In house lead generation vs. Lead aggregators.

Throughout the last 12 months we have been experiencing a wide range of fluctuation in real estate and self storage lead generators and lead aggregators. There have been a few new lead aggregators but the greatest change has been internal efforts to generate leads in house.

In our opinion both approaches are flowed: first and foremost, lead generators in general resell the same lead/s many times which reduces the quality and convertibility. Second, some of the lead generators may not use ethical approaches to lead generation. On the other hand, internal lead generation may not be any better: in house lead generation teams and participants are unlikely to have the proper expertise to generate online and offline leads cost effectively nor are they were likely to create the most effective environment in response time and follow ups.

Alternatively we would suggest hiring a third party to generate those leads specifically for particular vendor and geo targets. Such action would enhance the lead quality, response time, follow up time, lower per lead cost and most importantly allow for the internal data collection and analysis which maybe otherwise hard to come by.
The most significant factor in selecting a third party consulting firm to create those leads, is certainly their specific industry knowledge and experience. Depending on what industry one is searching, the larger companies are not particularly suited for small and mid size clients because of lack personalized service, higher retainer costs as well as lack of flexibility of large organizations.