5 Important Tips for Lead Generation using Affiliates and Partners
If you are in lead generation and distribution business, you are most likely to leverage affiliates, partners and other third party lead gen companies for increasing your lead volume. Here are 5 important tips while buying web leads from the vendors and partners. Using these tips will help save a lot of time in managing the lead business operations, insure consistency of lead sales and improve client satisfaction.
#1 Lead Posting / Integration Options to meet your Customer Requirements
Most lead buyers will be have different lead posting requirements depending on their lead distribution, delivery and management system. The following are some of the options, which in turn will need customization or minor tweaking:
- Basic HTTP Posting
- Advanced HTTP Posting with return of critical information
- SOAP based API
- Advanced Authentication
- Fixed / Converted data formats
If your lead provider cannot have multiple lead posting options with flexibility, you may not be able to satisfy certain customer requirements.
#2 Capabilities of Lead Vendor’s Technical Team
Even if the lead posting system is flexible enough, the customers will come with a ton of custom requests. Unless your vendor’s technical team is capable and willing to address these requirements, customer needs cannot be met.
#3 Response Time to address Technical Requests
The vendor support team should be agile and quick to respond to the requests. The turnaround time should be short enough to service the customers. Your lead providers should be flexible to accommodate the work at short notice. For example, if you need to post 100 sample leads to a large customer’s lead management or CRM system, the same should be done within hours; not in days or weeks, unless it requires super customization!
#4 Quality of Leads
Assuming that the vendor is able to deliver leads in time, the quality plays an important role in lead conversion rate. Understanding Vendor’s Web Traffic Generation strategies and processes might help you get an insight into the lead quality. Other traditional methods such as reference check will add great value in this area.
#5 Optimum Pricing
As pricing is relative to the quality and performance of the leads, evaluating and arriving at an optimum price is critical. The pricing is very elastic and hence the vendor’s pricing should be assesses based on both objective and subjective factors.
While evaluating lead vendors and partners, the above considerations should be factored in. If you are new to the business you may be content with your lead generation using Search Engine Marketing (SEO and PPC) and Social Media / Web 2.0 strategies. However using lead gen vendors who specialize in specific verticals and have long experience is required to scale up your lead business operations. Any missteps in lead buying will lead to customer churn and loss of revenue. Hence spend some time researching the vendors and their processes, ask questions and make a decision that will be a win-win for both the all the parties concerned.
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