Thread: Lead Generation and Actually Selling the Leads

So I've got this lead generation site that I thought would have a market hungry to buy the leads. But I'm suprised at the lack of interest when I'm contacting potential buyers.

I ran a adwords campaign and had no problem getting live leads, but I am having trouble selling the leads. I am offering my buyers an account with 10 free leads, no credit card information, risk free and they aren't taking it.

Does anyone in the lead generation business have any ideas?

The thing is, I'm providing a ton a value to the buyers. Adwords for this niche are around $3/click; which can be casual browsers, researchers, or actual buyers. And I bet their conversion rates are horrible. (some of the lead buyers are doing their own campaigns).

I provide a real live customer who is asking for quotes everytime they buy a lead from me and it costs between the buyer $4-$5 per lead. Why wouldn't a company want that? Thanks in advance for your responses.

DaMM i was seriously considering this Niche as well...but you have put me off. If they will not accept a freebie how will they pay for it? Hmmm.

Sign up for a couple of the bigger CPA companies (eg. NeverBlue.) Chances are, they have campaigns running that are in your niche; whatever they are paying out you can generally assume that the price you're going to get for your leads is somewhere around there. You may just be charging too much (Not knowing the niche, I have no idea if $4-$5 is a lot of course.)


Frank

I just bought leads a few weeks ago from a company. I spoke to reps at about 4 different places before choosing 1. While price was a determining factor, I didn't go with the cheapest place. The one that I went with had key statistics showing percentages and outcomes. They had testimonials (and I read every one of them).

You're selling an intangible - something that can't be seen, felt, or heard. You need to be like Mastercard and create a lifestyle (think of the priceless campaign). What results are these people going to get from your leads? What value can you bring to them? What is the end result that is going to make their life easier/better/richer? Get that image into their head

Are they currently paying for customers now?

Originally Posted by HsrJames

So I've got this lead generation site that I thought would have a market hungry to buy the leads. But I'm suprised at the lack of interest when I'm contacting potential buyers.

I ran a adwords campaign and had no problem getting live leads, but I am having trouble selling the leads. I am offering my buyers an account with 10 free leads, no credit card information, risk free and they aren't taking it.

Does anyone in the lead generation business have any ideas?

The thing is, I'm providing a ton a value to the buyers. Adwords for this niche are around $3/click; which can be casual browsers, researchers, or actual buyers. And I bet their conversion rates are horrible. (some of the lead buyers are doing their own campaigns).

I provide a real live customer who is asking for quotes everytime they buy a lead from me and it costs between the buyer $4-$5 per lead. Why wouldn't a company want that? Thanks in advance for your responses.

I own a List brokerage/ List Management / List Generation company. Been in the business since 97/98. Drop me a PM if your interested. I'm pretty sure I can find a home for your leads. I just need some more info and I will see if I can move them for you.

Just so everyone has a clearer idea, the niche is tires. I am finding leads of people who are ready to buy tires and want to be contacted with quotes. Since the competition among tire dealers is fierce and advertising costs are high I figured this would be an easy way for the tire stores to get more customers. I have hired a salesperson to make calls to the stores trying to get them to sign up.

What I'm finding is that the dealerships think the advertising they are doing is fine and that they don't need to buy leads. What I'm trying to get through to them is that they are spending a ton of money advertising and hoping that people who are in the market for tires will see their ads and actually remember them when they are ready to buy, most people want the best deal and have no loyalties about who they buy tires from. And I am bringing them real customers who are ready to buy and want to be contacted.

I'm also in the lead generation business but I use my weekly advertising magazine to draw leads for companies. What you need to do is approach a company and ask them what they would consider a qualified lead.

For example just because someone responded to an ad for an insurance quote doesn't make it a qualified lead. Maybe 4 or 5 years ago but not now. Just about everything you see online, TV, radio and some billboards are per inquiry based.

I work with about 30 different corporation and some of them only consider a qualified lead someone that calls and stays on the line with their rep 30 seconds to 1 minute.

For this I earn as much as $6 to $100 per qualified lead. When LifeLock came out they paid me $125 per 1 minute qualified lead phone call. (no purchase was necessary)

So maybe you can re-work your business and ask just 1 company to start what they would consider a qualified lead then you can provide those leads to them and bill them on a monthly basis for all the qualified leads.

To protect yourself if using toll-free number use a company called Call Source to 3rd party verify calls. If using the web only you can program the criteria that they request.

Hope this helps.

Originally Posted by HsrJames

Just so everyone has a clearer idea, the niche is tires. I am finding leads of people who are ready to buy tires and want to be contacted with quotes. Since the competition among tire dealers is fierce and advertising costs are high I figured this would be an easy way for the tire stores to get more customers. I have hired a salesperson to make calls to the stores trying to get them to sign up.

What I'm finding is that the dealerships think the advertising they are doing is fine and that they don't need to buy leads. What I'm trying to get through to them is that they are spending a ton of money advertising and hoping that people who are in the market for tires will see their ads and actually remember them when they are ready to buy, most people want the best deal and have no loyalties about who they buy tires from. And I am bringing them real customers who are ready to buy and want to be contacted.

Rework this.

Lead comes in > email goes out. Hook them up with Tire Rack or NTB "offer" from a CPA network. I know Tire Rack is on CJ.com, not sure about NTB. If a transaction is made on the site, you just made $45 for this lead (vaires based on purchase of course).

Keep the data. Day 3 send out an offer for a third party auto warranty. If they are in the market for tires, there is a strong chance the car is no longer new (the exception would be performance cars and tires). The user may not even know warranties are available by third parties, you as the marketer, just told them about it. If they sign up, there is another $27 for your "lead".

Day 5, send out an offer for Auto Insurance. The offer can "save" the user $100's per month (depends on what company you send the offer for of course). If they sign up for this offer, you just made another $40 for your lead.

All the while you can still sell the "leads" to places like NTB and Tire Kingdom. But you probably won't get near as much for managing the list yourself.

You are in the infant stages of becoming a solid lead generation company. You are doing the right things in generating traffic to your lead gen form, now you just need to figure out the other half and that is monetizing the data you collect. Be sure you have an active privacy policy and terms of service on your site. Be sure that you use a valid email service provider that is CAN-SPAM compliant. You'll need to figure out the best sending schedules and offers to send for optimum performance so you can re-coup your costs. The cookie cutter strategy above is not a bad way to start, but know that it's going to take lots and lots of testing.

I work, for now, in the lead industry. I've been down this road before. PM me for some tips.

If the site is producing, sell the site to one of the tire sellers. If they are buying advertising, then they'll see the reasoning behind the notion that a lead site is just a variation on the theme. Check around and find out what panel newspaper ads, serious Yellow Pages ads, billboards etc. in your area are costing, and price the site accordingly. I have sold several lead sites using such a strategy.


Frank

Thank you for responding. I am not ready to sell yet, I'm trying to make a solid effort to make this a viable business, because in my mind really can be.

So as far as the sites you sold, did you build them to sell? If not can you tell me what went wrong and what lessons you learned?

I had an epiphany yesterday about where the site needs to go. Its related to paypercall. I already have a rough prototype designed in ppt. This will be my third version of the site, but each time I'm learning so much. I think tweaking the concept but staying on the same general path is what its all about.

I generally buy or build sites to hold; however, I had a sizable network of lead gen sites at one point, and eventually sold almost all of my lead generation sites in order to focus on a specific niche (they were sharing backend resources, but most of the income coming off of a small subset of the sites.) During that process, the money I was finding companies willing to pay for a quality site was often a pretty significant multiple of the income the site was bringing in (behold, the power of presentation and perception.)


Frank