Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Sorry for the down time!

A week and no blog update - I apologize but it's been absolutely nuts. Most of my time is now spent on the association with about 6 new members per day on average.

Marketing and leads are obviously everyone's biggest issue and members are looking to me for legitimate sources. As everyone knows, I'm not an internet lead guy - been off them for 2 years.

So let's cover this first:

I feel the best way to build your business is local marketing; telemarketing, BtoB, flyers, chamber of commerce, etc...I'm still a fan of Marketing Campaign Solution's auto-dialer CRM. I think new agents need to learn to get comfortable on phone and spend as little money possible on leads while generating a lot of leads.

Telemarketing accomplishes that - $300 a month for the dialer (for members) and you should be spending at least 10 hours a week on it - 15 for newbies. That's the lowest cost-per-lead you'll find in the biz....and obviously the leads are exclusive.

That being said, it's not a perfect world and many agents simply do not want to telemarket. Fine - not an issue. They're looking to buy leads so I've been busy testing out lead sources. I'm not going to recommend lead sources that I can't close. Not to blow my own horn - but if I can't close 'em I doubt a new agent would be able to.

So I'm running the alossociation and dealing with shared leads....doing decent with the BETTER sources. And there are indeed good and crappy sources - the difference is immediate and apparent. Hardly anyone answers the phone on the crappy sources:

  • Too many agents calling
  • Lead generated by affiliate spam or incentive ads
  • Leads target the broke: "guaranteed issue for $29.95 a month!"
Decent lead sources don't use affiliates - don't spam, don't use banner or incentive ads, aren't sold and re-sold 20 times and people actually answer.

I also just started using LeadPod a few days ago - they call my leads for me and transfer the prospects to be so I don't have to plug away on the phone all day. So far so good but too soon to post actual results.

But yes, there are indeed still some fantastic shared lead source out there.

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