As many of you already know, the key to a successful home based business, especially one that involves direct sales, is leads. You need to have a highly targeted list of contacts that you can use to sell your product or services to. While this is a well-known fact among many marketers out there, both online and offline, the methodology of acquiring these leads has been quite questionable. Many network marketers and at-home telemarketers have decided to base their marketing campaign on free leads that are widely available online. There are many of these sorts of leads that you can retrieve from the internet and they come in all variety of packages. But can you trust these free leads for home based business?

From a simple list of hundreds to excel spreadsheets that contain thousands or tens of thousands, these freebies often come as part of an opt-in campaign or part of a service that you either have to buy into or sign up for. While the price is fairly affordable (sometimes not at all), the success rates of the people who are using these lists are fairly low. In fact, they are less than 5% successful in building up effective sales leads and even less in making actual sales. You cannot base your marketing campaign on volume, as you cannot emulate the penetration of above and below the line marketing, which can reach up to more than a few million people and work on percentages that fall even below 1%. You need quality over quantity and to do so, you need to get quality leads from trusted sources.

You can forget about doing these lists on your own because the process itself will take about a few months of your time to get a number that can sustain your campaign for a long time to come. Furthermore, there are so many levels of filtration that you need to think about. Buying patterns, individual psychology, movements in the market - aspects that you need to think about when compiling the list. So, the best advice out there is to leave it to the professionals, who have dedicated compilation systems, filtration programs and identification processes that will ensure that the list you receive at the end of the day is almost tailor made to your product. Many marketing companies that understand the details of markets and direct selling offer this service at a comparatively low cost compared to the possible benefits that you can receive.

The benefits are great and the effectiveness has been well proven, with more than a 40% change of sales and almost 10% more in creating sales leads. These are the kind of figures that you need to have firmly in the back of your head when you are thinking about getting leads to chase down. Never trust free leads for your home based business, as there is no thought and quality of process being put into them at all. Once you have a targeted, focused list in your hands, you will see the difference right away.