This is a concern of the network marketer buying cold market leads for the first time. The simple answer is to buy leads which offer the best cost-to-sponsoring ratio or "bang-for-your-buck". To put it another way, if you were to spend $6 each for 100 leads and 10 joined your business as distributors, the cost-to-sponsoring ratio would be $60 ea. If you were to buy 1000 email leads for $60 and one joined your business, the ratio would be the same.



If you recruit one distributor in one hour of prospecting phone calls, the cost of converting that prospect goes up by the value of your time. If you value your time at $60 per hour, call ten $6 leads per hour, and convert one into a distributor, your cost to acquire that business relationship goes up to $120.

The point I am making is that the cost-per-lead is not the most important factor in what makes a lead a good value. Depending on your level of recruiting skill, purchased leads can be a very costly way to acquire customers. The essential nature of the leads is that they are on guard when you call them, and most will not join you in business because:

a) they don't know you and

b) they aren't really ready to get started in business.

The critical skill is to sort through the leads in as efficient a manner as possible to separate the ?qualified? prospect from the ones who have:

a) no money to start a business

b) are incapable of running a business

c) are not people you would enjoy working with.

This sorting can be done by calling the leads yourself, having the prospects pre-qualified by somebody else, or with automated marketing campaigns to get them to call you when they are ready.

Calling the ?raw? leads yourself is an exercise in developing efficiency. You must quickly determine who is qualified for your business presentation and who is not. Many purchased leads are in a state of financial desperation and are not qualified for a business presentation. I like to plug those people into free training programs and keep them in my marketing system..

By using phone surveyed leads you may be getting a higher quality of prospect. However, many of these leads are led to believe they can make a 6 figure income with a $300 investment, so the number of serious business-minded people is low in my experience. These prospects often have fairly unrealistic expectations of how far their $300 investment will take them in business. I haven't tried a survey lead where the lead has $5000 to invest, but for me that would be a much more attractive lead.

To acquire surveyed leads of a more focused nature you will pay more for them. Leads which are generated through TV commercials can be very responsive and also very costly. While some of these ?impulse? leads may be easy to sign up, the proportion of business builders is unlikely to be high. Company-specific survey leads are among the most promising ones. A person interested in weight loss products is likely to have a strong personal interest in the product itself and may be a superior prospect for this reason.

Undoubtedly the email approach is the most attractive but also difficult to implement effectively. You will have to build or buy a list of opt-in leads, many of whom will not read your emails. However, by using high quality autoresponder copy, attractive offers. and by emailing large numbers of individuals, these leads may be fruitful. The upside is that you won't waste your time calling them. The downside is it generally takes a while to convert these leads into business associates or customers.