Stop buying leads!

If you are a marketer or a business development professional, the sight of relevant leads is always appealing. We understand leads are irresistible because they are the fuel to maintain our sales pipeline, boost revenue, and help our business grow. To achieve the aforementioned goals, many prefer to buy leads rather than generate them mainly due to the convenience. 

Why? This is because buying leads seems to:

• Save time and effort for the marketing team
• Provide you highly targeted leads that fit your sales criteria perfectly
• Save resources that would be otherwise be spent on lead generation

Therefore, it appears reasonable to set aside some budget for lead acquisition. After all, there is a slew of companies that have developed databases where lead criteria can be entered to generate optimal leads for businesses. We get the appeal, but take a moment to consider it on a deeper level. 

Disadvantages of buying leads

Buying leads has several drawbacks for your business.

To begin with, most commercial lead providers tend to generate leads that will become stale within a few years. And these stale leads may be sold to you without being refreshed, putting your business at risk of failure. Not to mention the fact that these stale leads may have closed, changed address, or even left the organizations. As a result, your carefully designed emails may fail to reach the intended inboxes. If any of these emails bounce, your account is more likely to be blocked as well.

Second, these leads could have already been sold to your competitors. This simply means that some of the prospects have already been captured, wasting your time and effort.

Last but not lead, this approach is often cold and lacks a personal touch. This is because these individuals are unaware of the service/product you provide, they don’t know who you are. More importantly, they have not expressed an interest in being contacted. As a result, the chances of them being thrilled by your unexpected approach are slim, setting you up for further rejections and ignores.

Above are the key reasons why buying leads is not a good idea.

Alternatives to buying leads

It is considerably better to use an online lead generation platform like Sendvilla to generate a list of active leads. Alternatively, you can set up an authentic opt-in option on your website or landing page, which will provide you with more legitimate who genuinely want to learn more about you.

You should also employ digital marketing to drive traffic to your landing page and website, resulting in more relevant and fruitful leads for your marketing efforts.