Take the Lead: The Top 10 Best Practices for Selling Leads

Today, 93 percent of adult Americans use the internet regularly. It means plenty of opportunities for generating and selling leads. Businesses can use the internet to know any unmet consumer needs or problems and offer solutions to them.

However, obtaining and selling sales leads involves strategy, skill, and effort.

Selling sales leads is a lucrative trade for various businesses. You might be running a company with a surplus of lead volume. With that, selling them means achieving another income stream.

Knowing how to sell leads can help advance your business. Read on because here are the 10 best practices. Learn more:

1. Establish Your Lead Offering

First, establish your product’s specifications. It means choosing the lead verticals you’ll operate in, like insurance or real estate seller leads.

It’s easier in some verticals to find lead buyers and sellers. However, some are more difficult and tedious. However, expect a higher revenue per lead.

After choosing your lead verticals, decide on your exact lead offering. For example, will you sell leads in packages of 200 leads per month? Regardless, you must be straight to the point.

Also, decide on how you’ll sell your leads as well as the pricing structure. Will you sell leads exclusive to a single buyer or will you have multiple buyers for each lead? How much will you sell for each?

2. Set Your Goals for Generating Leads

Besides an organized lead offering, define your lead generation goals.

For example, ask yourself about the number of leads you want to put in your database. How much revenue in new business do you want to generate this year? How many new customers are you targeting in the following quarter?

3. Choose a Strategy for Obtaining Leads

The two main strategies include generating and buying leads. The most common strategy is the former. Here, you need not pay a third party to get your leads so the profit is all yours. 

However, there are many challenges when generating leads yourself. There are also common mistakes to avoid, like the lack of proper customer targeting.

Lead generators have varying strengths and opportunities. An effective method for one business might not be as good for another.

The second strategy is buying leads. Many sellers resort to a third party to supplement their lead flow.

With this strategy, you won’t spend much effort on your marketing. Instead, you can use your network to find each lead. Keep in mind that you’ll add value to the process.

4. Offer Value

We’ve mentioned earlier that you need to add value to the process especially if you buy and sell leads. Offering extra value can take the form of brochures, ebooks, sources, expert tips, and white paper. 

Providing additional value is a good marketing strategy to build your brand. It demonstrates thought leadership. It adds to your credibility as a resource and encourages leads to seek more information.

5. Share Results

Having open lines of communication between lead buyers and sellers is beneficial for both. It allows for even more successful lead generation.

You can launch campaigns that include discussions about performance. You can share information like success benchmarks and lead-level conversion data. You can also talk about short and long-term goals.

6. Set a Distribution Logic

A distribution logic allows you to optimize your lead flow and maximize your profits.

You can start by creating filters for each client. This can specify the lead fields that buyers accept, the time they accept leads, price, and others. Having these filters helps you set up custom rules that can match leads to the right buyers.

7. Establish a Compliance Team

A compliance team allows lead sellers to have active involvement in daily activities. It helps them avoid compliance missteps leading to unnecessary spending.

Having an internal compliance team helps ensure that everyone follows the regulations. It’s also to improve quality and transparency. It builds trust for the buyers.

8. Have Purchasing Options

Offer purchasing options for your clients. It optimizes your lead selling process.

Decide how a client receives their purchased lead. Will you email it to the client automatically? Will you put it in a buyer portal where they can retrieve it whenever they like?

Another is the billing method. How will you charge the client when they buy a lead? Consider everything to ensure a smoother transaction.

9. Create a Buyer Network

Building a buyer network is one of the most important yet difficult parts of lead selling. If you’re in it for the long-term, expect to devote continuous effort toward building your network.

There are usually two categories of lead buyers. End service/retail lead buyers and lead aggregators/wholesale buyers.

Retail buyers are the greatest clients because they pay the highest in the market. However, they often have specific needs. It limits how much you can sell to them.

Wholesale buyers often resell their purchased leads. They pay less, but they’re easier to find and still valuable to your growth.

10. Get to Know Your Best Customers

Talking to your customers is another good practice. Consider the things you know and don’t know about them. Calling them on the phone can already give you plenty of information to fill any gaps.

You can ask your customers why they chose to work with your business instead of a competitor. How has your business helped theirs? Are they willing to refer you to others?

You can use the insights to optimize your message. It allows you to find motivated seller leads. Knowing your customers is also part of good lead management.

Selling Leads With Success

Today’s market landscape offers many opportunities to lead sellers. However, selling leads still requires strategy and skill.

Lead sellers must have an optimized selling process. You must have a well-defined set of goals and offers. At the same time, focus on maintaining buyer networks while expanding them.

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