Richard Kacerek

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My company has been using Approved Index services for approximately a year and as a result I have learned few things which I hope to share with you.

As a small business I am sure you do not have millions in the bank to spend on marketing campaign and spending wisely insures your return on investment. Point of this article is to share some ideas with you on how to save money on marketing for small business.

Approved Index is a company selling business leads from various industries. Our case it was web design, development and ecommerce leads that were most interested to us. Each lead cost about £20-£25 where depending on your plan it is being shared with 4 more companies.

Sounds like good deal but after buying let’s say 10 leads per week worth £250 your percentage of success is down to 25%. Are you willing to send £1,000 per month for only 10 potential clients?

You still have to put quite lot of effort into writing proposals, chasing up leads and spend hours on the phone, countless meetings and travel costs. Those are additional costs of course, your time, call charges…

During our contract with Approved Index we were tight to a certain amount of leads every month, which meant no holidays or no leads when you are busy enough. This caused large problems to us, so we talked to Approved Index whose response was only to pause the leads for couple of weeks.

Before you commit to a contract, make sure you calculate your time, additional costs as it all can become quite tedious task trying to follow 40 leads per month.

Our success rate was actually much smaller than estimated 25%. It was more like 5%. Again talking to Approved Index was not helpful as their response was “did you try to call client”.

We have learned very expensive lesson here, hope this will save you some money. When you consider any kind of marketing, do the math first and carry on detailed research. Sleep on it and if it still feels good then do it.

Approved Index is not a marketing company we will use again, simply because of the numbers. Very poor conversion rate, you have no choice over accepting or refusing certain lead as you are still paying for lead where prospect client is simply researching price. But you still have to spend a lot of effort in pricing the job and following up on the lead which can take weeks or even months.

There are many lead suppliers out there, so research your options first and look at contract clause, exiting strategy and of course overall value. Price of the lead is only one of the indicators, but quality is much more valuable.