Selling sales leads can be a fruitful endeavor for many different types of companies. Whether you run the marketing operations for an insurance business and need an outlet for excess lead volume or operate a marketing firm and are looking for an additional revenue stream, learning how to sell leads could be an extremely valuable skill. You might even want to start a lead generation company that generates all of its revenue from selling leads. Learning how to sell leads gives you not only an avenue to advance your business, but it also gives you the opportunity to assist consumers in many high-demand markets.
If any of these scenarios apply to you, then you are in the right place. We have taught hundreds of companies how to sell leads and would be delighted to help you too.
How To Sell Leads
1. Organize Your Lead Offering
If you are going to sell leads, you have to start by establishing exactly what your product will be. This includes selecting one or more lead verticals to operate in. If you have not already decided, our lead verticals guide is a great place to start.
Once you have decided on one or more lead verticals, you need to establish the exact lead fields that will make up your lead type. These are the fields that you will capture on your lead form and provide to your lead buyers with the contact information of every lead.
If you are not sure which fields to include in your lead type, there are several standard fields for most lead types that we would be happy to share with you. Just send us a request. Additionally, you may need to finalize your lead fields after adding a few lead buyers (see step 3) because some buyers require specific fields for the leads they purchase.
After you establish your lead verticals and the lead fields to capture, you need to decide what your exact lead offering will be. This means that you have to decide if you plan on selling leads in “packages” (e.g. 100 leads/month) or if you want to invoice your buyers for each individual lead they purchased in the previous week or month. You also have to decide whether you will sell leads exclusively (one buyer per lead), non-exclusively (multiple buyers per lead) or both and what pricing structure you will use for each.
Every lead seller is a little different, so if you are not exactly sure how to handle any of these options, let us know. We can help you understand what processes are most common in specific lead verticals and what techniques our clients have found the most success with.
2. Acquiring Leads To Sell - How To Do It
Once you have built a framework for your lead offering, its time to get the leads that you plan on selling. There are two main strategies for acquiring leads.
Generating Leads: This is the most common lead acquisition strategy and the option most marketing experts choose. However, this post will not dig into any specific lead generation strategies. All lead generators have different strengths and opportunities so a lead generation strategy that works for one business may not be as effective for another. For a better overview on generating leads, start here.
Buying Leads: Many lead sellers resort to buying leads to supply or supplement their lead flow. Buying leads in real-time from another lead seller does not require you to maintain your own marketing efforts, but instead allows you to use your network of buyers to find a service provider for each lead you purchase. However, it is important to remember that if you are purchasing leads only to resell them, it is in everyone’s best interest that you provide additional value to the process.
Many lead buyers utilize a call center to reach out to their purchased leads and verify their information and update any conflicting information before selling the lead to a buyer. This is known as call center verification. Other companies utilize a call center to contact the lead and a lead buyer at the same time, introduce the lead to the buyer and transfer the live call to the lead buyer. Each of these options provides additional value to the process, making your service stronger, improving the experience for the lead and ensuring that you are not simply a middleman that can be easily replaced.
Getting Leads - What To Avoid: It is also important to qualify exactly what we mean by getting leads. We are not talking about scraping the internet or databases for email addresses, purchasing cold email lists or anything other than real-time lead acquisition. If you are working with old data or lead details that were not recently provided by the leads themselves in exchange for a specific service they requested, then we cannot help you. Lead selling requires fresh, targeted, real-time leads.
3. Build A Buyer Network
Once you have established your lead offering and determined exactly how you will acquire your leads, your next step is to assemble a network of buyers to purchase your leads. This is one of the most important and most difficult steps when building your lead selling process. If you plan on running a long-term lead selling business, be prepared to dedicate much of your up-front and ongoing efforts to finding and working with your lead buyers.
End Service/Retail Lead Buyers: When selling leads, the greatest clients are end service providers (also known as retail buyers). These are the buyers that plan on reaching out to and making a sales pitch to the leads themselves. Because they are the end service providers, retail buyers are the highest paying lead buyers on the market, but they are oftentimes limited geographically or have set lead needs that sometimes limit the leads you can sell to them. In the insurance verticals, these buyers are insurance agents. In the home improvement industry, these buyers are contractors. It is important to know exactly who you are hoping to sell leads to before starting your buyer research.
Lead Aggregators/Wholesale Buyers: Lead aggregators (also known as wholesale buyers) purchase leads with the intention of re-selling those leads to their own network of buyers. Although lead aggregators pay less than end service/retail lead buyers, they can still be very valuable clients. They are typically easier to find and begin working relationships with and can provide a wider lead coverage than your retail buyers alone can. For a full write-up on working with lead aggregators, check out this post.
What about a lead buying/selling network? There is no standard lead network or exchange that allows you to "plug into" and sell leads through. Although many companies have tried to organize this, there are several reasons that this typically fails. The first is that lead networks take a cut of every lead that is bought and sold. This cuts into the already small profit margins that exist in the lead industry.
