While it may sound like a no-brainer as far as marketing efforts go, buying leads may not always be the smart thing to do. There are lead companies out there who are on the up and up and may be worth your time, others are in this business who have no compunctions about selling you leads which happen to be deceased or made up out of whole cloth.

By and large, the names which lead companies are offering to sell you are gathered through gimmicks like giveaways. To enter for a chance to win, people must provide their contact information which then ends up on a mailing list. There will generally be some fine print somewhere informing those who sign up that they are opting in to a mailing list by doing so; however, how many of these people do you suppose read the fine print?

Now, this contact information is then sold to the clients of the lead company who begin calling them. Nine out of ten times, the lead has no clue that they have agreed to have people contact them. These leads will also often be sold to many different clients and thus will have many lead purchasers such as yourself calling them.

The lead who provided his or her contact information in the first place is being swamped with calls, emails and direct mail advertisements; how likely is it that you will get a sale out of leads who are constantly being solicited in this way? Not very. So the leads get constant sales calls, you dont make a sale and have spent your money on these mailing lists and neither you or the leads have any recourse all covered in the fine print (a good reason to start reading the fine print on everything.).

Of course not all lead companies operate in this manner. Completely legitimate lead companies do exist and they can provide you with some genuinely useful leads but it may take some time to find one that you can trust. Its not a bad idea to ask friends and colleagues to refer lead companies they have done well with.

Do a little research on a lead company before making a purchase from them. Find out how long they have been in business and what sort of reputation they have. An unethical company will not tend to stay in business for long, understandably enough.

If you want to try out a new lead company, start with a small list and see what your results are before going on to commit a large amount of money to their product. Youll be able to tell by results if this company is one with which you can do business.