How And Where To Buy Sales Leads Online For Your Business

A consistent flow of new leads entering your sales funnel is vital for your company’s success. It’s the only way to keep your sales team busy and continue growing your business.

But unfortunately…

Lead generation has become a major challenge for many companies in this day and age. The process has only gotten harder for sales reps to find targeted prospects with verified contact information that are also interested in making a purchase.

But what can you do to generate leads if you already have a lot of duties on your plate?

Buying lead lists can be an effective solution to solving your customer acquisition problems. Yet, it has always been a high-risk/high-reward strategy that can easily get you in trouble if you’re not so careful.

And that’s why we created this article for you…

This guide will teach you how to buy quality leads that can really help you generate new business quickly. You’ll learn everything you need to know about finding targeted prospects for your company and verifying lead quality before you buy a list.

Let’s get down to business…

What Are Sales Leads and Why Are They Important for Businesses?

A lead is any target prospect that has shown interest in your products or services — which you can convert into a customer. It can also be any potential client that is yet to interact with your business but matches your ideal customer profile.

Leads are a vital part of your sales strategy because converting them into clients means more profits for your business. Targeted leads are already interested in your company, which makes them easy to interact with and convert.

Also:

Every new prospect you generate has the potential to become a loyal client to your brand and use your services for a long period of time.

How Do You Find the Best Leads to Buy for Your Business?

Whether you’re generating new leads yourself or buying them from a reliable partner, it’s important to pay attention to lead quality. Your sales performance will vary widely depending on how targeted your prospects are and whether they’re ready to buy from you.

So in this part, you’ll learn how to evaluate lead quality before buying:

1. Research Your Target Market

You can’t target what you don’t understand… So before you even start thinking about getting leads from a lead buying website, you first have to identify who you’re trying to reach. 

Lead selling platforms have large databases, sometimes with millions of contacts, that you can buy and use in your sales outreach. However, your chances of converting any prospects are pretty low if you reach out to untargeted leads that don’t care about what you’re offering.

Creating an ideal customer profile (ICP) is the first step in this process. So you must sit down with your marketing and sales team to try and understand what your average buyers look like. 

You have to focus on the following characteristics: 

• Demographics
• Company size / industry / location
• Needs and challenges
• Interests and business objectives
• Budget / Annual Revenue
• Decision-making ability

When you have an ICP at hand, you’ll be able to keep your objectives clear and know exactly what you need in the lead list you’re purchasing. You can easily specify the list of criteria you want and guarantee that you’re getting the most relevant leads for your business.

2. Make a List Of Potential Lead Buying Platforms

There are dozens of online lead selling platforms that you can use to purchase a lead list for your company. But having a multiplicity of options doesn’t necessarily make it any easier for you to choose the best lead provider to buy from.

To help you overcome analysis paralysis, we’ll provide you with a few simple tips to find your ideal lead platform quickly.

First things first:

You want to make sure that you’re buying from a trustworthy lead provider that has a good reputation in the industry. Their website and branding, for example, can tell you a lot about any lead generation service.

Also:

You can take a quick look at the testimonials and case studies featured on the website. Lead generation partners showcasing a lot of positive social proof from past clients will always be a good option.

Most importantly:

Feedback on social media or third-party platforms such as Quora and Reddit is your best bet. Users leaving comments on these sites usually have nothing to gain than provide the community with honest feedback. So be sure to look up any lead buying service you like before you buy from them.

3. Use Free Trials From Lead Generation Platforms

Let’s suppose that you’ve shortlisted your lead generation websites to a few final ones to choose from. Are you going to pay for them all and then compare your results?

Of course not…

What you’ll do instead is start a free trial on all of them and assess the quality of the leads you get. Most B2B lead buying platforms will offer you a list of prospects for free so you can try their service before you make a purchase.

Now:

The best way to go about this is to launch separate campaigns for each lead list you download. The more free leads you can get, the more accurate your results will be at the end. So it’s preferable if you can get around a hundred industry-relevant leads in your free trial.

You can make presumptions about these prospects based on how they’ve interacted with your sales reps. Be sure to check industry benchmarks for sales outreach so that you have a reliable reference point when comparing sales performance.

