Lead Buyer Be Aware
Consider the following if you’re thinking about doing business with a lead provider:
1) Ask for references. Can the company supply you with names and contact information for at least two contractors of similar size and of similar business model who have successfully used its service for six months or longer? Then be sure to contact those people.
2) Find out how many leads the company can supply you weekly, or monthly, and what percentage of those leads you can reasonably expect to translate into sales appointments. If it sounds too good to be true — if they say 90%, for example — it probably is.
3) Ask the lead-generation supplier when and how it gets its leads. Ask for an example of a market where it currently has a pay-per-click campaign running, so that you can verify.
4) Be fully aware of your contract’s terms and conditions. Some lead providers charge a fee to sign on; some charge a monthly maintenance fee, in addition to the cost of individual leads. If so, you may want to ask under what circumstances that monthly fee can be waived.
5) If everything else checks out, make sure you allot yourself sufficient time to know whether or not the lead-generation company you’re using is a good fit. Many prospects researching a remodeling project are not even at the planning stage yet.
6) Since most lead-generation companies develop their customer contacts through the Internet, be sure that you’re prepared to immediately get in touch with prospects supplied by the lead generator, and to follow up with marketing messages over time in the event that the lead doesn’t immediately translate to a sales appointment.
7) And don’t expect lead-gen prospects to buy tonight, or next month, or ever. The automated nature of most lead-generation companies prevents them from distinguishing between hot prospects and tire-kickers, says Mark Paskell, a former remodeling sales director and owner of The Contractor Coaching Partnership. “This is a name and a number,” he says. “This is a person who has an interest in doing something in the future.” But how keen that interest might be is not known. Maybe the homeowner is just curious about the cost, and quite often, remodelers say, these prospects profess shock at the answers given when it comes to discussing price.
—Jim Cory is editor of REPLACEMENT CONTRACTOR , a sister publication of REMODELING .
Hanley Wood, the company that publishes REMODELING , has a business relationship with ServiceMagic.
