Q&A: How to Deliver High-Quality Leads to Your Buyers

Posted on May 8 by Rocco J. Sarich in Blog

There’s no doubt about it. Quality matters. This especially rings true when selling leads.

In the lead distribution process, high-quality leads have a positive impact across the board — from fewer lead returns and increased revenue to strengthening buyer relationships and your credibility.

Now, imagine the significant risks of selling subpar leads. This is a position you don’t want to find yourself in. The bottom line is buyers won’t purchase leads that fail to result in sales.

So, what is a lead seller to do? Below are the most pressing questions on how to deliver the leads that your buyers want.

What determines the quality of a lead?

High-quality leads that convert to customers are valuable assets for your buyers. At the same time, these leads are ones that get you, the seller, the highest possible price from your buyer.

For selling premium leads, there are two essentials you need to know about — validity and alignment.

A valid lead is a potential customer who has provided genuine and accurate information. The authenticity of a lead can be tainted by fraud, which impacts 25 percent of leads sold. With the potential to undermine the integrity of your efforts, fraudulent leads can damage your credibility, waste resources, as well as result in fines and penalties.

Another major factor for providing quality leads is alignment or in other words, just a matter of a good fit. These refer to legitimate leads with valid contact details but simply are not aligned with the needs and preferences of the target audience. Eventually, lead buyers will cease acquiring such leads that fail to convert into actual sales.

How can I prevent fraud from affecting the quality of my leads?

Ensuring that fraud does not impact the quality of your leads requires a proactive approach that includes lead validation.

Lead validation is a crucial process that verifies the authenticity of leads as actual individuals.

Ensuring the lead is a real person and swiftly identifying any false information can be achieved through native and integrated tools embedded within lead distribution software. It’s important to invest in lead distribution software that includes built-in validation features that utilize third-party tools such as Xverify, Neustar, or eHawk which specialize in lead validation. These solutions help to filter out fraudulent leads.

How can I provide relevant lead information that aligns with my buyer’s needs and maximizes the chance of a successful sale?

A best practice that encourages individuals to provide their information involves limiting forms to 3-5 fields. However, aiming for this range may often result in not capturing all of the pertinent information essential for securing the highest sale price of a lead.

This is where another best practice, lead enrichment, comes into play.

To secure more relevant lead details that align with your buyer’s needs, consider leveraging third-party enrichment tools or a lead enrichment process, such as utilizing a call center. For instance, in the lending sector, potential leads can be prompted to offer their credit ratings, ranging from poor to excellent. Through lead enrichment, the lead seller may opt to conduct credit checks to obtain precise credit score figures, enhancing the overall credibility of the leads and making them more attractive to potential buyers.

For more best practices on validating and enriching leads, check out this video.

After a lead has been sold, how do I track its performance?

You’ve invested time in acquiring leads through efforts such as optimizing traffic sources, landing pages, and form fills. Now it’s time to focus on what happens next. After a lead is sold, dive into how the lead is progressing once it’s in the hands of your buyer.

With lead distribution software, buyers can assign a status to each lead, which is then reflected in the lead status report, offering real-time insights into lead quality. Lead statuses can answer questions such as — Did the lead go dark? Was the consumer not as qualified as the form fill made it seem? Did they end up becoming a customer?

Typical lead statuses may encompass:

Where/who the lead was acquired from
Where/who the lead was sold to
How much it was sold for
If it was later returned for a certain reason
If the lead buyer sent any additional information about the lead post-sale

This information is invaluable for lead sellers and generators to refine and optimize their campaigns. For instance, in the mortgage industry, when a lead, such as a first-time homebuyer, is sold to a mortgage lender, the buyer can provide immediate updates on the status of the loan application.

Armed with this information, you can figure out what’s working and what’s not, and optimize your strategy for increased lead quality and ultimately stronger ROI.

What’s the best way to leverage my buyer’s feedback to boost my lead quality?

Buyer feedback provides direct insights into the effectiveness of your lead from the perspective of those who are actually purchasing them. This can be critical for improving quality.

However, understanding how to leverage this information hinges on the lead distribution technologies used by both you and your buyers. You as the seller need flexible technology with automated capabilities to label and update each lead. With CAKE, for example, there is an Admin API if the network wants to do it or the buyer API if the buyer wants to do it.

On the buyer’s side, their solution should offer lead status capabilities with reporting to inform you of how the leads they’ve purchased are progressing through their sales funnel in real time. Ideally, the buyers should have an API that automatically sends lead status updates, which you can then connect via API to get those updates back into your lead distribution system.

What is a real-world example of how I can apply my buyer’s feedback to generate more high-quality leads?

To take advantage of lead status reporting and get detailed insights into lead quality, you can use CAKE’s Lead Status feature to create custom lead statuses specific to the vertical you are generating leads for.

Here’s a scenario from the mortgage sector of financial services. Let’s say you’ve sold a lead, such as a first-time homebuyer to a mortgage lender. Using CAKE’s Lead Update API, the buyer can provide you with real-time updates on leads, including the status of the loan application and when it’s moving through underwriting.

This data serves as a valuable way of assessing lead quality. Some leads may not meet the qualifications to purchase, depending on the type of loan they sought. Others may progress through the lead funnel more quickly, indicating a higher likelihood of being funded and thus representing more profitable leads. Additionally, you may discover that your high-volume traffic sources aren’t yielding the highest revenue for your lead buyers. Perhaps after further investigation, you find that it’s the niche affiliates and publishers with lower volumes that are proving to be more lucrative.

With first-hand insights directly from buyers, you can make profitable business decisions including, shutting off low-performing traffic sources or conversely incentivizing a high-performing traffic source with an increased payout to encourage more quality leads.

The lead selling process can be challenging. What lessons learned can be shared for when this occurs?

Though you follow best practices for selling leads, it’s common for the quality of leads to fluctuate or unexpected issues to come up. For example, you may encounter buyers acquiring leads that you wish they hadn’t or they experience a temporary dip in lead quality.

The key is to two-fold — remain committed to your buyers while keeping a proactive approach to identifying and preventing low-quality leads.

Working through challenges together, with mutual respect and consideration, is crucial. Successful partnerships thrive when lead buyers and sellers demonstrate commitment and readiness to address challenges that may come your way.

Ready to take your lead selling to the next level? Discover how to sell leads for the highest profit here.

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