Signed a 12 month contract with a lead gen service and wasted $3,400 in 4 months

I thought I was being smart by going with a company that promised 50 vetted B2B leads a month for $850. The first month they sent me 52 leads, but 40 of them were just recycled contacts from public LinkedIn groups. I called 15 of them and 12 said they never requested any info about my service. When I asked for a refund after month 2, they pointed to their fine print about 'lead quality not guaranteed.' By month 4 I had spent $3,400 and booked exactly 2 meetings that went nowhere. Anyone else gotten burned by one of these monthly lead subscription services? What did you switch to that actually works?

2 comments

2 Comments

oscar_hunt611d ago

That $850 a month figure caught my eye right away. I fell for a similar setup two years ago with a company that promised 30 B2B leads for $600 monthly. After three months I had maybe 4 real contacts and the rest were junk from data scraping tools. I switched to buying targeted email lists from industry specific directories and doing my own outreach. It takes more work but I spend maybe $200 a month now and get better results.

barnes.brian1d ago

That part about 'lead quality not guaranteed' is exactly what got my buddy Dave. He signed up with some lead gen company for $700 a month and found out the hard way. His first batch had a guy listed as a CTO at a software firm, but when Dave called the company, they said that person quit two years ago. He stuck with it for 6 months because he thought it just needed time, but he ended up with nothing but a stack of bad phone numbers and emails from free job sites. He finally gave up and started going to local networking events, which cost him maybe $30 a month for parking and coffee. He says it's way more work, but at least the people he meets actually want to talk business.