Why I Stopped Selling Leads (Buying Leads vs Getting Your Own Exclusive Leads)

Here’s something very interesting I’ve noticed over the last few years.

There are a LOT of lead generation companies today that will sell you internet, web or shared business leads.

Whatever you want to call it, these types of leads are generated when someone fills in a form online (usually their name, email and phone number) because they say they are interested in learning more about your services. This lead is then passed either to your business (as an exclusive lead) or to your business and a few other competitors (a shared lead).

🛠 Resources 🛠

0:00 - Why Buying Leads Sounds Like A Good Idea
0:43 - How Buying Leads Works
1:11 - Shared Leads vs Exclusive Leads
2:28 - Is buying leads a good idea?
2:45 - My experience selling leads
5:54 - Is buying leads going to get you the best ROI?
7:10 - A better alternative to buying leads
8:34 - One more reason buying leads doesn’t work well
11:26 - Should YOU buy internet leads?
13:04 - How to generate your own exclusive quality leads

SHARED LEADS VS EXCLUSIVE LEADS

I personally don’t like the shared leads model. I don’t believe it provides the best experience to both the business buying the lead and the prospect looking for help.

Exclusive leads on the other hand are much better. You pay a lead generation company to send you leads in real-time with people that are interested in learning more about your services. All you need to do is call them and close the sale. Sounds easy right?

In theory, it does sound pretty good.

But is it really as good as it sounds?

Now… full disclosure: this strategy (sending clients exclusive leads) is, in the past, something I have used myself for many years (for my own business AND clients) and it was working very well at the time.

However, I started to notice some interesting trends… across ALL industries (financial advisor, insurance, cleaning, real estate, etc).

THE QUALITY OF BUYING INTERNET LEADS

The biggest trend was the QUALITY of the leads.

Put simply:

The quality of the leads were not as high as they used to be.

Here are some of the problems I would hear from people buying internet leads:

The leads are hard to get hold of on the phone
The leads don’t respond to emails / calls / messages
The leads are shopping around and looking for the “best price”
The leads are not the right type of clients that I’m looking for
If you’ve ever tried buying leads yourself online, you might be able to relate to some (or most) of these issues.

And when I would speak to potential clients on the phone, many had tried buying internet leads in the past from all kinds of different lead gen companies and they were getting EXACTLY the same problems again and again.

Now, with determination, constant following up and a little hussle there are people who CAN get still get a good ROI on buying internet leads. It’s tough, but not impossible.

So it’s not always the case that the “leads are bad”. In most cases, if the lead generation company is doing a good job, these are people who have genuinely filled in a form to learn more about how you can help them.

But – and here’s the key point – the reason why most businesses buying leads say the leads were bad (or hard to get hold of, or not a good fit, etc) was because of the STRATEGY used to generate the leads in the first place.

On top of that, most businesses are not set up to handle leads from web forms effectively.

Most businesses don’t want to spend a LOT of time manually chasing and following up with leads…

Most businesses don’t want to waste time speaking to the WRONG types of leads….

Most businesses don’t want to spend thousands of dollars on leads that were just shopping around for information…

So, I decided to made ONE simple change to the online lead generation strategy…. which completely changed the results for myself and my clients.

HOW TO GET PRE-QUALIFIED BOOKED SALES APPOINTMENTS INSTEAD OF “INTERNET LEADS”

Let me explain…

Here was the old way of generating leads online:

People see an advertisement online (Facebook ads, Google, etc)
People fill in a form to learn more
You chase the leads for an appointment
Here is the new way of generating leads online:

People see an advertisement online
People fill in a form to learn more
They watch a short video presentation (about how you can help them)
If it sounds like a good fit, THEY schedule a call with you (rather than you chasing to work with them)
This tweak to the strategy (steps 3 and 4) completely changed everything for myself and my clients.

Now instead of you chasing internet leads, THEY chased YOU.

Now instead of convincing the leads to work with you, they WANTED to work with YOU.

It’s funny how one simple tweak in a strategy can make such a big difference…

[searchbug]

Totally agree with this! Buying leads is not really ideal. A lot of leads are bad and something you cannot use. Instead of buying, build your own using data tools that can help you generate leads.