The second large issue with communal lead networks or lead exchanges is lead ownership. Most lead exchanges are built by lead generation companies or lead sellers. This means that the very data that you are pushing through the network is extremely valuable (even vital) to the lead network provider. In essence, anyone posting leads into a lead exchange is willingly providing their leads to what amounts to a competitor, simply hoping the exchange alerts them of a sale and compensate them accordingly. This is typically the reason lead networks fail. This completely strips the lead company of any of their selling power and forces them to rely on an external system to get the best possible price for each lead. For this very reason, the biggest and best lead companies build their own buyer networks even if it starts with just a handful of different buyers. Learn more about lead generation vs lead exchange here.
4. Establish Lead Distribution Logic
Step four of our how to sell leads guide requires you to select the lead distribution logic you will utilize. Real-time lead distribution used to be fairly standardized, but today new distribution logic gives you several options that allow you to maximize your profits and optimize your lead flow.
To start, you can build filter sets for every one of your clients that specifies not only the lead fields that each buyer accepts, but even the time of day/day of week they accept leads, price exceptions and more. These filter sets allow you to build custom business rules that match real-time leads to the appropriate lead buyer(s).
Furthermore, sophisticated lead distribution systems allow you to select the distribution logic that is utilized for every lead that matches to more than one buyer. Let’s say you generate an auto insurance lead that matches to five different buyers. Who gets the lead and how much is it sold for? There is no right answer to this question, but rather, there are many lead distribution logic options that allow you to distribute your leads exactly how you want and in the way that matches every lead to the best possible buyer. Read our lead distribution logic guide to learn more.
5. Build Lead Purchasing Options
Finally, you need to establish and configure the lead purchasing options that you give to your clients. When a client purchases a lead, how can they receive this lead? Will you automatically email the lead to the client, post the lead into the client’s CRM or place the lead in a buyer portal to be retrieved at the buyer’s discretion? While most buyers provide posting specifications that allow you to automatically post every lead into their CRM or Lead Management System, you need to identify exactly what happens once a client purchases a lead.
Once your client buys a lead, how will you charge them? It is also important to set up a structured billing agreement that specifies whether you are charging for leads in real-time, sending an invoice at the end of every week or month or even launching automated re-billing on a time or trigger basis.
How To Sell Leads - How To Tie It All Together
This post outlined the specific steps you need to take in order to set up a lead selling process, but it did not specify exactly how to take these steps. It might not be completely obvious how to purchase leads in real-time, how to implement specific lead distribution logic or how to enable specific billing options for your buyers. That is because these processes and options require a system that handles these real-time decisions and management automatically. Gone are the days that lead companies can manage and deliver sales leads using Excel spreadsheets. Real-time lead distribution is vital and lead generation is harder than ever. In order to succeed, you need to let an automated system handle all of the back-office tasks while you focus on finding leads and finding lead buyers.
Why Should I Start Selling My Leads?
Sales leads are no new commodity, but the entire real-time lead selling process and infrastructure that is now available to marketers is not only adding revenue streams to some companies, but it has become the entire foundation of many more. The concept is simple: instead of selling your marketing services for an hourly rate or a media buy percentage, you market to generate leads and then sell them as a good on a per-lead or per-sale basis. If you are unsure about whether selling leads online would be a good addition to your company, please read on. The seven features of selling leads online listed below should help inform your decision and hopefully help guide your business in the most profitable direction.
1. Maintain your marketing practices
One of the best parts of selling leads online is that it requires no fundamental shift in the way you market products or services. If you’re an expert in PPC or SEO, that’s great. You can utilize those skills to drive more traffic to your landing pages and get more people to fill out your forms or call your 800 numbers. If you specialize in radio, TV or even billboards, that’s great too. These practices also continue to encourage inbound calls, direct people to landing pages and, in general, generate more leads.
2. Provides you with a product to sell
Selling leads and calls online gives you a very real advantage over selling yourself as a service. It puts a product on the shelf. No matter how great your are at marketing and advertising, if you depend on finding companies that will utilize your services you will likely experience the ebb and flow of client acquisition. However, by generating a product to sell, you will never be stuck waiting to land the big account. You will always be able to run your own campaigns and if your leads are good, there will always be buyers waiting on the other end.
3. More customers
Because generating calls and web leads gives you a product to sell, you are no longer constrained by the number of clients you have. Generally speaking, buyers in the lead industry have the same requirements across the board. Because of this, any wise business person will generate their leads with the standard requirements that meet the needs of virtually every buyer. With a standard product, you will be able to sell to a large number of customers which not only promotes a more consistent bottom line, but also allows you to be more selective with prices and selling patterns.
