[JayBallentine]

Fact. There's a lot of smoke and mirrors here! Caveat emptor!

Yes there is. They have excellent product design and Dave is a great salesman. However, they haven't figured out how to generate leads yet. The problems are that:

1. They don't want to spend money on high quality lead generation.
2. Why they haven't optimized a funnel to include the Yodlee API's so as to sell completed applications where the merchants knows "ok, I'm probably going to get a 1.38" is beyond me.
2. They want to sell each lead one time, to 4 different funders.
4. Lendio needs to figure out who it's customers are. Are they the merchants, or are they MCA?

An offer was made to someone I am very very very close with to buy leads from said person at $30 each.

What's funny is that, Bank of America, Chase, Wells Fargo have zero need to buy leads from Lendio. They are doing everything in their power to decline as many deals as possible!! lol

Lendio's only market is the alternative finance / merchant cash advance. Unlike SomoLend, SmallKnot, and others, they didn't spend as much time getting to learn this industry as they should have.

While I think "buying leads" makes as much sense as showering with a raincoat, this is the only market where Lendio has a shot at turning into long-term customers. They are also misleading merchants with PPC campaigns that say; "Government Business Grants." This entices the merchant to click on said PPC ad to which they will sell YOU the lead as someone who is NOT looking for free money. You call them up, and they either don't qualify or are insulted by your offer.

Lastly, Dave is a good guy. A genuinely good guy, and a gifted seller. Many of you need to be making the guy offers so he has a golden parachute. My issue is not with Dave, it's the fact that Lendios' name should be "Joke-io."

[MCNetwork]

While I think "buying leads" makes as much sense as showering with a raincoat, this is the only market where Lendio has a shot at turning into long-term customers.

Well there is an acquisition cost for every customer. Buying a lead is no different than spending on SEO, Pay Per Click, mailers, and telemarketing campaigns. For many smaller ISOs, buying a qualified lead is a more cost effective method at getting customers than spending 25K+ a month on various marketing efforts and seeing what sticks. Even the big ISOs and direct funders out there use a multi-pronged marketing approach that almost always includes purchased leads.

[JayBallentine]

Well there is an acquisition cost for every customer. Buying a lead is no different than spending on SEO, Pay Per Click, mailers, and telemarketing campaigns. For many smaller ISOs, buying a qualified lead is a more cost effective method at getting customers than spending 25K+ a month on various marketing efforts and seeing what sticks. Even the big ISOs and direct funders out there use a multi-pronged marketing approach that almost always includes purchased leads.

I totally understand where you are coming from. However, feel free to private message me your e-mail. I'll send you some hard data on Lead Generation. In the mean time, check out this study: published by InsideSales and conducted by MIT: http://www.leadresponsemanagement.or...lrm-survey.pdf. The takeaway is that leads go bad after 30 minutes. The best leads (highest converting) are contacted within 5 minutes.

You make solid points about guys spending gobbs of money on stuff that don't work. You should also note that there IS NOT A SINGLE COMPANY in MCA is executing on ALL of the basics. The basics drive down lead generation costs, enhance quality, and response times. The basics include doing ALL of the following:

1. Separating your web site from your landing page. Your landing page should have very few words. The best landing pages feature a video. Your landing page should be optimized to convert. Here are some examples; http://cash.cashpickle.com and http://www.paramountmerchantfunding....FUQw4AodaVMASQ - Please do not take my word for it. Measure their page performance on Compete.com

2. E-mail / blog marketing. It costs about $50 a month to keep a list of 25,000 e-mail addresses where you can send as many as you'd like. You can even use pre-designed beautiful templates. No need to pay a designer or CSS guy. Sending merchants quality information - which can simply be links to useful content, depending on merchant type is pure ROI. It keeps your brand in front of the merchant, whether they need the money at that moment or not. When they do, they'll CALL YOU!

3. Video - The data is in, video is king, especially on mobile devices as text is increasingly harder to read. RetailCapital.com is the only one to nail this. Now think about having someone on your staff, take their iPhone go into their office and record weekly video casts featuring useful information that your employee found on the internet.

