Selling leads is a great way to make use of marketing skills without necessarily needing to have your own product to sell. The skills of marketing and sales are very distinct and, if you lack the latter, trying to run the whole process yourself could be more challenging than it’s worth. Selling leads removes that problem.
It also has a strong passive income potential if you are about to optimise your advertising spend and marketing to funnels to such an extent that you have a regular flow of leads coming in, which you on sell, while having to do little to no additional work.
TL;DR
– Focussed – you will only need to be skilled in marketing to sell leads
– Seller’s Market – there is no shortage of potential customers
– Good Income – if you choose the right verticals, the profit potential from selling leads is excellent
– High Effort – it takes a lot of time and work to generate leads and set up the network to sell them
– No shortcuts – the processes of generating leads and finding buyers to sell them to all need to be set up by you
What is Selling Leads?
Selling leads is exactly what it sounds like…well, almost. We’re not proposing that you go into the pet supplies business and start a company specialising in dog leaches. We mean selling sales leads – basically, prospective customers. You would be acting as a company’s marketing department, narrowing down a vast audience into a smaller number of people who are actually likely to be interested in the product they have for sale so that they can go into the sales funnel and, hopefully, convert into customers.
The benefit of this business plan is that you can focus in on just the marketing side of things. You don’t need to have a sales funnel of your own, nor do you need to be any good at salesmanship. All you need is some skill in marketing.
You can pick one or more industries to promote – known as lead verticals. The most popular among them are:
- Mortgages
- Home improvement
- Payday services
- Health insurance
- Auto finance
- Life insurance
- Debt management
- Legal services
- Student loans
- Solar energy
- Auto insurance
As you can see, the overwhelming majority of the options revolve around finance. Even the two exceptions to that rule – home improvement and solar energy – are the sort of things that the average homeowner would probably need a loan for. While these certainly aren’t the only things you can sell, they are inevitably the most profitable as the commissions you can get from selling leads will be much higher. At the same time, with the complexity surrounding the world of finance, knowing what you are talking about will be essential and adds a bit of challenge to your work.
With that decided on, perhaps just by picking the areas you have the most personal interest in, you just need to obtain leads and sell them to the appropriate business. There are a couple of ways you can get leads. Generating them yourself is certainly the most common and profitable, but takes the most work. This could be achieved through setting up a website and focussing on SEO. Social media marketing is often quicker and can be easier, depending on your skillset. SEM, in the form of Google Adwords, can also be a pretty quick way of scoring leads, but it’s a tricky skill to master.
If all else fails, you can also buy leads from other lead generators, effectively becoming a go-between. Buy low and sell high and you should make a small income for yourself with only a small amount of initial set-up work. Even this approach requires some work, however, as you need to add some value to the process or risk being bypassed.
How to get started
The first step in selling leads is, as we already discussed, selecting your lead verticals. With that decided on, you need to pick what information you want to obtain from potential leads. This is the product that you age going to be selling. This may depend on the needs of the firm you are selling your leads to, but a standard suite of lead fields will generally include the name of the prospective customer, some means of contacting them (their address, phone number, email address or all of the above) and, if you are selling B2B leads, the company they work for and some details about it.
The next step is acquiring that information. This could take various forms, depending on where your skills and interests lie. You could:
- Set up a website, publishing content on the subject of your lead vertical. Use a pop-up offering more information on the subject to collect names and email addresses or potentially even just put affiliate links to your lead buyer’s website. This option is good for those with some skill in SEO and content creation, but can take time and a lot of work to bear fruit.
- Run a Google Adwords campaign, linking directly to your lead buyer’s site. This takes a certain degree of skill since it’s not easy to write a compelling advert that’s also cheap to run.
- Create a Facebook page marketing the services of your lead buyer. The user information you can collect from page likes and the people that engage with your posts will form the backbone of your lead sales. Of course, this also requires some skill and potentially also a few sponsored posts to boost your numbers.
It’s worth noting that none of these plans is entirely free. Setting up a website, running an SEM campaign and making sponsored posts on social media all come at a cost. It’s not a huge cost, in any of these cases, and you should make that money back relatively quickly, if you are successful in generating leads.
The important part is that the lead should be someone who is actually interested in the product that your lead buyer is selling. You could, in theory, scrape the internet for any number of names and email addresses – there’s no shortage of them on the internet. However, if you do so, you will quickly find your lead selling business failing as buyers will come to know you for selling cold leads.
The alternative to generating leads yourself is to buy them from other sellers and you will need to add something of value to the deal – otherwise, why wouldn’t the seller just go straight to the buyer? One popular way of adding value is taking leads generated by a call centre and reaching out to the leads they have generated, verifying their information and fixing any errors or contradictions. Alternatively, some people act as telemarketers themselves, taking leads generated by a call centre, calling the prospective buyer and then handing them over to the buyer when the customer is ready to make a purchase.
You will need to establish a network of buyers, with different types of customers and different ways you are selling them. You could sell packages of a certain number of leads per month or charge for each lead individually. Which approach you use and how much you charge will be significantly affected by whether you choose to sell your leads exclusively or not. Only selling each lead once obviously limits the earning potential of your work, but this is balanced by the fact that you can charge more for it.
Lead buyers generally take one of two forms:
- End service/retail lead buyers: These are the buyers that will reach out to the leads themselves to make their sales pitch. They pay the best but are often only interested in leads from a small geographic area and may also limit the number of leads they are willing to buy at once.
- Lead aggregators/wholesale buyers: These are essentially the folks who buy leads to resell them, just as we described above. While it’s easy to find and set up business with these clients, they do pay less per lead than retail buyers.
It’s advisable to develop a network combining both of these to give you the optimum income for your efforts.
Finally, in terms of setting up a lead selling business, you will need to consider the method of delivery. Spreadsheets of details are increasingly being replaced with lead management systems that can deliver the lead faster and fresher, with filters to help buyers pick out the leads that best suit their product. There are plenty of such systems you can find online, each with its own benefits and unique functions.
Things to consider
Generating leads is not a particularly easy job, especially in the highly technical world of finance. Any of the options suggested above – SEO, SMM or SEM – requires a considerable amount of specialised skill and effort, as well as a fair amount of time invested and even a bit of up-front financial investment in order to reach the point that you are consistently generating leads. In short, don’t expect to be making a lot of money out of this in very little time.
Setting up deals will also take a considerable amount of effort on your part. There aren’t any established networks of buyers or sellers you can join to make things easy. Instead, you will have to build your own network from scratch. There are plenty of companies looking to buy leads, so you’ll have no shortage of prospects, but the job of finding customers is on you.
Cost to get started
The exact cost of selling leads entirely depends on the approach you take. At the very least, you will need to pay for a lead management and delivery system. While you could use Microsoft Excel, your list of potential buyers will become much shorter as this approach is increasingly unpopular. In theory, the cost of lead generation could be kept quite low. For example, you could choose to use Facebook marketing and rely entirely on organic growth, though your progress will be very slow.