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Should You Use a Pay-Per-Lead Service?
July 16th, 2009 | Posted in Clients.
Generating new business can be a difficult task at times. Aside from freelance bidding sites, general advertising and word of mouth marketing, there are pay-per-lead services available to help you land more clients. These services may seem quite convenient to use, but are they worth the time and money?
Generally, a pay-per-lead service will give you information on prospects that may be interested in your services. They acquire these leads mainly by huge pay-per-click campaigns targeting prospects looking for web designers. By paying a certain amount per lead based on the prospect’s budget, you and four other design firms are competing for the prospect’s business.
“So let’s get this straight. These companies will send you potential clients and all I have to do is sell them my services and get them to sign a contract? This sounds pretty easy to me.”
Well, not exactly. Factoring in your niche, products or how you compare to the other four firms, you may be in a situation where you will be competing by price alone. Not every lead from these PPL services is legit. Many of which are simply curious about costs to start their stay at home business, which means that the lead you just paid for was a waste of time and money.
Be Quick
But, every now and then there may be a legit lead that you can pounce on. The one thing to remember about using a PPL service is to be quick to dial. Every single prospect that I’ve spoken to told me that they were overwhelmed by the amount of calls they had received. One lead had told me that she received over twenty calls in the past hour alone. By the time that I got a hold of her, she did not want to talk and was no longer interested.
Be Competitive
Nearly every lead that I received, I found myself competing with Heritage Web Solutions. Heritage has a large sales department and has a reputation for spending nearly $80k a month on PPC ads alone. Heritage has also been categorized as a “website mill”. One former client of theirs had told me he felt that his site was a cookie cutter template of another Heritage site. The company focuses on being low priced, but they make up the difference by a $50 per month hosting package.
One prospect, an esteemed salesman himself, had told me that the Heritage sales representative had told him that they would “submit” his website to thousands of search engines every month and that he needed unlimited bandwidth to handle all of that new traffic. So remember, price and value are key players when competing against the other four firms.
Final Thoughts
From my experience with using PPL services, I was only able to find five legit leads out of 100. This has given me the impression that spending over $2k on leads can only get you a 5% return. After lost money and time, I feel that these services don’t compete with traditional marketing and word of mouth. Stick to what works!
I didn’t mean to completely bash Heritage in this post, I am just repeating some of the items I have heard about them.
If you’d like to try out some PPL services:
Resource Nation
VendorSeek
Related posts:
- Lead Generation – Can Your Business Afford Not To Do It?
- Is The Vemmabuilder System Worth Paying For Vemma Leads?
- Surviving in a Small Local Market