4. Additional revenue stream
Many companies find lead generation and selling leads online as an ideal additional revenue stream to their current business. Lead generation offers the flexibility to run the campaigns you want and to put in the time and effort of your choosing. Because of this, selling leads online offers a perfect additional revenue stream for any marketing business that is looking to increase total revenue or counteract slumps in business throughout the year. Let’s take a traditional media or advertising agencies as an example. Even if this agency has several clients at all times, their revenue is limited to the consistency of their client's marketing needs. So what happens if a few of their clients cut back on their marketing budgets or only spend on advertising during the holiday season? These accounts go virtually dormant for parts of the year leaving little incoming revenue for the agency over large parts of the year. By adding a simple lead generation campaign that is active year-round, this agency can maintain a more consistent income and even give itself an additional project to work on during the slower times.
5. More flexibility in pricing structure
By selling leads online, you have more power to negotiate the pricing model you operate with. If you are promoting an offer or providing marketing services for a specific company, you are limited by the fact that you are marketing for one entity alone and constrained by their pricing model. In the lead generation process, you can run the same campaign and sell to dozens of different buyers. Because you are not tied down by one offer or one client, you have more power to dictate not only the pricing model, but the price itself, even on a client-by-client basis.
6. Run the campaigns you want
Another great benefit of selling leads and calls online is that you can market what you want, how you want. You are no longer limited to the creatives sent from your advertiser or the restrictions and opinions of your client. Not only that, but you can market in whichever verticals you want. Granted, some verticals provide more opportunities and have more room in the market than others, but the main point remains. You can market to your strengths with uninhibited creative freedom.
7. Growth opportunities
Selling leads online presents numerous growth opportunities. For one, the industry is growing rapidly and customers continue to fill out forms and call 800 numbers at a high rate. Simply put, there are more leads out there than ever before. Additionally, the software used to assist you in selling leads online continues to evolve. Sophisticated solutions such as boberdoo.com contain advanced tracking tools that allow you to narrow down all of your lead sources, perfect each campaign and generate higher quality, higher valued leads.
Where Do I Find Leads?
Generated Leads
Generated leads are, quite simply, any of the leads you generate yourself, and there are plenty of avenues to start producing your own leads. The most common is using a landing page, complete with an information form, that interested consumers can fill in with their contact information. Advertising these landing pages on search engines, display networks, and other high-traffic media can produce more than enough leads for you. In addition, finding leads on social media is getting easier every day. Twitter's Twitter Cards and Meta's Lead Ads can capture contact information in just a few clicks, pre-populating your forms with their user data.
Paid Leads
Another alternative for finding your leads is to buy them from other companies in order to resell them, a process known as "arbitraging." Many lead generation companies are happy to find buyers for their leads, so simply getting in touch with whatever lead generation companies you find on a Google search will most likely result in you finding leads. On one hand, this process is much easier than generating your own leads, but of course, it can cost more than an advertising budget for your own generated leads.
Ultimately, finding leads comes down to budgeting yourself well. You gotta spend money to make money, right? If generating your own, make sure you know how much you can spend on your advertising budget, and if you're going the paid route, make sure you've done the research on how much your leads tend to profit you.
Finding Brokers
What's the point of having leads without buyers? And how will you buy leads without connections? Well, there are a couple of options:
Lead generators love to buy and sell on LinkedIn. There are dozens of great lead generation groups on the site, ranging from incredibly broad to vertical-specific. Not only will you get great offers for leads, keeping an eye on the conversations will teach you a lot about how leads are bought and sold, how lead generators communicate, and other small details that you can only get from experienced traders. It really is an invaluable resource to not just buy and sell leads, but to learn how the trade works.
Trade Publications
Though the print magazine has largely gone out of style in the B2B arena, blogs and ezines are still all the rage. Many lead distribution companies run their own corporate blogs (like us!), and there are plenty of B2B and social media info blogs that do the same, like B2BMarketing. Many of these blogs have active comment sections that are full of active buyers and sellers, and can prove to be a valuable resource for your business. So get out and start networking! People and companies want your leads; they just need to know you have them.
Conventions
A couple of times a year, lead generation conventions come around. Not only are they in great locales like New York and Las Vegas, but they are the premier place to network with others in the lead business. Events like LeadsCon let you spend the weekend in great cities with other like-minded individuals who love to work in the B2B sector. If you find your way to LeadsCon, let us know! We'd be happy to meet with you and get you all set up, and make introductions on your behalf.
How boberdoo Can Help
In order to run a successful lead selling business, lead companies need to either build or purchase a lead distribution system to handle these tasks. While we have worked with many companies that have attempted to build their own proprietary lead distribution systems, we have also quickly taught them how much cheaper and more efficient it is to use a 3rd party system such as boberdoo. Not only does a 3rd party system save you from hiring an IT staff to build and maintain a system, but companies such as boberdoo bring you the knowledge of nearly two decades in the lead generation industry. In boberdoo’s case, this knowledge and experience have led to new features and improvements constantly added to the boberdoo lead distribution system that gives every lead seller not only the best piece of lead distribution technology, but also additional opportunities to maximize their lead revenue and optimize their lead flow.
Want to see boberdoo in action? Fill out the form below or give us a call at 800-776-5646 to get started.