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Lead Buying

Lead Buying

Lead Buying

Lead buying is one of the easiest ways to quickly fuel your sales team and revenue. Leveraging the Internet marketing expertise of a lead provider can keep your business focused on sales; not trying to figure out copywriting, landing pages, SEO, PPC, or media buys.

However, before you start buying leads there are a few things you need to learn to be successful.

Lead Providers

Enlisting the help of professional Internet marketers is a smart move. However, ensuring that you getting professional Internet marketers is a whole other issue.

Here are 5 quick steps to vet lead providers. This list can improve your chances partnering with a good lead provider:

  1. Do a business background check
  2. Review the pulse of the lead market
  3. Check the stability of the providers’ web traffic
  4. Determine if your customers will find them
  5. Manage your lead providers, like any other vendor

Getting and managing good lead providers takes a little work, but I can guarantee this little extra sweat will pay-off big time in your sales results.

Lead Types

The types of leads you can buy are almost as limitless as your imagination. If there is a reasonably large niche of consumers looking for products or services online you can bet Internet marketers are in there looking to profit. The trick is, as we just chatted about above, finding good lead providers.

Assuming you are going to follow those tips, here are some of the major categories of lead generation that have a robust marketplace of lead providers:

  • B2B Sales Leads
  • Debt Leads
  • Education Leads
  • Insurance Leads
  • Mortgage Leads
  • Specialty Lead Providers:
    • Aged Internet Leads
    • Trigger Leads
    • Telemarketing Leads
    • Live Transfer Leads

Believe me there are more (like services, i.e., ServiceMagic.com), but you have to cut the list at some point. In addition, you have to consider the size of the market and the number of lead providers to determine if you should be buying or generating.

For example, if the consumer market is big and the lead generation space is competitive, such as in the case of education, insurance, and mortgage leads you probably should be buying leads. However, if you are in small consumer niches and there are not a lot of lead providers, like B2B sales leads, you may be better off generating leads for yourself–even if that means hiring an Internet marketing firm.

Lead Management

Even the best leads in the business don’t convert if they aren’t managed. That’s the real value of a good lead management software or system.

Lead management adds three major advantages to you lead buying success:

  • Lead Follow-up – Internet leads always need immediate follow-up. These consumer submitted their questions to the Internet expecting an immediate response. If they don’t get that quick response they are very likely to move on. Lead management solves this problem by allowing your to immediately trigger emails and phone calls to the consumer–in moments, not hours or days.
  • Lead Distribution - Believe it or not getting sales leads into the hands of sales people who can call them is the number one failure of most marketing-to-sales interfaces. Lead management can be that seamless and efficient hand-off. Most lead management systems are equipped to automate the receipt and distribution of leads you buy, again making sales calls immediate.
  • Lead Nurturing - Of course we would be foolish to think that all Internet leads that we buy will close. The difference is do you discard or lose them or do you nurture them into future sales. You purchased all of these Internet leads and studies tell us that they will often close in the future. Why not get an email drip campaign going and make sure you are top of mind when they are ready–lead management can do that kind of intelligent re-marketing campaign.

Lead management is probably the number one thing you can do to increase your sales and lead buying success–regardless of your industry or sales process. Lead management plugs the inefficient gaps that always pop up in any sales team or organization.

Lead Metrics

This is really the hidden key to it all–lead metrics. If you want to avoid horribly wrong lead buying decisions, create big sales successes, of simply grow the successes that you’ve already achieved you need to know what and why it is happening. You have to measure.

Here are 5 key metrics you need to know about your lead buying:

  1. Are leads getting to sales people quickly?
  2. How fast are we attempting that first contact with the customer?
  3. What works better? Email or phone.
  4. Who is working leads the hardest?
  5. What is converting? What isn’t?

There are certainly many things that you will want to master to become and expert at lead buying; however, getting the basics in place is critical. If you have any questions email us.