Fantastic Leads and Where to Find Them

Jim Schulze [00:00:00]:
80% of consumers make a purchase between touch five and twelve. So if you only call somebody 4 times, you’ve lost 80% of the market. 

Jeffro [00:00:15]:
Leads, leads, and more leads. It seems like everyone online is always talking about leads. Now the reason for that is that leads are the lifeblood of many businesses. For some of you listening, though, the term leads is pretty neutral. It just means a list of prospects. But there are some folks who hear the word leads, and they wanna run the other way. That’s why today, I wanna talk to you about the quality of your leads and how you can make more effective use of whatever leads you have. And to help me do that, I’ve invited Jim Schultz onto the show.

Jeffro [00:00:45]:
Jim is an accomplished COO and CEO Who also leads a private advisory board as a Vistage chairperson. He has an incredible career story which saw him go from captaining ships in the merchant marines To learning how to be a sales rep and ultimately running entire sales teams and then the companies themselves. Today, James is the president and CEO of The Leeds Warehouse, a leading marketing data company based in Orange County, California. Welcome to the show, Jim.

Jim Schulze [00:01:10]:
Yeah. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it, Jeff.

Jeffro [00:01:12]:
Yeah. I’m Excited for this conversation because when you bring up leads, you get a lot of different reactions. People have had different experiences with leads. Some had good leads. Some had bad leads. Some overpaid, and many didn’t know what to do once they got the leads. So let’s start with leads 101. Can you give us some context to the term leads and differentiate between things like targeted and untargeted, cold or warm, and, you know, qualified, unqualified, all of that good stuff.

Jim Schulze [00:01:39]:
Sure, absolutely. So a lead is basically a person that you can call on for a specific product or service, right? So an automobile lead would be a consumer that seemingly has an interest in an automobile. And then therein lies the big problem. What is that interest? How is the lead generated? And is it an actual lead? Or is it just a person that’s a random cold call? Our focus, and and the best quality lead you can have is a lead with high consumer intent. So a high consumer intent lead is somebody who is essentially opted in via a Google ad search, via social media postings, or whatever, it’s a consumer that raises their hand and says, hey, I want a new car. Call me. That is a high quality lead. You can incentivize somebody to create a lead or offer a non incentivized lead.

Jim Schulze [00:02:34]:
A, Yeah. An incentivized lead would be, hey, if you come into my car dealership, you can win a free trip to Jamaica. A non incentivized lead is going to be where you’re really just focusing on the product or service. Right? So you might be saying, hey, come into my car dealership, you’re going to see the greatest cars ever, but there’s no outside incentive. And then of course the opt in process, depending on how a person applies for the lead, Can also vary, affect the quality of the lead, right? So we focus on what we call a long form, form filled leads. So a consumer that has an interest, they do a Google search, they end up on a landing page, and it takes them to a non incentivized form to fill out where it is page by page by page, not auto populated. The consumer has to enter the information. That’s a good quality lead.

Jim Schulze [00:03:24]:
And then the lead can be a real time lead or it can be an aged lead. A real time lead is me calling you up and say, hey, Jeff, I have somebody right now that wants to buy the product your service that you sell, boom, it’s ready to go. Call this person immediately. Or even better, perhaps I create a transfer where I call you up and say, Hey, Jeff, I have Bob on the phone and he wants to buy your product or service. Can you speak to him? And of course you can. And and now you have a warm transfer. An aged lead is any one of those that has not closed and them. That is still a contact that you can call.

Jim Schulze [00:04:02]:
So you can have live transfer leads where you’re literally handing off a consumer. You can have a real time lead where I can say, Hey, Jeff, this person literally just applied, or you can have an aged lead. The age lead being the lead where, hey, Jeff, sometime in the last 30 days, this person did apply, and they are interested, but they’re not, they haven’t been contacted yet. So those are a few different types of leads.

Jeffro [00:04:27]:
Yeah. And that’s really helpful to kinda give that backdrop, but it’s also a lot of information for someone who’s Kinda new to this. So one thing I wanted to highlight is how that range of leads. So understanding the difference between a cold random person versus 1 who’s filled out a form versus 1 you have on the phone right now, those all cost different amounts of money Because it’s really easy to get a cold, you know, list of names. Who cares? That you can scrape that off the Internet. But getting someone on the phone who you know is interested, That takes more time and effort, possibly an ad campaign plus a person ready to take the call who has the script. Like, a lot go more goes into it. And so that’s why The price of these leads can vary across the different types, but also across industries, because some industries, it might be even easier to find those leads than others.