4. Long tail PPC and Long tail SEO - There are a ton of long tail words no one is buying PPC on. Think about what the human is searching for. They are searching for a solution to their problem. So they may not put in "small business loans" or "business loans" all the time. There are a few dozen keywords that have little to no competition, where guys can get top position for less than $2 per day. Not $2 per click. $2 per day.

5. Connect first. Close first. - It takes on average an hour for MCA guys to get back to leads. You buy PPC, and pay $50 for that click to respond an hour later? It's insane. So that's why we make that connection automagically, in 20 seconds.

Lastly, the most effective / cheapest way to qualify a customer is to dominate math. As of Monday, for a big dog in the game, we will be delivering 500,000 voice mails at one penny each to auto repair, plumbing, and similar businesses. Our attention to detail is such that:

1. We target those businesses by those likely to have a simple answering machine.
2. Include in the message a local phone number which forwards to whatever phone number our client has designated.
3. Using voice talent that sounds local. In other words, southern calls will get messages left by professional southern voice actressess, who are leaving what sounds like a local number for the merchant to call back.
4. Messaging is targeted to the three regions where all the search activity for "business loans" and "small business loans" is coming from.

Messages get delivered at 1 penny a pop. A half of one percent response rate is 2,500 in bound calls out of 500,000 messages. This particular client has data that suggests they convert 7% of their inbound calls into closed deals. If that holds true, they have generated 175 deals for an upfront cost of $5,000. This is why I personally feel like buying leads makes as much sense as wiping before you squat. I am completely biased.

I dont think this particular client will ever spend more than $5k per month on marketing again.

[fastcash4u]

I totally understand where you are coming from. However, feel free to private message me your e-mail. I'll send you some hard data on Lead Generation. In the mean time, check out this study: published by InsideSales and conducted by MIT: http://www.leadresponsemanagement.or...lrm-survey.pdf. The takeaway is that leads go bad after 30 minutes. The best leads (highest converting) are contacted within 5 minutes.

You make solid points about guys spending gobbs of money on stuff that don't work. You should also note that there IS NOT A SINGLE COMPANY in MCA is executing on ALL of the basics. The basics drive down lead generation costs, enhance quality, and response times. The basics include doing ALL of the following:

1. Separating your web site from your landing page. Your landing page should have very few words. The best landing pages feature a video. Your landing page should be optimized to convert. Here are some examples; http://cash.cashpickle.com and http://www.paramountmerchantfunding....FUQw4AodaVMASQ - Please do not take my word for it. Measure their page performance on Compete.com

2. E-mail / blog marketing. It costs about $50 a month to keep a list of 25,000 e-mail addresses where you can send as many as you'd like. You can even use pre-designed beautiful templates. No need to pay a designer or CSS guy. Sending merchants quality information - which can simply be links to useful content, depending on merchant type is pure ROI. It keeps your brand in front of the merchant, whether they need the money at that moment or not. When they do, they'll CALL YOU!

3. Video - The data is in, video is king, especially on mobile devices as text is increasingly harder to read. RetailCapital.com is the only one to nail this. Now think about having someone on your staff, take their iPhone go into their office and record weekly video casts featuring useful information that your employee found on the internet.

4. Long tail PPC and Long tail SEO - There are a ton of long tail words no one is buying PPC on. Think about what the human is searching for. They are searching for a solution to their problem. So they may not put in "small business loans" or "business loans" all the time. There are a few dozen keywords that have little to no competition, where guys can get top position for less than $2 per day. Not $2 per click. $2 per day.

5. Connect first. Close first. - It takes on average an hour for MCA guys to get back to leads. You buy PPC, and pay $50 for that click to respond an hour later? It's insane. So that's why we make that connection automagically, in 20 seconds.

Lastly, the most effective / cheapest way to qualify a customer is to dominate math. As of Monday, for a big dog in the game, we will be delivering 500,000 voice mails at one penny each to auto repair, plumbing, and similar businesses. Our attention to detail is such that:

1. We target those businesses by those likely to have a simple answering machine.
2. Include in the message a local phone number which forwards to whatever phone number our client has designated.
3. Using voice talent that sounds local. In other words, southern calls will get messages left by professional southern voice actressess, who are leaving what sounds like a local number for the merchant to call back.
4. Messaging is targeted to the three regions where all the search activity for "business loans" and "small business loans" is coming from.

