Every business needs leads to prospective sales and the better the lead, the better the prospect of making a sale. Telemarketing used to provide leads for sales professionals within a restricted area, but telemarketing calls went south with the mandatory compliance of the national do not call registry. The industry moved to electronic communications, but the war on spam has dampened the job of prospecting for new leads.

Companies have had to be innovative in the way in which they harvest leads and many software programs have been developed to capture email addresses and ISP addresses of visitors, hoping to send them information about the site they recently visited. However, with multilevel marketing having the leads needed to not only sell the product but also to recruit them into the network requires more than buying a list of harvested email address, that quite likely are not going to be interested in the offering.

Everyone likes the word free, and often uses it to attract attention. While many will be reluctant to turn over the name and address to a qualified offering, most think nothing of doing so for a chance of getting something at no cost. Mention the word free and watch how fast their information is entered on the form. Whether offering a free trip or a free bottle of soda, the idea is to generate interest.

Man y companies use the free drawings to generate leads for network marketing prospects, but the quality of the leads is questionable. Just because the person signed up for a raffle does not mean they want to hear about a business proposition. Some have made the registration process more detailed, gleaning additional information about the person's interests as well as other personal information to help narrow down the list of potential prospects.

Survey companies are basically tricking individuals into signing up for many things online, from free magazine issues to credit cards to privacy protection software, promising a large reward just for filling out the information. The reality is that after about 30 minutes of endless offers being rejected most simply give up and never complete the survey. However, the information is already in and that company has email addresses and a partial list of the their interests to sell to others.

Leads are often sold to several different companies, sometimes as many as 30 or 40 different companies, through various lead generation techniques, but qualified leads to bring people to a marketing network are much harder to attain. Targeting emails to those not interested in MLM programs is the best way to alienate some potential customers while hoping they join the network.

Getting the individual to become a customer of a quality product they can use over and over again is the best way to introduce them to the multilevel marketing network or have the existing customers make referrals to the network to generate more quality leads of prospects for the marketing plan. Word of mouth is the best way to make sales of products, and even better when selling the idea of marketing a network.