Many businesses turn to lead providers to get a list of high quality leads. High quality leads are leads who have had contact with the lead provider and have expressed an interest about being contacted by your company to discuss the goods or services you offer. Your sales staff saves time, because everybody they contact is already willing to talk to them about what they have to offer.

One drawback to lead buying is that it can be expensive. Also, not all companies who advertise themselves as lead providers are reputable. When you are deciding whether or not to work with a company that generates leads, take a few moments to think about the following factors.

1. Read the Fine Print

Find out what, exactly, you are being offered and how much it will cost. Beware of hidden service feed. It’s also best to avoid companies that make extravagant claims, like a 100% conversion rate.

2. Ask Where the Company Gets Its Leads

The answer you want to hear is that they generate fresh leads from their own website or through telemarketing. Less encouraging answers are that they buy their leads in bulk from another company, or that they recycle leads, selling the same lead to dozens of clients. Both of the latter practices lower lead quality. Before you put any money down or sign a contract, make sure you will be getting exclusive leads, or leads that are specifically generated for your business and have not been sold to your competitors.

3. Ask How the Leads Are Delivered

Many companies deliver leads in bulk once or twice a day. It’s better to find a company that relays each lead to you in real time as soon as the lead requests additional information about your goods or services. Pursuing leads is a matter of “striking while the iron is hot.” Lead quality decreases for every hour that goes by without making initial contact.

4. Evaluate Their Customer Service

When you are lead buying, take a few minutes to evaluate the customer service of the company you are thinking about hiring. If the company is hard to reach or unable to give you clear information over the phone, or if the associates are rude, you’re probably wiser looking for another lead provider. How the company treats you gives you a pretty good indication of how it treats the leads with whom it has contact. If the leads have a bad experience with the lead providers, they’re likely to generalize that experience to your organization as well, which can hurt sales.

5. Check Them Out

Before making any final agreements, check the lead provider company out with your local Better Business Bureau. It’s also a good idea to ask the company for a list of references who are willing to vouch for their services.

Lead buying can be an effective marketing tool, but it’s important to be sure that you’re working with a reputable company that focuses on lead quality rather than quantity.

It can be next to impossible to generate enough quality leads without professional assistance, but it is necessary to understand that all lead providers are not created equal. Before purchasing any internet leads, the following tips should be considered in an effort to ensure that the lead buying process is as smooth as possible.

The source of internet leads is very important, so a prospective buyer needs to be satisfied with the process that each of the lead providers is going to utilize. Few individuals are interested in contacting prospective customers that have simply filled out an online form to qualify for a free giveaway of some sort. A lead provider should not be hesitant to explain where the bulk of the internet leads are coming from.

In addition to making sure that the source of the interest is indicative of quality leads, a buyer also needs to be aware of all policies and procedures. One of the most important questions to ask focuses on the process involved with obtaining a credit or a refund for a purchased lead should it turn out to be useless information. It is necessary to understand that some prospects will change their mind or may decide that they are no longer interested, but this is simply part of any sales person’s routine. However, lead providers should make it easy to request a credit for erroneous information.

Perhaps the most important step in evaluating a prospective provider as part of the lead buying process is to ensure that all fees and costs have been properly disclosed. A future buyer should never have any question as to what they will be responsible for paying. Minimum orders and other disclosures should be readily visible in any contracts, and this can help avoid any possible confusion at any time during the business relationship.

Lead buying is certainly not intended to be a difficult process, but a buyer needs to perform their due diligence before placing any orders. Only a reputable provider is going to supply quality leads that will actually deliver the desired results. Once an individual or company is satisfied with the provider that they have chosen, they will be able to spend more time focusing on their business and ways to improve the sales process.

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Finding the right lead provider is critical to your business success. Whether you are in the mortgage, debt, or insurance business you need a marketing partner that brings you quality consumer opportunities. And believe me, not all lead providers are equal.

Asking a few key questions can put your sales in a much better position for success. Here are a few of the basic things you should ask any lead provider.

1. How Do You Generate or Source Your Leads? Internet leads are  great sources of motivated financial leads and prospective customers. Whether you are in the mortgage, debt, or insurance business there are thousands of motivated consumers waiting for your call. However, not all lead providers generate or acquire leads in the best way. Make sure you are comfortable with their marketing methods.

2. How Long Have You Been a Lead Provider? Being in the business for a long time doesn’t necessarily make you the best. However, it does give you experience, customers, and stability. These are all important attributes if you are going to essentially outsource your marketing to a lead provider.

3. What is Your Return or Replacement Policy? Even the best of lead providers will aggregate or generate leads with bad contact information. Consumers and fraudsters will often provide errant information to test the marketing system, but avoid sales calls. This fact of Internet marketing is a bit annoying, but little cause for concern if you are dealing with a lead provider that has a reasonable return policy.

