3D Illustration. Seesaw balance between reward and risk. Business concept. Isolated white background.
- If you have to purchase a contact list to get sales moving, quality lead buying should be a priority.
- Ideally, all leads should come from voluntary opt-ins within organic lead generation campaigns.
- Many businesses don’t have the resources they need to develop such a campaign when they’re first starting or in a tight spot, though.
- Purchasing a questionable or old list can involve risks to your brand if you’re not careful.
- Smart Funnel bridges the gap by making it easier to buy quality leads.
Many small businesses that manage to survive the initial trial-by-fire that is the startup stage will attribute their survival to purchasing lead lists. Other companies will swear by pure inbound marketing. They say that buying leads isn’t worth the trouble. But is there such a thing as quality lead buying that bridges the gap between the extremes of cheap lists and curated databases?
In a Perfect World…
Of course, getting nothing but free-range organic pesticide-free inbound marketing leads is the ideal. It makes perfect sense to want all of your sales leads to be definitely interested in what you offer. Sounds like sales nirvana!
It also sounds like a fantasy.
Even the best inbound marketing campaign isn’t always going to generate only perfect leads, all the time. The real people behind all the email addresses and phone numbers on those lead sheets have a huge variety of motivations for opting in.
Some literally only want to read your free-in-exchange-for-your-email content out of pure curiosity or fun. Those leads have no intention of ever buying. Likewise, your competitors may find your email newsletters to be handy ways of keeping tabs on you.
Long story short, not everyone that an inbound lead generation campaign pulls in will become a prospect, let alone a customer.
Not Everyone Has Time To Scale Up Organically
So, organic lead generation isn’t perfect, but of course nothing is. In fact, it’s clear that in spite of the few drawbacks it has, organic lead generation is usually better than buying a list.
Why would anyone buy a list at all, then?
Well, for one thing, organic list building takes a combination of a lot of time and a lot of effort. If not one, then certainly the other.
Not every business has both of those luxuries on hand, and some have neither.
Small startups are under a lot of pressure to start generating positive revenue, and they don’t often have many staffers yet. Proactively building and sharing the kind of content that draws in organic leads takes a lot more resources than they have.
Outsourcing and offshoring are strong alternative options that open up the possibilities, but there’s still the question of time.
How long do you want to wait to get enough names to call and message to deliver your sales pitch?
Danger!
There are known risks to buying a list of leads. One of the most common and obvious is that lead lists can be out of date.
Every sales professional knows the experience of reaching out to a lead only to be told that the person in question no longer works at that organization. It happens. With bad lists, though, the stories get almost comically bad, like hearing that the lead left the organization over ten years prior, or worse yet, died ten years ago.
Problems like that are sharply compounded by the fact that most companies that sell lead lists don’t just sell them once. That wouldn’t be a sustainable business model.
Instead, they sell the same lists to as many buyers as they can find.
It’s no wonder prospects are so sick of getting cold calls and overloaded inboxes! The competition to reach a prospect from a basic lead list is fierce, and it favors the early birds.
Companies that call on leads from an old list that has been on the market for years are likely to actually damage their brand by annoying those leads with yet another unwelcome interruption.
Quality Lead Buying: It’s Possible!
Is there a solution? Of course. The only limit to the marketplace for ideas and solutions to business problems is our sense of imagination.
Not all lead generation programs are created equal, not even the best organic ones. Every company is always trying to figure out the best way forward.
Likewise, there are many ways to improve the quality of lead list data, even when you need it faster, meaning that you have to purchase it.
Most of these methods involve careful data analysis, and filtering the data before purchasing it. Others have to do with the specific ways of generating it.
Smart Funnel Helps With Quality Lead Buying
This is one of the many business acceleration services we provide at Smart Funnel. Among other methods, we enable quality lead buying by working with strong affiliate publishing partners. These partnerships help us to generate industry-specific leads that come with built-in interest.
We’ll go so far as to help you manage your entire lead-buying program, and always ensure that you’re getting the best bang for your buck while we’re at it! Contact us today to jump-start your sales cycle!
