[sean-nayyar]

Why You Should Avoid UCC Leads Like The Plague

Let’s talk about one of the most revered forms of leads in the merchant cash advance business: UCC Leads

To be honest with you, I don’t know any of the big dogs in the merchant cash advance industry that rely on UCC Leads.

The only brokers I see buying UCC Lead lists are usually startup brokers and ISOs, or ISO shops that have a cold calling boiler room set up and hit the phones all day long, trying to pummel their way into the hearts of frustrated small business merchants looking for capital.

Why are UCC Leads not used by any of the big ISOs in the cash advance industry?

That is a question that I found myself asking in 2014 when I was working at a small ISO shop that had just started up in the financial district of NYC.

I learned over time that it isn’t that UCC Leads don’t work. They do.

It’s just that they’re unreliable if you want to actually build a sustainable, predictable, and scalable merchant cash advance business over the long term.

Let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons of using UCC Leads...

Read More: https://lendnet.io/blog/why-you-shou...ke-the-plague/

[Rob Buchanan]

I'm sorry to say but you are uninformed. There are quite a few large direct lenders, large and small ISO shops and brokers who have been around a long time or are just starting up who have great success with UCCs. It all comes down to the source of the UCCs- from an actual data compiler, resellers or those guys web scraping data as well as how the UCC data is marketed to- telemarketing, direct mail, email, online display. UCCs can be very reliable if they are coming from a reliable source. Unfortunately most UCC list sources out there are unreliable. You just have to know who's who when buying a UCC list. You need to know if you a dealing with an actual data compiler, a list reseller or data broker selling old data and most times from a unreliable source or if you are dealing with that guy selling web scraped data.

It's unfortunate that you posted this writeup because it is not accurate and can mislead many readers.

[sean-nayyar]

You literally said the same thing i said. Read until the end of the blog post.

Here's a quote from the post:

So by now you’re probably thinking I have some kind of vendetta against UCC Leads…. Lol

You might be asking things like:

“Are UCC Leads completely flawed?”
“Is there no redeeming quality for UCC Leads?”
Honestly, even though I’m giving them such a bad rap, UCC Leads can still have some value to a guy who wants to start selling merchant cash advance and has less than $50,000 a month in commissions.

But there’s a catch: Your firm will be extremely inefficient because you’ll be pounding the phones 12 hours a day, which will inevitably lead to low employee morale, and lots of turnover in your sales department.

I have a friend down in Brooklyn who runs his own shop and he does $80,000 a month from UCC leads. He busts his ass off and has dozens of brokers calling all day (quite an inefficient use of labor if you ask me), but he certainly does get the job done.

And that brings me to my second point.

You will plateau once you hit $50K to $100K per month in commissions. And once you hit that plateau, you won’t really know how to break through because you built your merchant cash advance business on poor foundations: UCC Leads.

Bottom line is that none of the big dogs are using UCC leads to scale beyond 100k a month. It's bad foundation for a strong cash advance business.

[WestCoastFunding]

Sean, that’s a really good article.

[Rob Buchanan]

Bottom line is that none of the big dogs are using UCC leads to scale beyond 100k a month. It's bad foundation for a strong cash advance business.

But the big dogs are using UCCs and on a larger scale than ISOs and brokers.

[mrmrg]

I'm sorry to say but you are uninformed. There are quite a few large direct lenders, large and small ISO shops and brokers who have been around a long time or are just starting up who have great success with UCCs. It all comes down to the source of the UCCs- from an actual data compiler, resellers or those guys web scraping data as well as how the UCC data is marketed to- telemarketing, direct mail, email, online display. UCCs can be very reliable if they are coming from a reliable source. Unfortunately most UCC list sources out there are unreliable. You just have to know who's who when buying a UCC list. You need to know if you a dealing with an actual data compiler, a list reseller or data broker selling old data and most times from a unreliable source or if you are dealing with that guy selling web scraped data.

It's unfortunate that you posted this writeup because it is not accurate and can mislead many readers.

Rob, chill. We all know that UCC lists are your bread and butter but don't try to knock on the guy for writing this article and actually trying to help out new brokers. There is nobody out there having great success banging out UCC's, I don't care how big your sales floor is. I know because some of us are busy actually funding deals not just emailing brokers all day asking them to buy your data.

[HDF]

https://lendnet.io/blog/why-you-should-avoid-ucc-leads-like-the-plague/[/url]

Good stuff. However, there are strategies (with or without selling MCAs exclusively) that are powerful and work extremely well. Segmentation is a powerful tool in the right plan.

I'm not particularly a fan of Rob's company at all, but I'd bet that one of their biggest frustrations is customers NOT having a plan or articulating what would/might really help them beyond "give me MCA leads...new, or give me aged MCA UCCs... this old."

If you can't hold a sales meeting once a week and dissect success stories and relate some of them to funneling relevant segmented leads to reps, then you will likely fail in the long run.

Ordinary example: If you have a rep who successfully topped-up a AMEX loan for a client with an MCA, re-invest a little bit and get that mofo 500 AMEX UCCs, and preferably in a related industry. And so on... PM me if you are stuck and out of ideas

[sean-nayyar]

Rob, chill. We all know that UCC lists are your bread and butter but don't try to knock on the guy for writing this article and actually trying to help out new brokers. There is nobody out there having great success banging out UCC's, I don't care how big your sales floor is. I know because some of us are busy actually funding deals not just emailing brokers all day asking them to buy your data.

Rob isn't under threat from me. He should have plenty of business from smaller brokers (who surprisingly make up a majority of the industry).

I said that UCC lists are good if you're new and want to get started fast with minimal investment. You can get to a decent level with them, and once you do, it's time to start reinvesting into content, SEO, paid ads, funnels, backend technology etc.

[Rob Buchanan]

Rob, chill. We all know that UCC lists are your bread and butter but don't try to knock on the guy for writing this article and actually trying to help out new brokers. There is nobody out there having great success banging out UCC's, I don't care how big your sales floor is. I know because some of us are busy actually funding deals not just emailing brokers all day asking them to buy your data.

You are incorrect. It is not our bread and butter. Sure we sell UCC lists but its never been our primary product or focus. In fact we are a company of about 2500 employees and there are only two us who sell our UCC data.

There are a lot of people (small and large shops and direct lenders) having success with UCCs. If they did not we would not have return customers buying more UCC data month after month after month.

UCC data is not just used for telemarketing. You can actually use it for other forms of marketing with great success and our customers do that. Some use our marketing services and others may do it on their own.

There is also more to UCC data than just MCA related UCCs.

I should add that providing UCC data is a very small portion of what we do in comparison to all the other products and services we offer and provide to our customers.