MLM Lead Generation

Archive for the ‘MLM Leads’ Category

With winter fast receding for another year, the approaching summer brings with it the promise of longer evenings, warm sunshine and an opportunity for the kids to escape the confines of the home and emerge to enjoy playing outside during the long summer nights.

However, with the advances in digital entertainment and coupled with the fears faced by parents in letting their children play outside unsupervised, many youngsters will spend the coming evenings in front of the television or video games console rather than running amok outside with their friends. This alarming reluctance to venture outdoors to play tag, hide and seek, cowboys and Indians or the current game of choice is being widely attributed to the rising tide of obesity in our youngsters.

So far this year, the media have highlighted this topic by reporting on health risks involved in being overweight – not just in children, but also in adults. Individuals who are classed as obese have a much higher chance of developing life changing diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and osteoarthritis, to name just a few. Also, from the opposite end of the range, these obesity reports are coupled with the recent ‘size zero’ outcry that has inundated our celebrity-obsessed culture. However, both extremes court numerous health risks and the current buzzword to assess whether you are ‘too skinny’ or ‘too fat’ is BMI – Body Mass Index.

BMI looks at the ratio between your weight and height to assess what your body weight should be. The guide can then be used to establish whether an individual is of ‘normal’ weight or not; but there have been numerous debates as to whether BMI is an accurate assessment of health relating to weight as not everyone can agree on the point when someone becomes ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’. With confusion about what you should eat or how much you should weigh, are we becoming a society obsessed with image or the possibility of a health crisis when our indulgencies finally catch up with us?

For providers of healthcare, these life style trends can cause concern. If the NHS is struggling to cope with the illnesses of an active generation, how will it cope with the consequences of the current sedentary generation? Some private medical insurance providers have jumped on the bandwagon and reward those members who lead a healthy life style or have a ‘normal’ BMI by offering a discount on their premiums. Alternatively, loadings can occur if your life style is not so healthy or your BMI a little higher than necessary.

But if the experts can’t agree on what your BMI should be how can your private medical insurance provider be so certain? Health-on-Line, for example have recognised this confusion and have removed the questions relating to height and weight from their application process. Just tell them your age and what you wish to be covered for and you will receive a competitive quote for the same amount whether you are large or small.

Andrew Regan
http://www.articlesbase.com/health-articles/body-mass-index-a-slogan-for-todays-generation-129196.html

Although annuity lead scams are out there, agents agree that leads are the lifeblood of their business. No matter how good the products or presentation, without a qualified prospect there can be no sale. Annuity agents also agree there is a vast difference between a lead and a qualified prospect. If you are among the majority of agents who depend on lead generating companies to supply both prospects and suspects, you need to know the standards and definitions of a legitimate lead, a qualified prospect, and an outright scam.

Leads fall into two categories, raw and qualified. Raw leads are generated according to demographics. Qualified leads are further refined by the subject’s level of interest in you and your products. All leads should be filtered by specific criteria which often includes age, income, geography and possibly home ownership and marital status. When you pay extra to have your leads qualified, you refine your list of suspects down to prospects.

Annuity lead costs can range from 10¢ to 75¢ for each name on a raw list, up to $10 to $35 each for individuals who have qualified themselves by (a) knowing who you are, (b) knowing what you sell, and (c) agreeing to talk to you further. Internet leads and direct mail/direct response leads are often well qualified and worth the investment. Insist on exclusivity (you are the only agent getting the lead) and freshness (the fresher the better). Anything less can be a waste of time.

Telemarketing is still a viable means of lead generation, but there are two red flags to watch out for. Beware of companies using immature, inexperienced telemarketers who have an hourly quota to fill or who get paid per lead generated. Ask specifically who makes the calls and how they are paid. Another bad omen is the telemarketing company that charges per lead instead of by the hour. In my 30 years in the lead business I have never found a telemarketing company that consistently generates a predetermined number of leads at a fixed cost without compromising the quality. Unfortunately, most annuity agents opt for the false sense of security of knowing how many leads they get for their money instead of how good the leads will be. Quality is always the bottom line.

