps compliance but also boosts your contact rates and overall campaign effectiveness​.

“We spend so much time in our compliance section of onboarding...ensuring that, as a company, you're set up for success,” Mananian says.

This proactive approach to compliance helps prevent costly mistakes, all while maintaining the trust of your customers.

DISCLAIMER: The information on this page and related links is provided for general education purposes only and is not legal advice. Convoso does not guarantee the accuracy or appropriateness of this information to your situation. You are solely responsible for using Convoso’s services in a legally compliant way and should consult your legal counsel for compliance advice. Any quotes are solely the views of the quoted person and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of Convoso.