Marketing is expensive and in many ways mystical. What works and what doesn’t is often this most obvious fit into an image or value message. This is why aggressive sales professionals who thrive on good conversations and building personal relationships quickly become frustrated when trying to create effective and sustainable marketing programs. Fortunately, there are people who can reduce that frustration and help efficiently stock that pipeline with potential new relationships. Several capable lead providers generate hundreds of thousands of leads per day and can filter and target these customer inquiries specifically to their products and services. The best news is that they usually only charge you per lead. Which means you only pay when a customer raises their hand for you to call.

As easy as it sounds, pay-per-lead marketing requires your understanding and fine-tuning your sales process for real success.

Creating a Pay Per Lead Sales Process

Your current sales process is most likely highly focused on prospecting and methodical relationship building as you move people through the sales funnel. In many ways, Internet leads, and pay-per-lead programs in particular, short-circuit that process. Often these leads, or customer inquiries, are more like coveted incoming, spam calls: they’re ready to go. They are at a stage in the sales process where they expect an immediate response, frequent follow-up if you miss them, detailed information, and minimal time, hassle, and interaction to close the deal. This probably means that you need to tweak your sales processes a bit.

You need a system, a lead management system. This is usually best accomplished with lead management software, but it can be built with a disciplined mix of email and spreadsheet lead follow-up. This system should help you create efficiencies in the key points of pay-per-lead success: immediate receipt of leads from the point of customer inquiry, real-time distribution, forced contact management, and lead tracking. Without these key ingredients, you’ll wonder why you can’t get the promised conversions and ROI from the leads you buy.

Understanding Pay Per Lead Marketing

An important part of refining your sales process for pay-per-lead marketing is understanding how you produce a lead and what you have when you receive one.

Most pay-per-lead providers use one of two predominant techniques: email marketing or paid search (pay per click). Both require scale and efficiency. Generally speaking, these marketing methods are based on large number theory and are made or broken by the tiniest nuance.

These techniques produce leads in a similar way. The idea is to attract a large number of targeted email addresses or web traffic with an attractive offer or value to submit a limited amount of personal contact information and your request details. The end result of this process is generally a well-targeted prospect, but due to the simplicity of the offer and the low risk of committing, only a small percentage will be immediate buyers. Consequently, the sales process and the active monitoring system is especially critical.

Vendor evaluation of prospects

Understanding the basics of marketing will help you choose a good partner. The key to success in choosing the right primary provider is to ask lots of questions.

• How long have you been in business?
• How are the leads that I am going to buy generated?
• For which industries do you generate leads? What is your experience?
• What is your return policy?
• What are some best practices for working with your leads?

In addition to these basic questions about your leads, be sure to do your business research. Validate your business locations, contact information, and business licenses. Check the best business office. Google the names of their companies and principles. Ask your colleagues and friends in your industry for opinions and perceptions.

Optimizing Your Lead Buying

Once you’re ready to start buying leads, optimizing that buying by matching your lead requests (lead filters) to the specific products and services of your business is probably one of the biggest hidden secrets of paid buying. per potential customer. Although the information provided by the customer in a lead of 10 to 20 data points is limited, it is very robust in targeting your ideal customer. Make sure that when you start buying leads, you have a minimal filter of customers that you can actually help; That means matching geography, product attributes, and the number of leads.

As you begin receiving and working with leads, your investment in lead management will help you continue to optimize your targeting and buying. You’ll be able to go beyond matching your business and start matching leads with your targeted sales force.

Lead & Sales Tracking

Evolving to that perfect state of getting the perfect leads to the right salespeople is entirely dependent on excellent sales lead follow-up. The ability to see what happens to each of your purchased leads. What works and what doesn’t is critical to process improvement. By keeping track of your leads and the sales processes that make them tick, you can see opportunities to improve both.

Maximize your lead tracking by consistently defining and tagging your leads with the time, date, and action taken. This simple methodology will show you the bottlenecks in your sales pipelines and where customers are falling into the funnel. With this data, determining marketing or sales as the source of the consequences is an easier process.

Payment per lead needs a process

Pay-for-performance lead generation is an efficient, value-based way to pay for marketing. However, to create consistent and predictable success, you must create a repeatable and traceable process. Be sure to evaluate this marketing approach for your business. Make sure you have a good mix: partner, potential customers, and sales culture. Then establish these key processes and watch your success grow.