5 Reasons Pay-per-Lead Produces Poor Performance

It’s easy to fall into the trap: you think that pay-per-lead lead generation companies will give you exactly what you’re paying for, thinking that their incentive structure will encourage the best performance possible. Unfortunately, that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Pay-per-lead companies use bad work environments and inferior methods, damaging your brand, generating fewer quality leads, and creating conflicts between you and their sales team. If you’re thinking about working with a pay-per-lead lead generation company, give a thought to these five potential issues first.

1. No Research Incentive
Pay-per-lead companies don’t have any incentive to put time into researching your product and ideal customers. Remember: their only incentive is to book meetings with your team while spending as little of their own money as possible.
That means these companies have no incentive to do research beyond the most basic level they need to make a pitch on a cold call.

2. Short-term Profit Interest
It’s important to remember that you won’t be your pay-per-lead service’s only client. These businesses try and collect as many clients as possible, prioritizing the ones they can make money from the fastest.
That means that if your product isn’t easy for them to collect a short-term profit from, they’ll deprioritize you. Instead, they’ll focus on other clients that require less time.

But the problem goes deeper: there’s no short-term profit in providing good customer service, consulting on sales strategy, or A/B testing different options for outreach. While other lead generation services may take a more consultative approach, pay-per-lead companies only look to extract profit as quickly as possible.

3. Lower Talent Level
If you’re a talented lead generation professional, you’ll probably work for anyone but a pay-per-lead company. That’s because the pay-per-lead structure creates questionable working conditions with economics that don’t allow them to pay a living wage. It also creates little incentive for a proper training and onboarding process.

Obviously, the impact of this is enormous. Not only will they generate leads slowly, but the inexperienced people that work for pay-per-lead services will also have a harder time identifying ideal prospects. You’ll get your leads, but they’ll be
low-quality and coming in at a trickle.

4.Client-Provider Conflicts
With the structure of a pay-per-lead agreement, the provider is incentivized to define “leads” as broadly as possible. That means that the provider may try and charge for low-quality leads, individual contributors with no buying power, or even leads whose attribution is questionable.

When providers engage in these practices, they’re simply responding to the incentives they’ve set up for themselves. But that means they’re shifting the conversation away from what actually matters–providing you with quality leads–and towards issues of secondary importance like attribution.

5.Brand Damage
Consider the sum of all of these issues: poorly-informed, untrained cold callers looking to generate leads as quickly as possible regardless of quality. Now, imagine that team coming into contact with key decision-makers at high-value companies.

The long-term damage to your brand could be serious. The next time you try to reach out to those high-value prospects, they’ll associate your company’s name with the unprofessional and often aggressive cold calls they received from the pay-per-lead service.

Conclusion
The long-term impacts of using a pay-per-lead service can be severe. With poorly-trained callers incentivized to work as quickly as possible and stretch the meaning of terms like “lead,” you may find that the service does more harm to your brand than good. If you’re thinking about working with a pay-per-lead service, try reaching out to Salaria Sales to discuss better models for fast, quality lead generation.

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Patricia McLoughlin
Patricia McLoughlin
2023-03-30
We have used Salaria for over two years and the experience has been great. They are hands down the best B2B prospecting agency I have used (and I’ve used many over the years!) I’ve seen them deliver consistent, quality results over a long period of time. We have even referred partners to them that have also been pleased with Salaria’s performance. They are very proactive when it comes to trying new strategies and do a great job managing engagement data - both inside and outside our system. Overall, I would highly recommend Salaria to anyone looking for an outbound prospecting agency that can deliver results and a positive ROI - regardless of the market you operate in!
Kyle Miller
Kyle Miller
2023-03-17
Salaria has done a great job increasing the total amount of prospective leads for our company. Elizabeth and her team are very professional and the amount of calls they crank out with just a few people is remarkable! We value the collaborative process, and the open line of communication makes it easy to adjust strategies on the move without any down time. The weekly reports & dashboards they provide are a very nice touch. Overall a great experience with an honest and hard-working company who's motivated to help us grow our sales.
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Aviva Fridman
2023-02-01
Salaria is amazing! I have spoken with several companies like Salaria, but I have found them to be mostly talk. Salaria does exactly what they say they are going to do - they get meetings! I greatly appreciated that even though we had a slow start, they came in an worked hard to earn regain our trust. They are always tweaking and improving their process to make sure they are meeting our needs.
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Matt Shreibman
2022-11-28
As someone who has been in medical device sales for 10 years now, I highly recommend Salaria to anyone who is looking for more targets. Pipeline is the life blood for any sales organization and Salaria is a great resource to have.
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Nick Lassor
2022-07-20
Salaria has been a game changer for us! We have tried various companies and internal processes to manage a rather difficult lead gen process and they have performed way better than we expected. They adapt to our feedback. They provide clear information. They are always looking for ways to improve. If you are on the fence, just pull the trigger. Salaria will do everything they say and more!
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Jason Gonos
2022-07-14
Great company and great people. I am super impressed with our director of account management LP and his team. I have been with them for about 4 months and just signed for a 6 month extension. I have been getting TOO MANY HIGH QUALITY LEADS to manage and am now forced to build out my sales team because of Salaria :) Highly recommended. The cost will pay for itseld quickly.
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James Hoover
2022-04-06
Salaria has been a huge boost to our lead generation efforts. They are able to create meetings with high level executives who are vetted properly. Great company to work with.
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Nilesh Surana
2021-12-16
We started working with Salaria about 10 months ago and they have been able to generate about 60-70 meetings of which 4 deals have closed. I was a bit skeptical before deciding to work with them because I didn’t know if we could effectively outsource part of our sales development strategy. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how well things have gone. We’ve also seen an improvement in conversion rates across the whole team because we started using a lot of the scripts and templates Salaria was using. I have to admit that they've been impressive with how helpful they’ve been from a strategy perspective. Highly recommend these guys!
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