Jeffro [00:05:11]:
So can you do you have any thoughts on that too?

Jim Schulze [00:05:14]:
Yeah. Absolutely. A, a real time lead can be upwards to $150. Me calling you up and saying, hey, Jeff. I have a transfer client ready to go. So in some verticals, that can be a very, very expensive lead, $150. Other verticals, it could would be less money, maybe in the $60 range. And then the age leads that I mentioned, they could be 12 to 24 months old and maybe a nickel.

Jim Schulze [00:05:39]:
So so a huge difference in the lead from a real time lead to an aged lead to a transfer where somebody is actually reaching out and saying, you know, let’s talk right now or an aged lead that’s an older lead.

Jeffro [00:05:53]:
Right. And so it’s important to know if you’re a business owner looking to buy leads, you need to know what you’re getting, what your plan is for them, and make sure the math works out so that if you know, okay, my close rate is only 10%. If I’m talking to a 100 people, I need to close, you know, 10 of them, in order to make x amount of money. Does that cover my lead cost plus give me room to handle the customer and everything else I need. So you gotta run that math ahead of time before you get yourself in trouble.

Jim Schulze [00:06:20]:
Well, that’s a great launching off point to how how you then handle the lead. Regardless of, industry. I always like to use the word, if you go industry agnostic, there’s a few numbers that that any, any listener or viewer can Google search and find. The first one is if you contact somebody over 6 times, there’s the 90% likelihood you’re going to reach them. So 6 times is kind of a magic number. If you take a look at it, and again, this is industry agnostic, so it doesn’t matter if we’re talking solar and we sell solar leads or if the lead for an automobile, 80% of consumers make a purchase between touch 5 and 12. So if you only call somebody 4 times, you’ve lost 80% of the market. Again, you can find these numbers online.

Jim Schulze [00:07:04]:
But if you take a look at statistics on leads, 50% of consumers take over 3 months to make a decision from when they first express interest. So again, if you stop after 2 months, you’re losing 50% of the market. So, understanding these numbers then will help frame how you contact that lead. Obviously, if I call you up, Jeff, I’m like, hey, let’s get you on the phone right now with Susie. She’s is ready to go. You’re on the phone with her. You don’t necessarily have a whole lot of work to do to contact her. But I mentioned 80% of deals close between touch 5 and 12.

Jim Schulze [00:07:39]:
So you still may have follow-up work to do after that conversation. Okay. Susie may have just inquired today and is reaching out and and says, hey. I need to talk to some other providers. This is the 50% over taking over 90 day rule. Right? Now if I give you a list of a 100 people that want your product service. And I’m like, Hey, Jeff, here’s the list. Go ahead and call these people.

Jim Schulze [00:08:00]:
We know they’ve opted in. We know it’s a good quality lead. You have to call these people. If you call them once, there’s a 2 to 3% chance you’re going to reach them. If you go deep into a campaign 6, 7, 8 times, And it’s a quality opt in lead where the consumer raises their hand and says, call me, please. You have a really good chance of reaching that person and actually talking about your product or service.

Jeffro [00:08:24]:
Well, and especially if you’re smart about it. Right? If you’re calling at the same time of day, You you might never reach them because maybe they’re always doing a work thing at that time. So if you try the 1st time, call in the morning, 2nd time, call in the afternoon, 3rd time, call in the evening, Next time, call on a Tuesday or so Wednesday. The more once you get to that 6, 7 calls, like you said, you’re likely to reach them and talk to them. You can’t just call them once and say, hey. These leads were terrible. I I only had a few people pick up.

Jim Schulze [00:08:48]:
I had a client call me up and tell me my leads were terrible. And I said, let’s, let’s talk about what you did. And he said, well, I hired a young lady. And this is a true story. I won’t use the fellow’s name. But very true story, Solar Leads. He’s like, your leads are terrible. They didn’t work.

Jim Schulze [00:09:01]:
I said, well, let’s talk about how he handled them. He said, well, I handled a young lady. Call all the leads for me. I said, tell me more. He said, yeah. She was part time worker. She worked every day from 10 to 2 pm. And, you know, she called him for a couple straight weeks, and we didn’t get anything going.

