MLM Leads To Buy Or Not?

November 16th, 2007 | by Chris |

That is a question that every marketer involved in this industry has asked himself many times and while many give it a try and get excellent results so they become regular customers, others get so bad results and possible spam complaints that they regret the time they decided to do so. Of course, many others learn how to generate their own leads so they can sleep without worries at night and at the same time get high quality at low price compared with purchased ones. And finally those that are still wondering what they should do.

So should you buy or not?

Ok, first things first, for those who may not know an MLM lead is the identity of a person that is interested in becoming a distributor in an MLM company. Of course many Network Marketers may be interested in acquiring solely customers for their products, in which case they are looking for what is called a sales lead.

The best leads are those that you generate them yourself, not only because you know for sure that they are real people with a genuine interest in your business, but also because they cost you less. The downside to this is that you need some “technical” knowledge in order to generate them. For example, if you generate them online you need a capturing form put on website which is a box where people can put their name, email address or other info and request more information. I am sure you encounter them many times on lots of websites. But the most important is the traffic. If no one visits that site then you are doing nothing and to generate traffic especially targeted is not the easiest thing to do. If you don’t do it right you may waste a lot of hours or money in vain.

Now, some people may want to get their business going and give it some momentum before they learn this knowledge or plain simple they never want to learn how to do it and prefer to outsource it. Here comes into play the companies that generate such leads and then sell them. In essence is like outsourcing that job to them, but here also starts the problems, too, because you are not sure about the quality you get until you test them first.

To be honest, a great deal of such companies are offering low quality and overpriced leads that often sell the same ones to multiple buyers or mix into them many fake ones or worse of people that never gave them such permission, especially when we talk about email leads. At least with phone leads no one is going to accuse you of spam.

On the other hand there are companies that at the beginning are selling high quality ones and as they gain popularity and new customers their quality drops as they can’t keep up with all the new demand but they don’t also want to lose sales, so they start mixing leads that buy cheap from other vendors, usually of low quality, and then resell them to you.

Of course, there are also companies that from their start until now manage to deliver consistently what they are promising. I want to stretch the “until now” because you can never be sure if they will fail in the future to do so. So always be vigilant.

Now, before you rush to forums and other sources to find that handful of sellers, perhaps it’s better to turn to your sponsor first. It is very likely that he or she or someone else up the line would be purchasing from them and so they can recommend them. A prudent thing to do is to always test them. Purchase from a few recommended sellers and see which one is bringing the best results. Keep the best one and then find a new one to compare with. Keep the best of the two and then repeat. The trick is here to trying to find and compare a new source with the previous one, all the time, and keep the winner so that way you continually improve your results. It’s like the split testing you do with your advertising, only here we test the lead sellers instead.

Another thing you have to consider when you buy email leads is the autoresponder that you are going to use to send the emails. Most of them don’t allow you to load leads and those who do hardly reach your prospects email boxes. The best solution here is to use lead sellers that offer autoresponder services. That way you get saved from a lot of trouble.

Also, bear in mind that by buying the leads you are not finished, you hardly have started. Your purpose is to convert them to distributors and here plays a big role your communication skills if you phone-contacting them or email marketing skills if you email them.

After all we’ve said above if I was to make a suggestion then quite frankly that would be to learn how to generate your own leads. That way you’ll get the highest quality and you will save yourself from a lot of troubles.

If you want to go the other way don’t forget to Test, Test, Test and always be careful.

Technorati Tags: leads, MLM lead, generate them yourself