How To Check Lead Quality Before Making a Purchase

Building your own lead list is a much better option for lead generation — especially if you have enough time and resources. Because it allows you to verify the quality of your prospects and add more contacts to your list as you go.

Lead quality is a critical factor when choosing a lead generation platform to buy from. You need to know that the prospects you’re getting can easily be reached out to, interacted with, and converted into clients.

What makes a high-quality lead is the following:

• Valid contact details (full name, email address, phone number, company website, etc)
• Perfect match to your ideal customer profile, especially when it comes to needs and interests 
• Decision-making power and openness to interacting with your sales reps

Here are three questions to ask yourself to know that you’re getting the right prospects:

How Much Does The Lead List Cost?

Price tells a story whenever you’re about to purchase any product or service — and lead lists are no different.

A price tag that’s too low often reflects low quality, which means that you’ll only be wasting your sales rep’s time on prospects that are never going to convert. On the flip side, a higher cost doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll be getting good leads either.

What you really want is to pay a reasonable fee for a prospects list that helps you get new clients. Even if such a list is expensive, you’ll still keep a positive ROI and be profitable in the end.

How much should a lead list cost your business?

To be honest:

It’s hard to tell how much you should pay to buy leads online. The cost for these lists varies depending on the platform you’re using, how many leads you’re getting, the quality of those leads, the contact details you want to get, as well as the industry you’re targeting.

You need to make sure that you’re not spending more than you’d have to pay to hire a lead generation team. Purchasing online leads is meant to save you time, but that doesn’t mean you should exhaust all your budget on this.

Is This an Exclusive Lead List?

One of the biggest drawbacks of purchasing leads lists is non-exclusivity.

Many lead buying services offer shared lists for sale on their platforms that anyone to buy. While these shared lead lists might cost you less, they’re a huge waste of time and money.

Chances are, another competitor has already gotten there and used the list before you even think of purchasing it. So when you start your outreach a few weeks or months later, most of those leads will have already converted or decided not to buy.

Let’s face it…

Buying lead lists already puts your brand’s reputation in danger and may get you reported for spam. So you shouldn’t deliberately take more risks and purchase low-quality shared lists.

Instead:

You must go with reputable B2B lead generation platforms that offer exclusive lists specifically for your company. These are usually businesses that have large databases with millions of verified contacts to choose from.

Am I Getting High-Quality Leads?

Aside from cost and exclusivity, you should also verify the quality of the leads you’re buying before, during, and after the purchase. You have to guarantee that every prospect from the list fits your ICP and that their contact information is correct and up-to-date. You can use bulk email verifier tools to clean your email list and phone validators to check and verify the contact number’s authenticity.

If you’re going with a popular lead provider, you’ve already covered the “before” part so you shouldn’t worry too much about it.

Now let’s be real:

You can hire a virtual assistant online for a low cost to help you build a lead list with only contact details. So this should be far from what you’re expecting when buying B2B leads online.

During the purchase, you have to be specific about what you want while also detailing what a bad lead might look like. This is how you can get a list of targeted prospects in your industry with the highest buyer intent.

Once you get your B2B lead list, you must confirm the contact details and clean up the wrong data from the start. You should also look into some of the prospects to learn more about them and ensure that you got the highest possible quality.

What Are Some of the Most Reputable Lead Generation Providers Online

Lead generation platforms come in different shapes and forms.

Some sell you fixed-fee packages based on size and quality, while others may offer monthly subscriptions. Some might provide you with exclusive leads, while others can waste your time with unverified prospects that will sabotage your business growth.

The point is:

It’s hard to pick a trustworthy lead generation platform to purchase leads from and transform your business results. Thankfully, you’ve already learned how to evaluate B2B lead generation providers and check the lead quality before buying.

Now…

To help you narrow down your focus, we made a short list of four prospect buying platforms that you can start with. These come in no particular order so you can start a free trial on any of them and pick the one you like best.

1. Uplead

Uplead is not only one of the most popular lead generation platforms online but also one of the best sites to buy B2B leads. The company claims to have over 85 million contacts and 14 million businesses with a data accuracy of 95%.

Uplead gives you the option to verify email addresses when building your list. This allows you to maximize your outreach results and avoid wasting time on outdated leads or incorrect data.

