How to Make Money Selling Leads in 2024 (& How Much to Charge)

Selling leads is a skill. But selling leads with maximum profits is an art.

Not many lead-generating businesses are aware of this difference. And this is why they often leave money on the table. Money that rightfully belongs in their pockets.

So, we’ve dedicated this post entirely to; how to sell leads.

From bluff-free basics to a thorough step-by-step guide on how to sell high-quality leads for maximum profits – we’ll give it all to you.

The bit we’re most excited to impart in this post is how to fish the highest quality leads and how to find the right buyer for them.

What is pay-per-lead generation?

As per this lead generation model, a business owner may hire you on a contractual basis.

And your job will be to do the market research for them, run campaigns, acquire traffic, and generate leads.

Simply put, pay-per-lead generation is when you charge for each lead.
They will pay you on a per-lead basis, and the pricing is usually fixed.

We’ve shared standard industry rates for lead generation under the next heading. Use that to estimate your budget.

Note that leads refer to a visitor who shows an evident interest in your product or service.

It goes beyond clicking on the ad. For example, a quality lead may take any one of the following actions:

• Create an account
• Fill out a form
• Take a quiz

You can pre-determine the action that’s worthy for the business. This action is what you’ll get paid for.

Some businesses will pay per appointment, others may pay for a call, and for some, it’s just an email lead they need.

Now, of course, like every other advertising model, there are pros and cons of the pay-per-lead model too.

But to give you a quick idea, the biggest win of the pay per lead marketing is that it saves money and time on both ends.

Businesses don’t have to spend on zero-value visitors, and lead generators don’t have to sweat blood on retainer agreements. You get paid for all your hard work.

The biggest risk with the PPL model is – a lot of lead generators struggle with understanding marketing funnels and nurturing leads. For businesses, this means low-quality leads. For agencies offering lead generation services, this means zero to no recurring clients.

We have found a way to tackle this big risk at LeadsHook – and we call it Reverse Market Research.

The idea is to put all the traffic you acquire through a series of steps.

We’ve shared a glimpse of these steps in this post: How to create winning lead generation campaigns

Via these steps, you will find crucial data points that you really need to collect. Align your search with these data points – and voila! You’ll acquire a lead for every single penny you invest – meaning more profits for you. 🙂

If you’re selling leads to companies with a large and highly segmented audience, you might need to invest a bit initially. You will need more LeadsHook features to support your search.

But it’s really a small amount you’d pay for the recurring business you’ll win.

However, if you’re only starting to make money selling leads, chances are you’re selling leads to local businesses.

You’re dealing with smaller audiences and less complex segments. In this case, you’ll be able to verify our Reverse Market Approach within the first 14 days of your free trial. 

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How much can you sell leads for?

You can sell leads online for anywhere between $20 to $500+ per lead.

The exact pricing of a lead depends on a lot of factors, including your niche, quality of leads, type of buyer, and lead costs. Read our full guide on how much to charge for lead generation.

You can maximize your profits by optimizing your approach to selling leads as given in the step-by-step guide below.

Use our calculator to find out how much to charge

Detailed Pricing Overview

By niche

You can generate, sell, and resell leads for almost any niche or industry. Be it home improvement services in your local area or a SaaS like Slack.

However, some industries are generally more profitable than others. For example, tech companies with a $100,000 product will spend hundreds and thousands per lead.

On the contrary, a local business offering a $100 product will pay only $25 or so per lead.

So, how can you tell what are the best pay per lead niches?

Here are some identifiers:

• If the niche fulfills an urgent need, it is profitable. These are usually problem-solving departments. Consider cell phone repair as an example. You won’t wait for months to get your phone fixed, will you?
• If the niche is local, it is less profitable – especially if you’re new. There’s a limitation to prospects. You can only convert a small portion of the traffic due to geographical limitations. We recommend maximizing profits by repurposing leads for other businesses in the same industry or selling leads to lead brokers.

With that said, here are the average per-lead prices for profitable industries:

By the quality of leads

Lead quality is the most influential factor when it comes to pricing. You can measure the quality of a lead by the following factors:

• Closing potential: It refers to how easily the lead will convert and make a purchase.

• Revenue potential: It refers to how much money the lead will generate over a specific period.

Ideally, if a lead is closer to making a purchase and has a high revenue potential, it’s a quality lead.

The further away they are from making a purchase or providing recurring business, the quality decreases.

With that said, a high-quality lead sells for 10x the price of a low-quality lead.