Jim Schulze [00:09:15]:
And I said, so, you know, when I run through the math, you bought 3,000 leads. You probably didn’t even have a chance to call through all of them once. And you called from 10 am to 2 pm every single day. With all due respect, I’m not saying my leads are perfect, but you might need to put in a different type of effort to make these things back out. So leads work, but you have to understand the type of lead you’re buying. And if you tell me, Hey, Jim, I want to buy some leads, and you’re going to be calling them yourself from your kitchen table, don’t buy like 3,000 leads. You’re not going to be able to get through them in a reasonable amount of time till they have any success. Buy some fresher leads, buy some newer leads, spend some more money on them, and you’ll have some higher connection rate, and you’ll have a better chance of closing deals.

Jeffro [00:10:01]:
Yeah. And that’s a great story because I think that happens a lot, and most people don’t even bother going back to complain. They just move on to somewhere else and spend their money and waste it again somewhere else. So you mentioned knowing your customer too, right, and understanding if you know when they work or how they like to be contacted. Because if you’ve got a list of millennials and you’re trying to get them on the phone, you’re gonna have a much harder time than you are if you do a texting campaign, right, or an Instagram outreach campaign. So there’s different ways of reaching people in different types of lists, and just understanding that, can go a long way too in helping you reach people.

Jim Schulze [00:10:33]:
Call, text, email. You know, it’s, there’s a kind of variety of lists you can get. You can get a list of just phone numbers. You can get a list of just emails. You can get a list of phone numbers and emails, a call, text, email, professional times, professional hours. You know, I always use the don’t be a jerk rule. You know, don’t call somebody at 2 in the morning or whatever. Right? I mean, Don’t don’t be a fool about it.

Jim Schulze [00:10:53]:
The call, text, email, be professionally persistent. And and then when you get them on the phone, be ready to speak. Don’t have marbles in your mouth.

Jeffro [00:11:02]:
Lost Yeah. Practice this. Write out your script if you need to. Here’s another question because now they’re mentioning texting. It’s really important to know if you have a mobile number versus a business number or not. Otherwise, you could be wasting time and effort trying to send texts to landlines. So is that part of a feature when you buy a list that you offer to say, okay, we we know these are mobile numbers, or how does that work?

Jim Schulze [00:11:27]:
Well, Yeah. It’s a great question. You know, it depends on how that list is derived. Ultimately, somebody has to enter the information and The older rule is garbage in, garbage out. Right? So if it’s consumer entered information and I put in there a big red letter cell phone only, there are going to be people that don’t enter their cell phone. So that’s going to happen. So a list is garbage in, garbage out, which is why call, text, email works well, because the texting campaign can be difficult to execute. The, you know, there’s a lot of, without going into the whole legal discourse behind how to contact people.

Jim Schulze [00:12:04]:
There’s a lot of laws out there about how and when and where you can contact people. And you need to understand those laws and and deliverability. You know, if you look at my spam inbox, it’s, you know, an embarrassment. It looks like Times Square in the 19 seventies before it was cleaned up in terms of the types of offers I’m getting. And I would say most people’s probably look names. So it’s one thing to have a really good list. It’s another thing to actually get in touch with somebody. So understanding, the type of, lead you have, call, text, email, and running an email campaign alone doesn’t do any good if you end up in the spam box like the other 300 emails I get today in my the sandbox.

Jeffro [00:12:45]:
Right. And there’s an interesting distinction here too between marketing and sales. People draw the line in different places. Right? So for some people, creating or generating that lead is the job of marketing, and then it gets handed off to sales to call and follow-up. So that’s probably the most traditional way of drawing that line. But now with online campaigns and email campaigns and things, it’s kinda blurred a little bit more because maybe you buy a list, And then now you start an email campaign that still falls under the marketing umbrella before you get them on the phone or something. So can we talk a little bit about lost What to do once you have these leads? We’ve started doing it. You gotta reach out multiple times.

Jeffro [00:13:21]:
But how do you get the most out of these leads and make sure you’re not wasting these opportunities.

Jim Schulze [00:13:28]:
One word, strategic. Right? Be strategic with the leads. So Do you have a call center team? Do you have 6 people? Do you have a dialer? Are you manually dialing them? How are you contacting the leads and and figure out a campaign? There’s all sorts of, dialers out there like Phoneburner, which are real easy dialers to work with from anyone’s computer. You can build a full on DG dialer for a massive call center team. But I always tell everyone, be strategic. So and, and, and understand the market that you’re calling into to set an expectation as to how often you have to contact the people. Okay. So I always tell people there’s happy leads and there’s unhappy leads.

