I was surprised to discover how many small company owners still buy leads from lead generation companies. It reminds me of my old brick-and-mortar business. We used to pay 1000s of dollars every month hiring people to publish, fold and mail countless prospecting letters. In the past, this is how we generated our “hot” leads week in and week out. Following the letters were delivered, our telemarketers followed up with a telephone call in relation to the letter and create a follow-up appointment.
Whenever we were done recycling the names and addresses, we would purchase a new CD with new names and addresses from these . This is a very costly process in the event that you are the leads, the printing, stuffing and mailing of the leads. Not forgetting the telemarketers! We were happy to have a closing rate of approximately 1% to 2%. The commissions we generated then were high enough to cover the massive infrastructure it took to generate these potential prospects.
Progress slightly over 10 years, and those times seem such a long time gone. In today's economy, trying to generate business leads this antiquated, expensive and burdensome way would put anyone out of business. Yet the amazing thing is small company owners still take action this way. When they're facing a wall, desperate for new prospects because obviously this old methodology no more works, they turn their desperation to lead generation companies for small businesses.To create matters worse, these lead generation companies sell the same contributes to different business owners at very good prices, making these potential prospects almost worthless.
This old cumbersome means of conducting business can very quickly be eliminated if small company owners took some time to know the power of the internet. But even then, unscrupulous so called SEO experts are using them when they're most fragile and need prospects the most. Ironically, these small company owners do not know they really do not require lead generation companies to come up with good leads. With the advent of the internet and so much free technology and free pay per lead marketing agency, they can probably generate better prospects than any of the best lead generation companies they deal with.
The easiest way for a small company owner to generate “hot” leads, is NOT to pay their wages with lead generation companies or with so called SEO experts. Instead, they're better off setting up a lead generation site that captures leads. This is performed by developing a free offer that could entice people who wish to learn and know more in what they have to offer. If the potential prospect is interested, he will fill in his name and email in order to download the free offer. Once the tiny business owner gets the potential prospect's name and email, then she can provide her services on the back-end.
This can be a win-win situation because the chance gets something he needs for free, and the tiny business owner gets a “hot” prospect. If this person wasn't really enthusiastic about what the tiny business owner had to offer, he'd hadn't bothered to fill in his name and email address. Therefore, the next phase for a small company owner is to produce an online lead capture system and start driving prospects to her site, that “want” to purchase from her.