The gold standard of qualified leads is the preset appointment. This prospect fits the demographic and is further qualified by (a) knowing who you are, (b) knowing what you sell, and (c) agreeing to meet with you at a time and place to hear your presentation. Salespeople of all persuasions yearn for the days when they can leave prospecting behind and just do what they do best: sell and close, sell and close. But this yearning often overpowers better judgment, and many promising careers have been cut short by preset appointment programs that sound great but just don’t deliver.

Ironically, the preset appointment program I hear cursed most often is the one promoted by the highest grossing field marketing organization in the country. Every agent I talk to (that’s 100%) describes them as a complete waste of money. One agent told me he was quoted a fee of $5,614 for 40 appointments, of which only 25 would be replaced in case of a no-show. As expected, their standard operating procedure is to use immature, inexperienced telemarketers who have an hourly quota to fill or who get paid per lead generated. They also charge per appointment instead of by the hour.

In all fairness to legitimate annuity lead producers, however, there are three things an agent must do with every lead or appointment that often get neglected. First, assuming the leads can be emailed or posted to a web calendar as soon as they are generated, the agent must call the prospects and confirm the appointment time, place and date. Do not talk product. Just confirm and show up.

Second, if you purchase direct mail/direct response leads, do not take the lazy approach of calling for an appointment. It is imperative you use the Drop-By System. If you try to skip the work by calling for an appointment, you are just another junk phone caller even though they signed the postage-paid card and mailed it back asking you to call them. Your appointment setting rate will struggle to reach 20%. But if you follow the Drop-By System to the letter, your appointment setting rate will soar to between 60% and 80%.

Third, before you spend any money on annuity leads or preset appointments (or before you use up the free leads your marketing organization gave you as a recruiting bonus), make sure your presentation and close are well rehearsed and brightly polished. I often hear agents say, “Just give me someone to talk to, I can sell anybody.” The next thing I hear from them is, “These leads stink!”

Annuity lead scams are out there. But fortunately, there are enough good companies to keep faith (and production) alive. If you want to report on an exceptionally good, or bad, annuity lead generating company you’ve had experience with, please drop me a line by clicking on one of the links in my bio below.

Gary Le Mon
http://www.articlesbase.com/sales-articles/annuity-lead-scam-watch-69700.html

There are a wide variety of traffic generation methods that you can use for your website today. No one method is right or wrong, but there are certain traffic generation techniques that are preferable depending on the internet flavors of the day. The predominant flavor of the internet these days is -  Social Networking.

The power of recommendation, so trusted in offline marketing is no less powerful online. One amazing phenomenon is the so called “Digg Effect”. The premise is very simple. An article is written for a blog or news service, or maybe it’s an online video that appeals to a variety of tastes. One person will find it through diligence and earn you one page hit. All good so far. Then that one person will bookmark it to share his new find with the world. The article/blog submission will then be picked up by another Digg user, then another, then another and pretty soon an estimated 2.7 million people have been exposed to your website. This then allows for a massive influx of readers that you would otherwise be hard pressed to find. Word of mouth marketing with a viral twist – two powerful components fused into one that will help with your success.

The Digg Effect, though, is a fickle mistress. It can often lead to nothing if the article is not written properly, or if the blog submission is not tailored to a wide variety of tastes. However there is another, darker problem that exists with the Digg Effect. If you skimped on choosing your host then you could be in for real trouble with any traffic generation techniques that you use but most particularly with the Digg Effect. The simple fact of the matter is that some people fear the Digg Effect. They fear it because their host is not equal to the copious amount of traffic that such an effect can generate.

This brings me to a lesser touted fact of traffic generation. The thing no one bothers telling you about. Aways be careful when choosing your host! While many people might tell you to consider price and features – this can be slightly misleading. If you are in the game to win – in other word to create a website that pulls in a large number of pageviews – then you have to make sure that the alloted traffic is more than enough to cater for your ambitions. It is also imperative to check what hardware your website will be running on. There is no use in having all the features of the world enabled when the server that is running your website will crash if there are more than 100 people online at the same time.

Remembering that word of mouth is paramount and to have a good hosting solution so that you can deal with the visitor numbers that you are obviously aiming for. If you do not choose correctly, any work that you have done could have been in vain.

Donna Walsh
http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/traffic-generation-for-your-website-1275493.html

Growing a business has its obvious challenges. The owner(s), usually with a limited allotment of initial resources, must battle the clock in creating a meaningful strategy to steal market share from larger competitors. A few pivotal client relationships can make or break the entire business. In many ways, these challenges have not changed over time–but in 2008, there are also new ways to compete.