Messages get delivered at 1 penny a pop. A half of one percent response rate is 2,500 in bound calls out of 500,000 messages. This particular client has data that suggests they convert 7% of their inbound calls into closed deals. If that holds true, they have generated 175 deals for an upfront cost of $5,000. This is why I personally feel like buying leads makes as much sense as wiping before you squat. I am completely biased.

I dont think this particular client will ever spend more than $5k per month on marketing again.

i would be interested in hearing more about the above conversation

[NBDC_Leads]

Well there is an acquisition cost for every customer. Buying a lead is no different than spending on SEO, Pay Per Click, mailers, and telemarketing campaigns. For many smaller ISOs, buying a qualified lead is a more cost effective method at getting customers than spending 25K+ a month on various marketing efforts and seeing what sticks. Even the big ISOs and direct funders out there use a multi-pronged marketing approach that almost always includes purchased leads.

Cash Advance and loan type leads are to hard to sell straight out, because there are to many variables to set a price before talking to the business owner. We developed a program where we do all the marketing then talk to the merchant, ask questions and pre qualify the lead before transferring to the Inside sales reps. All leads are exclusive, as fresh as can be and already prepped for the reps to sell AND we only get paid if sold (a percentage like the Agents) and we generate a good volume too (we only work with large rooms with and inside sales force ready to take inbound transfers) these are transfers from a hand off from one of our "Senior Administrators" so we introduce the business owner and explain what they are looking for before getting off the line. We have had Tremendous success in both the merchant Service and Cash Advance industries with this transfer lead. This allows the Cash Advance company to do their job and we do ours, that is a true "Partnership" when it comes to leads, we have grown at a rapid rate and opening another facility in a few months, i think this type of system addresses the problem for big cash advance companies with a strong inside sales force, the small guy is still SOL.

[MCNetwork]

They are also misleading merchants with PPC campaigns that say; "Government Business Grants." This entices the merchant to click on said PPC ad to which they will sell YOU the lead as someone who is NOT looking for free money. You call them up, and they either don't qualify or are insulted by your offer.

Yes you can definitely generate 10,000 leads this way. Too bad they're all worth jack!

[Franklin]

Yes there is. They have excellent product design and Dave is a great salesman. However, they haven't figured out how to generate leads yet. The problems are that:

1. They don't want to spend money on high quality lead generation.
2. Why they haven't optimized a funnel to include the Yodlee API's so as to sell completed applications where the merchants knows "ok, I'm probably going to get a 1.38" is beyond me.
2. They want to sell each lead one time, to 4 different funders.
4. Lendio needs to figure out who it's customers are. Are they the merchants, or are they MCA?

An offer was made to someone I am very very very close with to buy leads from said person at $30 each.

What's funny is that, Bank of America, Chase, Wells Fargo have zero need to buy leads from Lendio. They are doing everything in their power to decline as many deals as possible!! lol

Lendio's only market is the alternative finance / merchant cash advance. Unlike SomoLend, SmallKnot, and others, they didn't spend as much time getting to learn this industry as they should have.

While I think "buying leads" makes as much sense as showering with a raincoat, this is the only market where Lendio has a shot at turning into long-term customers. They are also misleading merchants with PPC campaigns that say; "Government Business Grants." This entices the merchant to click on said PPC ad to which they will sell YOU the lead as someone who is NOT looking for free money. You call them up, and they either don't qualify or are insulted by your offer.

Lastly, Dave is a good guy. A genuinely good guy, and a gifted seller. Many of you need to be making the guy offers so he has a golden parachute. My issue is not with Dave, it's the fact that Lendios' name should be "Joke-io."

---




Your numbers seem to be a little off Jay;

Lendio has spent $30,000 a month on just ONE campaign in the past. They've also made six figure purchases for lead generation platforms.

How does selling one lead to multiple lenders at the same time (same as Inside up, Buyer Zone, Leads2Results, Merch Quest, Edirex, etc.), infer that they don't spend money on lead generation?