4. Can I Talk to a Customer Reference? Nothing helps your due diligence and success rate with a lead provider more than a couple of good references. These contacts can give you the straight scoop on how to be most successful with the leads from that lead provider. And those lead providers that won’t give you a reference–watch out.

5. What is Your Better Business Bureau Rating? This is an easy way to check for yourself. The Better Business Bureau aggregates and investigates complaints about businesses. This quick check can give you a third party evaluation of doing business with any lead provider you consider.

Partnering with the right lead provider can be the difference between success and lots of money pouring down the drain. Make sure you are asking questions and getting answers. A good lead provider will want to build a trusting relationship with you–a good Q & A session is a good place to start.

Your objective is to get the best leads for your specific business. If you are buying leads then you should be telling your lead provider what leads you close the best. Here are three simple lead measurements that will give you better leads from your lead provider:

1. Contact Rates

Who are you getting on the phone the fastest and most frequently? If you can’t get a customer to respond to your communications you are going to be at 0% lead conversion. Leads (even within the same lead provider) originate from a lot of different marketing sources and methods. Some marketing channels may not set good expectations, match your pitch, or even be expecting a call.

Share contact rates immediately to get your lead provider tuned into their marketing source that takes your call faster and more frequently.

2. Closing Rates

This is a no brainer. If you don’t do anything else tell your lead provider what leads are making you money. A good lead provider doesn’t want to sell you a single lead that doesn’t close. Sure it is an impossible goal, but help them get as close as possible.

3. Withdraw Rates

Withdraw rate is another precious metric, but it is often overlooked. These are the leads that are either consistently non-responsive or more often than not the ones you can’t help. This typically means you have a mismatch in your lead filters or the lead provider is not sufficiently segmenting their lead generation.

For example, if you don’t do loan modifications you don’t want a loan modification customer inquiry sold to you as a mortgage refinance or debt settlement. Look for these pockets of lead generation and product mismatch.

Give Me the Good Stuff

Regardless of who you buy leads from, real-time or aged leads you need to share performance data. Any lead buying program is going to need a little tuning. Your business is going to be slightly different from every other client your lead provider services.

You may be one of hundreds of mortgage lenders, but are you experts in VA, FHA, reverse mortgages, or maybe your have a special accelerated mortgage program. Maybe you are one of hundreds of debt settlement specialists, but are you staffed with ex-loan officers, experienced debt counselors, or experts in credit card consolidation, or maybe loan modification specialists.

All of these little nuances are going to dramatically effect what leads work best for your mortgage or debt business. Make sure you are sharing this information and data from your sales teams so your lead partner can give you your sweet spot.

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Next Wave Marketing Strategies brings over 5 years of integrity, innovation, and client satisfaction to the aged debt leads market. We offer industry leading quality control, data cleansing, and a generous return policy to empower you to build your business in the fastest, most cost effective manner. Learn more about aged debt leads.

Here are 5 important steps to evaluate reputable aged debt list providers:

1. Valid contact information: It sounds elementary, but verifying all of the contact information for your consumer data provider is a critical first step. Make sure they are a legitimate operation.

Your aged data provider should be willing to provide a physical place of business, telephone numbers, and customer service representatives.

A simple online map search on the address will let you get a birds eye view of the business and verify it isn’t a FedEx/Kinkos drop box. A second Google search of the telephone number will often reveal any issues or complaints related to the business numbers.

2. Verifiable business credentials: Verifying the credibility of the business goes in line with validating contact information. Start with Google and then Dun and Bradstreet. You are looking for a reasonable time in business, any complaints, and an incorporated business.

Red flags include: little or no Google presence, lack of articles of incorporation, no DUNS number, or website with little or no physical contact information.

We live in a virtual business world, but you need to buy customer data from a business–not some hacker stealing consumer data in his parent’s basement.

3. No large deposits or long-term contracts: Speaking of red flags–beware of sharks asking for large upfront deposits. Aged debt leads are valuable data and a reputable provider adds significant value to that data, but do not fall victim to large up front payments.

Buy a small quantity of data at a reasonable rate to test the quality of the data. As you build trust and partnership you can certainly invest in greater increments.

4. Reasonable return policy: Even the best data and quality control process will allow some level of bad leads to enter your data flow. Any good aged debt lead provider will understand and account for this in their return policy.

Whether it is in the per lead price, return credits, or monthly discount you should assume approximately a 10% bad data rate, which should be accounted for in the data providers return policy.

5. Know where leads come from: This will be the hardest part of your due diligence because most marketers and lead providers hold marketing sources closer to the vest than the crown jewels. Simply assure them that you do not want their business trade secrets just some idea of how and where they acquire data from.

This will also help your sales performance with their aged debt leads. How was the data generated? Search, pay-per-click, email–understand the marketing method helps you talk to the customer. It also gives you some understanding of the marketing quality and legitimacy of the aged lead.

