Should I Buy Leads For My Business?

Spoiler Alert : the answer is YES! When you buy leads, you get in front of potential customers almost immediately.

As you begin your journey down the entrepreneurial path, you will find that having a supply of sales leads is the most crucial piece to building your business at a rapid pace. There are many moving parts to owning a business, we all know that. Sales cures all business ailments, and purchasing an interested customer’s information is a much quicker route to get the results you need to dominate your market.

The concept is simple – you hire a contracted company to go out and find sales leads for your business type and they send those leads directly to you or your sales team to close. Sounds easy enough, but the problem lies within the integrity and quality of the company you have chosen to hire.

Where To Buy Leads

You can find many lead generation sources simply by doing a Google search for “sales leads” or “buy leads”. There will be a few blog posts on the subject, but then you will start to see some lead generation companies in the search results. You will also find many intense opinions from owners and companies that were burned by a lead generation company. Contrary to that, you will also see many businesses that contribute all of their success to purchasing leads. Your experience will depend on how you treat the leads given to you and how well you execute your internal sales process.

The largest issue most people discover is the exclusivity of the leads given to them – meaning the lead is shared with more than just your company. This causes a “race” between your competitors and yourself to be the first ones to come in contact and hold a consultation time with the potential customer. If you are the first business to contact the lead, you have a high chance of closing the sale. However, if you are late to the game and are one of the last companies to contact them – you likely won’t even have a chance to put your hat in the ring.

How To Buy Leads

Typically you will need to pay a company a monthly retainer to provide high quality leads for your business, or some lead generation companies offer a “pay per lead” type of deal. The best option if you buy leads is to pay a monthly retainer and let them send you an endless supply of leads to contact and close. However, there is a much better alternative to just purchasing massive amounts of leads.

In most cases, you are better off hiring a full-service marketing company that will not only produce content on behalf of your business but also build sales funnels that lead into your company. That way you not only receive sales leads, but you also elevate your brand to the public eye.

Building Your Own Marketing Plan

When you start a company, your plan is to be in business for many years. So investing in your own internal marketing efforts is absolutely essential. In 2019, the most important factor in marketing any business is building digital brand recognition and the public support of your company. With social media, SEO, and quality website design – you can accomplish this relatively quickly in your first year of business. Even if you have been around for many years – if you fail to have these three components actively managed, then unfortunately your business will fall behind the industry leaders in today’s business world.

Investing in SEO and website design is by far the most profitable form of marketing in today’s economy. However, building your brand and digital presence can take time and effort – so if you are currently drowning and needing sales immediately then buying leads and running digital ads is the way to go.

Let’s put it in these terms – when you start your business you either need to rent your office space/building or you can purchase and own it outright. The same goes for your leads and marketing plan – you can either continue to “rent” leads from lead generation companies or invest in “owning” your leads and marketing strategy for years to come by building out your website, SEO, social media, and sales funnel.

The ROI is much higher when you invest in your own marketing strategy. We outline the best strategy below for you to get a nice up-front push going for your marketing plan. If creating and managing your strategy seems daunting – our dedicated Marketing Consultants can help you design an entire marketing system custom tailored to your business

Using Google To Your Advantage

Anyone that looks for a service or product nowadays uses Google. Google receives 63,000 searches per second, 3.8 million searches per minute, 228 million searches per hour, resulting in 5.6 billion searches per day! If you break that down by country, state, and region – it’s very obvious that your business needs to be highly visible on Google in all areas.

Google has three (3) main areas for you to take advantage of when people are searching for your service or product. Google Ads, Map Pack, and Organic Listings. Let’s take a deeper look at all 3 of them and exactly what you can do to manage them.

Google Ads

Google Ads has helped many businesses scale their online leads and have been the sole reason a lot of companies have seen digital success. You will notice when you search for something in Google such as “real estate agents” you are served with a page like this :

The red arrows point at the “Ads” area. The idea is that the searcher will click the top result more often than others when completing a search. The more you pay and bid on each click, the higher your ad will show up in the Ads results. If you create a Google Ads account and attach a credit/debit card, you can start paying Google to appear in these areas once someone searches for a certain “keyword”. In this example the keyword was “real estate agents”. Before launching your own campaign, we recommend reading our article on Google Ads and PPC Ser vices.

