MLM Leads 101

Lead companies are able to offer you leads at a lower price than what it would cost you to generate the leads yourself because:

- Lead generators are experts in generating leads at the lowest possible cost per acquisition/ conversion.

- Lead generators offset your cost by reselling leads to more than one buyer.

The reason your MLM business needs leads is obvious. However, how you use the leads is not quite so obvious. As a lead generator and provider myself, I see some of my clients buy the wrong type of leads for the type of marketing they are doing.

The right lead for the right campaign

Many new MLM promoters think in a consumer mindset and not a business mindset. A consumer is always looking for the best price without so much concern for result. For example, a consumer will look for the best price for a ream of paper. As long as the consumer gets paper at the lowest price, the consumer is happy. With a business mindset, you will need to consider other costs or opportunity costs when making a purchase.

When you purchase leads as a business owner and not a consumer, you will want to consider the following:

- How will you initiate contact with your leads…Email or Phone?

- What type of leads is your upline mentor using successfully?

- Lastly, do you have enough time and energy to convert leads into buyers?

That stated, leads are as good as they are being marketed to so you will need leads that fit with the type of marketing campaign you are using. If you are emailing your leads you will want email type leads such as those used for auto-responder system and bulk email.

Email Leads tend to be at a low cost per lead giving you more leads for the dollar. However, the quality of these leads for phone marketing or cold calling is very low.

When cold-calling or phone marketing you will want to use phone interviewed or phone surveyed leads where the lead's contact and survey information is verified by a live person. This ensures you are contacting more people who are interested in what you are offering as opposed to manually sifting through large amounts of leads to find the right people yourself with a lower quality type of lead.

Things to consider for quality leads:

- How many times are the leads sold or re-sold?

-- You don't want to be the fifth person calling a lead about the same offer.

- How old is the lead?

-- Less than seven days old is ideal…the fresher the better.

- Are the leads guaranteed to be accurate?

-- Not everyone is interested in what you have to offer, but you should at least get a chance to speak to the right person.

Marketing to the correct type of lead is only part of the solution. The other part depends largely on you, your message and what you are offering your leads.

Remember to use the right quality lead, keep it simple and use what has worked successfully for your upline mentor.