Jim Schulze [00:14:11]:
A happy lead is like a solar lead. Hey, Jeff, let’s get solar. Right? Let’s get solar on the office. You, come home to your wife, Hey, honey, let’s get solar. We can save some money. We can save some polar bears. Everyone wants to get solar. It’s a beautiful thing.

Jim Schulze [00:14:24]:
Right? So the that’s gonna be a higher response rate group. Unfortunately, people have problems. And for example, I have tax resolution leads. And I tell my tax clients, you do realize people would rather get a call from their dentist to schedule a root canal than to talk to you about their tax problems. Okay? So the solar guys, you know, you might be able to contact them 3 or 4 times and, and boom, you’re gonna be good to go. The tax guys, you might have to go 20 deep into a campaign to contact somebody. So understanding what that is, be strategic, get a working list that you can reasonably work through and run it over a 2 week campaign, and then let it die off and go back to the next list, go back and forth, back and forth. And, you know, one thing you mentioned about marketing.

Jim Schulze [00:15:11]:
And I tell people this all the time, marketing is speculative by nature. Okay? So any anything that you do, you can spend money and put a billboard on the side of the road. Speculative. You don’t know if that if it’s going to reach the demographic you want. You mentioned I came from restaurant supplies. We would do a trade show every year in Chicago, the National Restaurant Association show. We would spend $100,000 on this trade show without knowing if a single person was going to walk in to look at a single product that we had. Of course, people were going to, but we spent $100,000 without even thinking about it.

Jim Schulze [00:15:46]:
So, you know, to get a list of $1,000 worth of contacts at a dollar apiece, you know, that’s a pretty cheap investment compared to going to a trade show where you have literally $100,000 expense by the time you pay the lodging, you pay the booth fees, the drayage to get things in out in and out. All the entertainment, everything goes on with the trade show. It’s a big proposition. So, leads can be incredibly effective. And then understanding What is your ability to contact those leads? How fresh should the leads be? How big is your call team? Should you do more of a real time lead? Should you do an age lead. Should you do, you know, we didn’t mention it. You have exclusive leads and you have shared leads. I could say, hey, Jeff, a really great contact for you.

Jim Schulze [00:16:34]:
I did pass the name on to, like, 5 or 6 other people because this client wants to talk to a few different providers, and, you’re one of a few, and I’ll tell you that upfront. Right? Or I could come to you and say, listen, they don’t wanna be bothered by everyone. I know you’re great at what you do. Here’s a lead. Call this person. It’s untouched by me to anyone else. And then that is one final massive distinction to take to make, right? How many people go home and do a Google search and then shut down after 1 URL? They’ll look at a few places. So again, there’s competition in the marketplace.

Jim Schulze [00:17:09]:
If somebody goes to the trade show that I talked about, they’re not just going to walk in and go to my booth of tableware and leave. They’re going to go look at my booth and probably 15 or 20 others and gather a lot of information. They’re gonna do the same thing online. They’re going to do the same thing in any number of means. So you just have to understand what the competitive landscape is.

Jeffro [00:17:28]:
Yeah. And and I love that you highlighted the fact that marketing is speculative because nothing’s guaranteed. But so often, hear from owners who want that guarantee. So there are some things you can guarantee and some things you can’t. So for example, you can say, On my list, I guarantee that this person has filled out a form saying they’re interested. Right? That’s that’s as good as you can get, but you also have to know your audience. Like you mentioned, if they are tax broker lead or text, solution leads, you you probably wanna think about how you’re talking to them. Right? When you finally get the phone picked up, you don’t wanna be like, Hey.

Jeffro [00:17:59]:
Let’s get this taken care of today. We’ve got this package, you know, with the cost like, maybe take it a little easy and be like, hey. I know this has been probably a stressful thing for you, but we’re really experienced in handling this well. You know, we’ll walk you through it every step of the process. Like, connect with them a little bit, so they know that, alright, maybe this This person isn’t just trying to sell me. They’re trying to help me. So, yeah, that’s a big part of it. And yeah.

Jeffro [00:18:22]:
Go ahead.

Jim Schulze [00:18:23]:
But in terms of marketing being speculative, There’s, you know, some tiny little companies out there like Nike or Apple or other massive consumer brands, and they have massive marketing budgets and marketing is speculative, but if it didn’t work, you wouldn’t see the largest companies in America every single day putting money into their website, putting money into SEO, putting money into leads, putting money into marketing. So it’s speculative by nature, but it works. And, again, when you talk about how to approach leads, granted, I provide marketing, so take it with a grain of salt. But the best approach is you’re looking at it over a long period of time. You’re not you’re not gonna put out a website and throw in some money on SEM or put some effort into SEO and say, hey, nobody came to my website yesterday, day 1. Right? And you can’t get a list of leads and call through it and say, Hey, I didn’t close anything on day 1. This is This is a long term campaign. And one thing I’ll say about age leads, they they can work exceptionally well.