For example, if you’re selling leads for home improvement, a low-quality lead would sell for $20. But a high-quality lead might sell for as high as $200.

To begin sorting your leads with better clarity, browse this post on 7 types of business leads.

By type of buyer

There are two types of lead buyers. These are:

• End buyers: These are businesses that will sell their product/service to the lead.

• Lead aggregators: These are intermediary agencies that engage in either lead reselling or lead flipping.

End buyers are the best buyers you can get. They’ll pay the highest price per lead. But it’s difficult to find direct buyers. You’ll have to work on establishing a network of buyers.

On the contrary, lead aggregators buy leads for a lower price, so they’re not the best type of buyer. But since you’re only learning how to sell leads right now, we recommend aiming for lead aggregators. They are easier to start with.

By lead costs

The lead cost refers to the amount you spend on acquiring the lead.

Whether you’re spending on ads, buying lead lists, outsourcing to a lead generation agency, or using lead generation software – it counts as your share of the price.

The lead cost should always be less than the price you charge for that lead.

For example, if you spent $10 on a Facebook ad to get one lead, you should sell it to relevant companies or lead brokers for $25 or more.

Note that lead cost also includes your labor and any additional expenses you may be making at your end.

By the rule of thumb, the lead cost should be as low as possible.

If you spend $25 on acquiring an average quality lead for the home improvement niche, you cannot expect companies to pay you $50+ only because you spent a lot. Spend the least possible for maximum profits.

Where to sell leads?

You can sell leads to local businesses, companies that buy leads, or online affiliate programs. It depends on your niche and approach to selling.

If you want to sell leads online for the highest price, approach an end buyer.

You can find these buyers on dedicated social media groups, freelance platforms, LinkedIn, or via lead buying agencies.

Step-by-Step Guide: How to sell leads

So far, in this quest of sharing how to sell leads, we’ve given you all the ingredients required to establish a profitable lead-selling business.

We’re now going to share with you how to put all these ingredients together to achieve the best results.

1. Pick Your Niche

Above, we shared how to identify a profitable niche for your lead generation business. But at this point, we ask you to dive deeper into the details.

When picking a niche for your lead generation business, ask the following questions from yourself:

• What makes you appealing to your potential clients? It could be a deeper understanding of the target audience, cheaper pricing, solid marketing tactics, or proven expertise in nurturing leads.

• Are you passionate or well-experienced in the niche? If you’re neither, you’ll have a tough time understanding the buyer’s intent.

If you’re confident about these two aspects, it’s time to assess the profitability of the niche.

• Check average profits per lead
• Check the volume of leads
• Check if the market is growing or dying

Make sure you make data-based decisions. Study competitors, their success, customer stories, and the trend of their business.

2. Do Your Market Research

The point of market research is to visualize the entire process of acquiring and selling a lead.

Remember, your process is what makes you profit.

You need your market research to be 100% accurate. So you can come up with an efficient acquisition and selling process.

How to do it?

First, conduct market research to generate leads.

• Define your best quality leads & customer cycle.
• Align your offering with the wants & needs of your best leads.
• Determine how to approach prospects at each stage of their buying journey
• Develop messages that bring prospects closer to purchase
• Develop marketing campaigns to upsell and resell to converted customers
• Figure out how to shorten customer’s buying journey

Next, conduct market research for lead aggregators or end buyers. Find out the definite answers to the following:

• Who are your potential clients and where do they operate? Narrow down to their exact names and the social media platform they use.
• Why are they buying leads? If you know what’s stopping them from acquiring prospects directly, you can convert them into recurring clients.
• How much do your potential clients currently spend on leads and how much more do you want? Verify the money they pay through other companies doing business with them or directly.
• What will you offer these potential clients to attract them? Reliable first-party data is the strongest offering.
• How will you offer these? Ads, websites, word-of-mouth, email marketing, cold-pitching, or anything else?
• How much will pitching your services cost you? What’s the ROI you might enjoy?

We realize the process of market research is quite detailed and demanding. And it’s the crux of your lead generation business. One wrong move, and you’ll have to start all over again.

To minimize risks and struggle on your end, we offer market research services too.

Just let us know what the aim is and we’ll dig out each piece of information that you need to develop robust systems.

3. Pick a Lead Selling Module

You have 70% of your homework done by now. There’s one last thing you need to decide before jumping into real action.

And that’s the lead selling module.

There are five ways of selling leads to businesses:

• Sell leads exclusively to one client.

• Sell the same leads to multiple clients.

