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Generating Leads For Complex Sales

I’ve been designing a lot of lead generation offers for various types of businesses lately. Designing a lead gen offer isn’t as easy as it sounds. A lot of the time it’s the OFFER part which get’s complicated. I do a lot of lead generation for complex sales. By complex sales I mean expensive items like cars, homes, medical procedures etc.. Sales that don’t take place over the internet with a credit card or with an instant decision. The problem that comes with creating an offer is HOW are we going to convert a potential prospect into a lead?

Let’s take for example an expensive motorcycle. Let’s name this motorcycle the “Hustler 1.” The Hustler 1 costs $22,432. Its an awesome bike. It’s not unique though, all of the motorsports shops sell the Hustler 1 for just about the same price. If there is a price difference your talking about $100 difference, nothing major. So how do we generate a lead on an expensive ass item with no real unique properties. Not only is the bike not unique, neither are the businesses selling them. They all have the same value propositions.

The reality here is that you have 2 major strategies to sell this sucker:

1) The Straight Up Info Sell: You design a landing page that has all of the information about the bike including the price and really anything that the prospect would want to know about buying it. You include a contact form and phone number and hope the price is competitive enough to generate a lead.  If you actually DO have a killer price compared to the competition, this tends to do well.

2) Withhold Information Sell: You design a landing page that withholds information that the potential buyer really wants to know. For instance a statement like “Ride the Hustler 1 For As Low As $149/month.” Although the bike is still $22,432 maybe a prospect will look at the $149/month and say, “Hey I can afford that, whats the details about this deal?” – Once they are thinking about affordable payments they aren’t worrying as much about the actual price.  Then maybe they fill out the form or make a phone call inquiring about this deal.

Both ways are perfectly legitimate ways of generating a lead or making a complex sale. They are just totally different strategies.

Here’s where the conflict of interest comes in:

  • You as the lead seller or internet marketer usually want to get paid for your services (a lead) – The more leads you generate the more monies you make.
  • The seller of the item wants to sell their items – The more items they sell the more they can spend on coke & prostitutes.
  • You have a vested interest in seeing the seller succeed because the more items they sell the more leads they buy (sometimes, not always).
  • The seller of the items has no vested interest in seeing you succeed because quite frankly they don’t really care about you.

So which style of landing page is better?

With the direct “Straight Up Info Sell” often times you WILL sell product.  Since the page is kind of a salesman in itself, it relies very little on the business selling the products to “make the sale.”  A lot of the time once someone turns into a lead off of this style of landing page, the sale is already made because the person has all of the information (or most of it) to make a decision.  This is good for the business, not so good for you as the lead generator.  The reason it’s not as good for you is that there are a lot less leads generated but the quality tends to be a lot higher.  Less tire kickers, more buyers.

With the “Withhold Information Sell” you can generate a lot more leads.  You’ve peaked people’s interest and now they become a lead. to get more information  Personally if it were my product being sold, i’d probably want a landing page that was more this style.  Although the quality of the leads will be a little lower at least you get the OPPORTUNITY to work these leads into a sale instead of never making any contact at all.  The unfortunate thing is most businesses (especially on a local level) have a hard time selling.

As the lead seller you can make money either way.  You can charge less per lead for a higher quantity of leads or more per lead for a lower quantity of leads.

I hope this opened some peoples eyes about how to generate leads for a complex sale.  Any questions?

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Published inAffiliate MarketingLocal Online Advertising

12 Comments

  1. Matt Matt

    I’ve been doing b2b leads for some years now & understand what you mean with the complex sales. It’s rare when these companies close leads with the same tenacity as their b2c counterparts… scary rare.

    Unfortunately the blame usually comes back on the lead seller – even if one sits down with them periodically and goes through the leads by hand “what happened w/ this guy – his work email is from a fortune 100 company? How about this woman from a govt agency giving specific model #s and wanting to set up a webinar? Oh, you called them a week after the form submit & they didn’t return the call?” Then the client gets evasive and cancels in a couple months.

    My recommendation to those considering this field is to do a serious gut-check. If you are the type of person who has little patience for bureaucracy or get frustrated asking yourself questions like “I know they closed an $80,000 deal last month, so why are griping about the $5k they paid me for the leads and viewing me like an unnecessary cost?” then you likely will not like working these types of deals.

    I’d wager many if not most affiliates fall in this camp. There are a few like you hustler who have good patience & little ego to get in the way (we met at a ASW a couple years back) who can hang in there. Maybe guys with a background in the military or government could make it work as well, because they’re used to the fact systems sometimes override reason. I’ve made it in the land of complex sales lead gen for 5 years, but only because my partner is good at reeling me back in when I’m ready to walk. That and keeping some b2c affiliate projects to keep me fresh.

    okay, maybe a little disgruntled & I need a walk on the beach, cookie and a nap. 🙂 Just saying to some of those affiliates out there, watch out. Just like those following shoemoney into the local leads game a couple years back, every market has substantial challenges – just make sure it’s a fit for your personality so the challenges seem like a game instead of a grind.

  2. Scheme Scheme

    Awesome post Ad-Hustla, I never comment blogs but I enjoy you on wicked fire and have some input actually.

    I am handing a business that spends $30k a month of Adwords but targets 100,000 keywords (yeah they told me that) and looking to general more leads and frankly there marketing department has no idea wtf to do.

    My questions is in your opinion what is the best amount to charge per lead. Guys got a fat wallet and by all means can afford my services, just having a hard time coming up with what to charge him 😛

    -Scheme

  3. Getting their mouths watering on the landing page is the way to go in my mind.

    All starts with great copy. Use great imagery and the reader is already thinking about how they will use your product.

  4. J.P. J.P.

    Great post.

    Its always the same: If you want a job well done, you must do it yourself, or ad list your organisation.

    But has some logic, you know?
    Ask yourself, how many business owners have you met that really undestand and play by the Numbers?

    In the local business field there are not that many, that´s why Jay Abrahams, Clayton, etc. Could make a living out of teaching them.

  5. Interesting perspective. It’s a balancing act giving just enough info to hook someone into wanting to learn more.

  6. Jon Jon

    The option to withhold info seems like its very popular and I would suggest it would be successful.

  7. tom tom

    Good post. When the switching costs are low, maximize revenue.

  8. As you and I both know this is really a tough thing to pull off. The great side is that when you find the secret sauce the rewards beat the crap out of any offer where you only get a small percentage.

    It was Shoe who first pointed this out to me years ago. I bet over time we will see more and more and more of the affiliates who can think finding their way over to this model.

  9. Sebastian Sebastian

    Hey, i do this for car dealers.

    I always go the straight up route.
    Including price and all the information.

    But i get enough leads by offering a cool hook. Its a cool discount + something free they get + some more shit and i limit this to X number. U can call it fake scracity, they dont really care and it works.

    I have more deteails if u want to know more, becuase i give a NAME to that “packadge” of good benefits they get, and i think thats whats making them feel important (specially becuase of the NAME i put to that).

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