In the best case scenario a good lead partner should give you a reference to a lead supplier and/or a current lead buyer.

At the end of the day poking around a lead providers business a bit will shake out the good partners from the bad.

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Next Wave Marketing Strategies brings over 5 years of integrity, innovation, and client satisfaction to the aged debt leads market. We offer industry leading quality control, data cleansing, and a generous return policy to empower you to build your business in the fastest, most cost effective manner. Learn more about aged debt leads.

Aged Leads are Not Scams

The biggest myth about aged mortgage or debt leads (assuming a reputable aged data provider) is that these leads are fraudulent, scams, or somehow lead rip-offs. Again, assuming you are dealing with a top aged customer data provider, nothing can be further from the truth.

Here is a quick background on how the real-time Internet lead generation game is played.

Web marketers, mortgage companies, real estate companies, debt companies, affiliate marketers, email marketers, and various other Internet lead generation market participants work very hard to generate large volumes of high-quality, real-time online customer inquiries. To these entities and their clients that means a lead that is generated, delivered, and contacted in a matter of moments. Every minute and hour that the customer inquiry is not delivered or not responsive the lead declines significantly in value.

A simple analogy is a new car. The moment you drive it off the lot it loses 30% of its value. This number is even bigger when a lead sits without follow-through.

As you can imagine the inefficiencies in this process produce an enormous amount of aftermarket leads. These are customers that want to talk to someone, but never got into a sales person or didn’t return a sales person’s call fast enough.

In fact, a recent study says that up to 60% of Internet leads never get a call–these are all after aged leads and motivated borrowers.

Aftermarket Leads are “Disenfranchised” Borrowers

Imagine buying an aged debt lead (from a few days old to a few weeks old) for a fraction of the real time cost that was never called and certainly never followed up on, which would have cost you $20-$40 had you received it in real time.

These leads are borrowers that are generally looking for someone willing to work with their particular situation, were anxious about the borrowing process, or were not ready or able to borrow.

A skilled marketing and sales team could very quickly grow their customer database with highly loyal customers by purchasing and following up intelligently on these “disenfranchised” borrowers.

Vintage Leads Can Grow Your Business

Tough markets are making companies in the lending business rethink how they acquire customers and the cost of doing so. Vintage leads can be the more affordable alternative to real-time Internet leads. You are able to achieve the same or greater results at a fraction of the marketing costs.

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Next Wave Marketing Strategies brings over 5 years of integrity, innovation, and client satisfaction to the aged mortgage leads market. We offer industry leading quality control, data cleansing, and a generous return policy to empower you to build your business in the fastest, most cost effective manner. Learn more about aged mortgage leads.

Here are 5 steps to finding a quality aged data provider:

1. Do your homework: Mortgage leads, even at a few dollars a lead, can add up quickly, with the wrong partner. No one likes to be a victim and there are lots of scams in the online lead business, especially in the aftermarket lead business. So, do your due diligence.

Find an aged mortgage lead partner with:

• Several years of lead generation experience
• Valid business credentials and contact information
• No big deposit or prepay requirements

2. Look for a partner, not a list: I can’t over emphasize this enough. Lists are simple to come by and most are worthless. If you are going to be successful at aged mortgage lead buying you need a partner–someone that wants to add value to their product and your business.

Look for data lead providers that genuinely show an interest in what your mortgage business is trying to achieve. Your lead provider should also understand and have experience in the mortgage business. This knowledge will help them to optimize their supply of lead data to you.

3. Find quality, not quantity: Just because aged mortgage data is cheap is no reason to gorge on junk. As the old adage goes, “garbage in, garbage out.”

In your search for a good mortgage lead provider focus your eye on what a potential partner does to give you a top quality mortgage lead.

Some fundamental lead quality services you should look for:

• Lead data scrubbing
• Removal of duplicate lead data
• Reasonable return policy
• Date time stamp and IP address

4. Use lead management: Vintage leads need to be managed. Just buying a list and cherry picking a few to call is a futile waste of money. Every lead needs to called, emailed, and routinely followed-up on.

To accomplish this at any reasonable scale you need to find a good lead management system. This will allow your lead nurturing routine to go into auto-pilot. A lead management process will help you spend more of your time calling lots of leads, rather than managing them.

5. Measure, analyze, and adjust: Having done all of this, and in conjunction with using a lead management system, you need to be measuring. This is the only way to affirm that the partnership is working.

Are you getting the right leads, can you convert them, and are you converting them profitably?

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Next Wave Marketing Strategy brings over 5 years of integrity, innovation, and client satisfaction to the aged mortgage leads market. We offer industry leading quality control, data cleansing, and a generous return policy to empower you to build your business in the fastest, most cost effective manner. Learn more about aged mortgage leads.