How Not to Purchase Leads

Last week a prospect told me that he needed higher quality leads than were currently being provided by two third-party outsourced solution suppliers.

His definition of a lead was the loosest that I have ever heard. A worker of a targeted business required just to download some content to be certified as a lead. It did not matter if they were ready to purchase– or perhaps certified to buy. As long as they worked for XYZ Company and downloaded the content they were a lead.

When I challenged him on the worth of these so-called leads he said that the recipients of the leads were interested in having a relationship at any level in targeted companies.

Openly, I question that is in fact how the lead receivers feel.

Here, in my viewpoint, is what is incorrect with this technique to lead generation:

1. Lower-level workers are 2.5 times most likely than greater level executives to download content. Lower level workers offer up their digital body language (rating points in marketing automation) while more senior executives do not.
2. Not every offer needs to be sold to the President or CEO. Nevertheless, it is a lot easier to navigate from the top down than it is to navigate from the bottom up. The lower level employee that downloaded the material is likely the last individual you desire to begin a sales cycle with.
3. The lead definition was being driven by the objective to minimize cost per lead and not by the objective of providing real value to sales.

Throughout another PointClear prospect call, the contact mentioned that his source of leads, consultation setting, ended up with just 4 out of every 10 leads delivered being certified. The cost of a consultation was $900.

Over half of the consultations created weren’t qualified, so that implies the expense per certified appointment was actually $2,250.

It is extremely likely that this buyer would never have actually agreed to spend $2,250 per lead– however he accepted invest $900 per lead with 60% of the leads being disqualified– a waste of both loan and sales’ time.

Neither one of these online marketers were buying leads for low-priced products. In both cases the they were intelligent and cared about their tasks. They both offered relatively expensive software options. In the very first case, the optimum enabled cost per lead was $125. In the other case, it was $900 per lead (with an effective cost of $2,250 per certified lead).

In both cases the sales associate getting the leads would follow-up on the first and perhaps the second batch of leads and then neglect every subsequent lead that came from those sources. I estimated that the credentials rate on the $125 leads had to do with 9% and we understand the certified rate on the 2nd source of leads was 40%. No sales associate is going to follow-up on leads where only one of 10 of them is qualified. They probably aren’t going to follow-up on a source of leads where 2 out of every three are disqualified.

Desire to know what does it cost? a lead should cost? Go