If you are a lead generation company, your customers are BOTH, funding companies AND business owners, as you are the one attracting both of them and bringing them together. A good lead gen. company has to do double the work, as anyone who's marketed in this space successfully for years knows.

"Chase DOESN'T BUY leads and they decline as many deals as possible??"

Not sure how you mean that, Because JP Morgan Chase was in the top 10 in marketing spend last year, and in the lending industry, top 3, with almost 2 BILLION DOLLARS spent. You'd probably be swamped with an ocean of unqualified leads if you spent that much on marketing as well. B of A and Wells Fargo also have marketing budgets in the millions per year.


Just because a marketing company advertises one specific niche doesn't mean they don't do other niches as well. I've done campaigns for Uber cars, medical industries, and staffing, but I've never advertised that I do those things. How would anyone know if a company only does alternative lending and that's it? A bit presumptive.


There is a cost (an investment) to acquiring a SUSTAINABLE source of leads, whether you pay a third party to do it, you pay someone in house to do it, you learn it yourself, or you spend the time and energy building a network of referral sources. While in principal, the methods you speak about (landing pages, email, videos, etc.) do work, by "talking down" to the logic of buying leads, you're greatly minimizing the amount of work and expertise required to successfully execute those strategies you mentioned.

A great landing page means nothing if you don't know how to get qualified traffic to it, and THAT'S the hard part. You can use Wordpress.com or Weebly.com to create a great site very quickly.

An email blast to 100,000 owners is useless if you can't get the emails into the owner's inbox, you can't get them to click it, you can't keep them from dispositioning your message as spam, you can't get them to respond back or pick up the phone and call you, or you can't get them to visit your site, you can't keep your server from being blacklisted, stopping you from being able to deliver to the rest of your list. The avg. response is 1/3 of 1%, and I've seen as high as 15% from top guys.


Videos are very popular but the top marketers have known that for years. But it's entertaining and/or informative videos that are popular. That video of you sitting on the bench feeding pigeons ritz crackers, is not popular. Nor will it generate leads. And how would an Iso/lender know what to film that would hold a business owner's attention, then entice him to come for funding. (And no, the answer is not, a video about funding). How many funding videos go viral, unless MAYBE they had a tv commercial? Forget about production values involved in filming a decent looking video quickly and efficiently



If you want to build your pipeline quickly, you are going to spend money or time (which is also money) one way or another. You are not just going to walk into this industry, or any other industry with major competitors, and think you don't have to do any work or spend any money, just run a few ads or do a campaign or two, and just start capturing market share, even if it's growing. Too many people think that way, and when marketers trying to sell books perpetrate that message, it encourages people to think they'll see success and 24 - 72 hrs with no experience or expert knowledge.

The real story is that IF you take the time and energy to learn how to market, even IF it's just ONE vertical, like videos, and you learn it very well so you're highly adept, you will generate leads at a wholesale price and have exclusive control of the source, which is more sustainable and cost effective than buying leads. IF you do this, IF you are willing to keep trying and fail and keep trying, and testing and tracking. IF you have no desire to become good at this or pay someone to be good at this, if this is not your makeup, then you should buy leads, and that's what a lot of funders do. It's not wrong or right, it's simply a choice.



As for statements made about great lead generators becoming Isos/funders themselves, they're a bit silly. Why would a great marketer who is having success, decide, I'm in my prime and at the peak of my success, let me change industries? (we saw how that worked for Michael Jordan, watch the documentary called Space Jam if you didn't). Just like it's been proven that most funders aren't very experienced marketers, most marketers have no desire to lend money and learn underwriting. Now I have seen top guys go the Iso route, but they took the time to learn the industry before they did, so it wasn't just some random plunge, they invested in learning the game first.



The one thing I might agree on is the wording for Government Grants, it could be misleading. But again, maybe this is predicated on a relationship with a govt. agency or some other. It will likely attract a lot of unqualified people but hey, that's their strategy so you can't knock someone for trying.



No biz relationship with Lendio, just clarifying some numbers and misconceptions.