Google Map Pack

The Google Map Pack is the section below the ads. This serves up the top 3 companies relative to the location of the searcher. This area of the results page receives about 30% of clicks when people are looking for a service or contractor type of business. Here is a visual view of the Google Map Pack :

There are a few things you can do to show up higher than others within this section.

First and foremost, you must register for a GMB account – this stands for Google My Business. You can register for this account easily by typing in the Google search bar “Google My Business” and then selecting the top result and following the on-screen prompts.

Secondly, you need to have as many customers as possible give you reviews directly to your Google profile. They can do this by either googling your business and then clicking the “review” link under your site name, or you can generate an automated link to the review section that you can give out by email/messenger/etc. to all customers.

Lastly, you’ll want to optimize your entire GMB profile with updated information on your business, address, phone number, hours, owner information, and add in as many pictures as possible directly to your Google My Business profile.

Google Organic Listings

This is by far the most coveted spot on the Google search results page. Ads and Map packs combined get roughly 37% of clicks from searchers – but the top organic results that show up directly below the map packs receive the other 63% of clicks and online traffic.

Google has conditioned it’s users for so long around ads and the quick results, that people nowadays know the ads are paid for and at most times don’t fulfill the needs or answers for what they are searching for. Here’s where you want to be :

The yellow stars outline the top 3 organic positions. When you hear the term SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization. This refers to the act of optimizing and improving content and back-end technical coding on your website in order to show up higher in the organic search results within Google and other search engines.

Most businesses will hire a company that specializes in SEO to handle the entirety of the workload for them. It is very time consuming and extremely confusing unless you have coding or technical background experience. Some businesses will pay up to $200,000 per year to an SEO agency to secure and maintain the #1 organic position for different keywords – that shows you how important and profitable SEO will be for your company.

Google Wrap-Up

If you can get your business to appear at the top of those 3 individual areas in the Google search results pages, you will undoubtedly experience a large influx of sales leads and calls coming into your business. Now the fun begins, it’s time to put the potential customer into your sales funnel and start your sales process.

Investing your marketing budget dollars into Google optimization is the smartest plan for long-term success and sustainable growth. Google has a computer algorithm that tests your website and automatically compares it others – so it typically takes about 7-12 months to rank a website for certain keywords as it climbs up Google’s results pages and they check your content. Point is – start investing with an SEO agency ASAP. Leads will start to trickle in over the coming months, and reach full strength in about one year – at which point you can stop paying for and buying leads from other companies.

Tips For Success

Whether you have built your own lead source internally or you choose to buy leads, you will need to be able to plug the potential customer into a sales process that is tested and proven to drive revenue. Here is what a successful sales process should look like :

Call the prospect as soon as you receive their information. Briefly talk with them about their needs and what they’re looking for. Do not give out price or discuss in-depth features, save that for the time of your actual meeting. Build value in your company, but keep this call brief and to the point. Set a solid time to meet with the potential customer in person or over the phone. The sooner the better, always go for a next-day or same-day meeting. Send a calendar invite to their email to solidify meeting time. Bring all sales materials and required paperwork to the meeting, be ready to close the sale. Don’t back down on your price. Try to find out exactly why they are shopping for your service and really dig into why they need a company like yours. Don’t get timid when presenting the final close paperwork. Be confident and believe in yourself! Once the deal is closed, hand them a document that outline all of the next steps and what their on-boarding with your company will look like.

Conclusion

The option to buy leads online is a very enticing idea, and for some businesses it really works well. The only way to tell for yourself is to try it out, and test it against building and owning your own lead generation sources. For most, the financial investment required to do both may not be feasible – in this case we recommend speaking with a marketing specialist and determining what the best route for you would be.