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.

MarketingProfs, a leading online marketing research organization, conducted a survey with over 5000 professionals regarding the usage of Social Media by B2B and B2C companies. The State of Social Media Survey results seems to show that the social media is beneficial to marketers and will help silence the skeptics.

Here is the summary of the survey results:

• 81% of businesses surveyed gained positive exposure
• 61% increased their online traffic or subscribers
• 56% created new business partnerships
• 52% boosted search rankings

This is a comprehensive report with over 240 pages containing detailed charts and statistics. Note that this is a paid report, but may be worth the money for those who are into social media as a marketing platform. If you are a lead generation /distribution agency or demand generation consulting service provider, the report contents would be a great addition to your knowledge base.

You should be using Question and Answers (Q&A) as part of your internet / social media and lead generation strategy per Jason Falls, one of the leading social media experts. Question and Answer forums such as Yahoo Answers, Answers.com, LinkedIn Answers, etc. drive a lot of business leads.

Business.Com has released a Social Media Benchmarking study results recently. Polling over 900 professionals, the study has revealed some interesting facts. Question and Answers forums are more popular than even Twitter. Consumers and business are finding Q&A increasingly useful. While LinkedIn Answers leads the category, Yahoo Answers follows distant second.

The Social Media Best Practices: Q and A Forums report is available for free download from Business.Com. You need to register, if your are not a member already. You may also download the full Social Media Benchmarking Study report from Business.Com.

Video Blogging is a great tool to leverage your demand generation and brand building efforts.  If you are a internet marketer and involved in lead generation and inbound marketing using SEO practices, I am sure all of you must be on one or more blogs, not just reading, but contributing your ideas, suggestions and best practices. Here is the take on vlogging from the lead blogger of Cisco.

While personally I am not a vlogger yet, video is a great addition to your social media marketing and inbound marketing efforts. Video is obviously not as easy and simple as text simple text blogging. For example, video search is still its in infancy. Search engines deliver video links by keywords and tags. Also, video is still not very popular among the smart phone users, as the bandwidth issues are plaguing the industry. However, it is a good time to start using the video in your blog posts so that your will be a master when the practice becomes more mainstream.