Clicksharp Marketing has participated in a research effort involving Zoomerang and other Web 2.0 companies, surveying close to 500 businesses nationwide from a wide variety of industries. The objective was to understand the following about owners of small businesses: (1)

* How they value new client relationships

* How they approach lead generation

* How comfortable they are with social networking on the Internet

New client relationships – the lifeblood of small business.

Imagine that two CEOs meet at a conference in New York. Sarah, the owner and president of up-and-comer Startup LLC, approaches Bob, the CEO of the multinational Megacorp Inc., asking for advice on how to grow her business. Bob finds that her concerns as a small business owner are far different from his:

* Sarah places far more emphasis on new client relationships, knowing that her business will flounder if she does not continually generate new sources of revenue. (2)

* Despite the obvious risks involved in depending too much on a small handful of clients, Sarah still finds it difficult to diversify her client roster by adding new ones. (3)

* Whereas Bob employs a massive sales organization led by many capable managers, Sarah is reluctant to hire additional sales personnel to grow her business. (4)

In short, Sarah knows that her company is finished if she cannot find new sources of revenue. But with all the usual small business hurdles in front of her, where can she turn?

Social networking – a turnkey solution for business development?

A social network, according to PC Magazine, is “a virtual community for people interested in a particular subject.” (5) Popular examples today are Facebook, Myspace, and LinkedIn.

Sarah knows all about social media. When Bob told her how important word-of-mouth marketing has been for his business, she gave some thought to how social media can accomplish the same thing: (6)

* Adding one contact gives her access to all their connections; with a little time, growing the company’s network exponentially would be easy.

* With a keyword-driven interface, qualified individuals would have little trouble finding her company’s profile and engaging in meaningful discourse.

* Information on products and capabilities, along with all positive feedback from clients, is easily picked up by search engines, making them a useful branding tool.

And she could accomplish all this without hiring more salespeople. Moreover, this marketing strategy would circumvent other major obstacles typical of new marketing campaigns: (7)

* Upfront costs. Social networks thrive on user-generated content, a comparatively small investment of time and perhaps a nominal membership fee.

* Lead time to implementation. Social networkers are “always on,” 24 hours a day. The more information goes out, the more feedback eventually comes back in. And unlike at Megacorp, seniority means little.

* Return on investment (ROI). Whether or not Sarah records information on client development, social networks always leave a paper trail (or the electronic equivalent). This makes it easy to weigh acquisition costs against the revenues generated.

Which social media will generate the most leads for small businesses?

This will usually depend on the products and markets at hand, and can be better understood with the help of a marketing firm specialized in social media.

News Corporation bought Myspace after the site enjoyed tremendous growth at the hands of performing artists and urban socialites. Match.com and other dating sites thrive by delivering a measurable, lucrative advertising target. Emerging sites like Salesconx allow sales professionals to trade introductions to key decision makers.

For a small business competing in virtually any industry, chances are there is already a social network in place, bringing buyers and sellers together. According to eMarketer, the number of U.S. adults participating in social networks will grow to 69 million people in 2008 (a 21% increase over 2007). (8) Over time, one or two of those garage bands on Myspace might pan out, but the businesses which invest in this innovative form of interactive marketing have a much better chance at success.

References

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1 – 82% of participating companies reported less than $500,000 in annual sales.

2 – 39% of our respondents count on new business for at least half of their annual revenues.

3 – More than one-third (34%) of businesses surveyed are adding no more than three new client per year.

4 – More than half of respondents (56%) believe that growing their company’s sales force would have AT BEST a neutral effect on new business generation.

5 – PC Magazine: Definition of social networking site.

6 – 61% of respondents answered that client referrals and other forms of word-of-mouth marketing account for at least 50% of new business.

7 – Percent of respondents who were at least “somewhat concerned” about major launch criteria: Upfront costs – 62%; Lead time – 56%; ROI – 67%.

8 – Social Network Marketing: Ad Spending and Usage,” eMarketer (2007).

Paul Burani
http://www.articlesbase.com/social-marketing-articles/social-networking-a-new-generation-of-business-development-297352.html