• Sell leads exclusively for a specific time and then put them up for sale to anyone.

• Generate leads with your own budget. Then sell exclusively to one client but only charge a fixed fee per conversion. This is for high-ticket niches.

• Generate leads with the client’s budget. But only commission per conversion.

Selling exclusively is risky but highly profitable. If you’ve properly conducted market research and you’re confident of the generated leads, go for it!

4. Generate Leads

Time to get to the real action. There are two types of leads you can to generate:

• Leads you will sell off
• Leads you will sell to (i.e., your clients, the lead buyers)

To generate leads that you will be selling, it’s best to use lead generation software like LeadsHook which can help you automate lead acquisition. You’ll be setting up a decision tree once and using it to continually generate quality leads.

You might need to make minor tweaks in the strategy as you gather more and more data along the way. But that’s something you can leave to the LeadsHook team. We’ll take care of it for you.

You can use LeadsHook to find your best lead buyers too. It could help you build a strong and massive network of buyers in no time.

But even so, allow us to outline the conventional industry process.

• Google “niche + lead buyers” and search on LinkedIn, websites, and social media profiles.

• Send an email and offer your leads

• Nurture the leads and go the extra mile until they become a customer

Alternatively, you can keep pitching to different lead sellers.

In pay per lead advertising is most commonly used to get eyeballs on your offer, but don’t underestimate PPL SEO.

5. Use Lead Selling Software

Once you’re through with step four, you’ll have plenty of buyers to sell leads online.

But if you’re having trouble navigating through the market and finding the right type of buyer, we recommend trying lead-selling software like Aggregatur.

Note that sell leads software is different from generating leads software. Lead-generating software helps you acquire prospects for products/services. But lead selling software helps you find prospects who wish to buy leads from you.

Pick a decent one and use it to kickstart your journey at selling leads online.

Pros & Cons Of Selling Leads

By now, we hope you’re confident and clear on how to sell leads. But before you leave, there’s a mirror we need you to see.

The table below lists the Pros and Cons of selling leads. So, before you commit to lead generation and selling, consider both ends carefully.

How to sell leads for maximum profit?

The disadvantages given above are also the risks involved in this business.

And to be honest, the biggest of these risks is “the lack of accurate data means higher churn rates”

If you fail to collect the information that’s truly beneficial for securing a lead;

• You could be investing hours and still earning peanuts
• You could be offering the cheapest lead generation services and still fail to get repeat business

To tackle this, you need a means of asking the right questions from prospects.

It is the key to filtering your traffic and securing high-quality leads. And hence, the key to earning maximum profits.

This is where LeadsHook comes into its own with personalized Decision Tree campaigns.

First, LeadsHook will help you capture quality leads via decision trees. And then, it’ll help you qualify them further by collecting verified contact information (phone, emails, and more!)

Since these are leads businesses can convert instantly, they’ll happily pay you 3x your usual profits. But, of course, it’s best to stay around industry rates. It helps build a strong, stable clientele.

With that said, creating decision trees with LeadsHook is super easy. But if you need help with anything, Team LeadsHook will be with you every step of the way! 🙂

Hop into our rapidly growing community of leading lead generators simply by signing up for your 14-day trial.

If you need more time to weigh your lead generation business plan, take your time. Just drop us a message if you need any other insights on how to sell leads to make your decision. We’d be happy to help!

FAQ

Do you need a license to sell leads?

Yes, you need a license to sell leads. That’s because you’ll collect and pass on the personal information of a potential lead. The type of license required for your specific business depends on your niche and country. Note that not all countries observe the same rules and regulations concerning leads licensing.

Can a non-profit sell leads?

Yes, nonprofits can also sell leads. They can find people who are interested in their mission and would lend their support. These leads are useful for new NGOs with similar objectives, so they will purchase

What is a good price to sell leads?

The best price for leads depends on the industry. Non-profit leads typically sell for $31, whereas consumer product leads sell for $105. Technology leads are the most expensive, with a selling price of $200+.

Where can I sell my leads?

There are several dedicated platforms, like Leaddrops, where you can sell leads. You can also use lead distribution software like Boberdoo. But, if you want to take the traditional route, you will have to approach prospect companies and lead aggregators individually.

How to sell leads to local businesses?

There’s a lot that goes into selling leads to any business – local or international. You need to first pick a niche and conduct thorough market research. Then, you need to figure out how to pitch your prospective buyers and convince them to buy leads.

We’ve already discussed the details of how to sell leads above. Go back to it for a better insight!