Jim Schulze [00:19:27]:
I have a really good friend named Jamie, who is in the solar space. He tells me all the time he closes on leads that are 2 to 3 years old. So they have long legs on them. Right.

Jeffro [00:19:37]:
Because at some point, they expressed interest and they didn’t make a move. So now there was some objection that was not overcome. And if you’re able to reconnect and overcome that objection, then, of course, they’d still be interested.

Jim Schulze [00:19:47]:
Right. Solar is a 30 to $40,000 prospect. My car broke down. Hey. I was gonna do solar. I’m getting a new car this year. Next year,

Jeffro [00:19:55]:
it’s the year

Jim Schulze [00:19:56]:
for solar. Stuff happens.

Jeffro [00:19:57]:
Stuff like that. But, yeah, that’s why consistency is important because you don’t know what’s going on on the other end and just continually making the strategy and working the strategy and not hoping hoping for an overnight, a moonshot to hit. You know, you can’t bank on that. If it happens, great. But, yeah, that that’s not a strategy. So one one other thing I wanna ask you before we kinda wrap up here. You know, obviously, there’s different ways to acquire leads. First1, we’ve been talking about, you know, is buying a list, but You can generate your own leads by posting on social media, doing SEO, or running paid ads.

Jeffro [00:20:31]:
Obviously, those are tactics for another episode, but Where does it make sense to make a leap from doing your own to, you know, buying them from somebody else? Is is there a clear rule on that?

Jim Schulze [00:20:42]:
I don’t know that there’s a clear rule. And my clients ask me, and I will, tell them all the time, I’m kind of an all hands on deck kind of guy. Right? You should absolutely do some of your own native lead gen work. But there are people also that are spurts in creating really good quality leads that can help you put together a reasonable marketing budget. You know, you can talk to your, you know, depending on the size of your company, you can talk to your accounting team, you can look in your industry and see what it would be a typical percent of spend that would be, you know, suitable for your type of industry, come up with a marketing budget. And again, marketing is speculative. I would definitely do some of my own lead generation. I would definitely augment that with some leads that you could purchase somehow.

Jim Schulze [00:21:29]:
Understand is it better to do a fresher lead, an exclusive lead, an aged lead. And be strategic. Have a plan, work the plan. In terms of being strategic, the last thing I’ll say about that is, and I’ve seen this and personally used it to great success, the idea of a marketing calendar. Right? So what are you going to do from a marketing standpoint? How is that reflected? I know you do websites, right? How is it reflected in changing the landing page on your website? Put together a cohesive marketing plan. Think of it as a campaign rather than just a one off deal and make the whole process work together. And your success is going to go up exponentially rather than just, hey, I’m gonna try a list today, and next week, I’m gonna change what my landing page looks like, and then do nothing for a few weeks, and then somebody calls you with some new idea and you, you know, give that a shot. You know, you’re just throwing darts at the wall.

Jim Schulze [00:22:23]:
Come up with a plan b strategic, put a calendar together, and execute.

Jeffro [00:22:26]:
Yeah. I love that. Now, Jim, I really appreciate you spending some time with us today. Leads are the lifeblood of a business, And you’ve given us given us some great tips to help us grow and improve. So, oh, I think there was also a discount code for podcast listeners. Correct? If people wanna by leads from you. How could they do that?

Jim Schulze [00:22:45]:
Jeff Rowe, j e f f r o, 2024. Go ahead and mention that, when you’re placing an order, and we will give you a 15% discount.

Jeffro [00:22:55]:
Awesome. Thank you, Jim. We’ll put that in the episode description as well. Go to the leads warehouse .com and work those lists, guys. Any other closing thoughts before we wrap up, Jim?

Jim Schulze [00:23:05]:
No. I appreciate it. Yeah. We have a great website. We love what we do. We help take small businesses and make them big. So, it’s a really fun job.

Jeffro [00:23:14]:
Awesome. Well, thanks again, Jim, for being on the show, and thanks to all of you for listening. We’ll see you in the next

Jim Schulze [00:23:23]:
episode.