You’ll also be able to enrich your list with multiple data points depending on your target audience criteria. For example, you can get the job title, phone number, location, and many other company details for each prospect on your list.

You can start a free trial on Uplead and get 5 credit points to test the service. From there, there are monthly and yearly plans with different features to satisfy your needs and the possibility to purchase more credits if you run out of points.

2. Salesfully

Salesfully is another lead generation website that can be a great lead source for your business. However, this platform is more focused on US-based consumers and companies. It has a database of 140 million individuals and over 14 million company profiles.

As one of the top leaders in the lead generation space, Salesfully segments its lead lists into highly-specific databases for different industries. For example, you can purchase a list of B2B leads targeting doctors, accountants, nurses, new businesses, and more.

What makes Salesfully special is that it offers you an unlimited number of lead searches for a fixed monthly rate of 29$. You can export your data into a CSV file and integrate it with any CRM for no additional cost.

The free trial on Salesfully lasts 5 days and also has a 30-day moneyback guarantee once you decide to purchase from them.

3. Lusha

Looking to build a laser-focused list of prospects for your next sales campaign?

Lusha might be your best option.

Lusha is a lead prospecting website that offers exclusive B2B sales leads. This platform has a database of over 50 million decision makers and 15 million complete company profiles.

But here’s the interesting part…

Lusha also has a browser extension that you can use with Chrome, Firefox, or Edge to gain access to key contact details. This prospecting tool can be a great addition to your arsenal as it helps you learn more about the leads you find on LinkedIn, Gmail, or other online websites.

The free plan gives you 5 credits a month that you can use to find new prospects or verify existing contact information. You can, however, upgrade your plan to Pro, Premium, or Enterprise and start building lead lists to fuel your next campaign.

4. Cognism

Cognism is an excellent lead-buying site offering a high degree of information accuracy. It’s a beginner-friendly platform that helps you start conversations with your ideal prospects using a large database of verified phone numbers and email addresses.

What makes Congism stand out is how it takes data compliance seriously. So if you’re aiming to target global markets in Canada, the UK, and most European countries — this might be the best choice for you to accelerate sales while staying in accordance with the law.

Unfortunately…

Cognism has no free plan and does not offer a free trial. So what you can do instead is book a demo with their team or request a quote depending on the features you need.

Consider Building Your Own List With LinkedIn

Did you know that 64% of Forbes fastest growing companies use LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

LinkedIn is the world’s leading online network for business professionals who wish to enhance their careers or grow their companies, and LinkedIn Sales Navigator is part of that platform.

Sales Navigator is a premium sales tool with a database of 800 million contacts and 57 million companies. It’s the ultimate lead generation solution and the largest lead source out there for businesses of all sizes in all industries. 

One of the biggest advantages you’ll get with Sales Navigator is the advanced search function to help you match your ICP. Within a few minutes, you can enter a long list of search parameters and find thousands of companies or individuals matching your search criteria.

The best part?

All this data is verified and confirmed because it comes directly from LinkedIn’s database. The prospects you’ll generate are verified accounts who are active on the platform using their real contact details. 

So not only will you be able to reach out to these leads via phone or email, but you can also connect with them on LinkedIn and make a first impression. 

Conclusion: Should You Buy Sales Leads Online?

Spending money on untargeted leads and then wasting your time trying to convert them is a sure way to slow down your progress. You’ll only put your brand at risk by reaching out to uninterested prospects while ignoring spam regulations.

However:

When done correctly, buying B2B sales leads can become a time-efficient, cost-effective approach to growing your business.

Before you think about buying a lead list, you first need to identify who you’re trying to target in future campaigns. Only then will you be able to look for reputable lead selling platforms that offer reasonable pricing.

You need to request a list of highly-targeted prospects that are also exclusive to guarantee that you’re not competing for their attention. If you’re not sure about the lead quality, you can always split test lead lists from different sources and compare your results for each campaign.

Of course…

There’s always the option of building a list of prospects of your own using an internal team or outsourcing the work to a lead generation agency. This is the best way to ensure that you’re getting genuine prospects that are well-qualified to make a purchase and be your clients.