When Dealer Principals first dip their feet into the world of online lead generation, they all tend to emerge with the same question: how can I bypass these third party lead providers and get an exclusive lead?
While it’s naive thinking, it’s naive for the right reasons. What kind of advantage could you possibly gain from buying a third party lead that gets simultaneously delivered to your competitors? And furthermore, if such a large portion of these leads are created via the third party’s search engine marketing, why pay a middleman for something you can do yourself?
The reason dealers don’t know the answer to these questions has to do with their lack of experience as an Internet consumer. They don’t understand that Internet buyers seek multiple levels of research, and use the anonymity and speed of the Internet to comparison shop. Those two elements - tiered research and comparison shopping - make “exclusive” Internet leads virtually non-existent.
You can buy leads from a provider who only sells a lead once over. You can take it upon yourself to run PPC campaigns to snatch up leads before they hit a third party site. But you’ll never stop a consumer from submitting one lead and moving on to their next bit of research, wherever that may be. In fact, this is often why exclusive leads from smaller vendors are worse than those coming from the big third parties… you may be the only one getting the lead from that website, but that could be hours or days or weeks after the consumer submitted their information to a top-tier site like Edmunds, which is what the big third parties are selling to you.
Point is, the nature of the Internet consumer makes lead exclusivity nearly impossible. They don’t want to be stuck talking to just one dealer, and they don’t want to limit their research to what a dealer’s web site can provide. You’d have an easier time generating exclusive Internet leads by trying to direct non-Internet shoppers to your corner of the web. Take your radio, print and other advertising mediums and use them as a means to promote your website. Of course, there’s nothing to say you won’t be shooting yourself in the foot by pointing inexperienced shoppers to the mecca of consumer buying power, but hey, if you’ve got a thing for exclusive leads, that’s your best bet.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Great post Mitch. Thanks for sharing your perspective. I’m a product manager for a leads product over at DealerTrack and we’ve been exploring an exclusive vs. shared leads model for a while now via our Leads Network product. Question for you though. Assuming that exclusive leads are a myth, it follows that duplicate leads (receiving the same lead from multiple providers) are invevitable. What are your thoughts on dealing with and managing dupes? Should dealers just expect them as part of doing business or should providers expect a certain percentage loss (via refunds) due to duplication?
Scott, I’d have to think that the onus is on the vendor 100%. The commodity is not the “lead”, but the access to a single prospect’s contact information. Once a dealer receives that access initially, any lead coming after it has absolutely no value - and that blame lies on the vendor for either not getting the lead to the dealer fast enough, or not having an appealing enough site to grow the lead before the other guys had the chance to.
And of course, if any vendor made a habit of delivering me the same leads noticeably later than another one of my vendors, they’d have to refund me just to keep me from cancelling them.
Makes sense to me. Thanks Mitch!
Leave a Comment