In today’s complex business environment, the authenticity of your sales leads can make or break your success. Vetting your vendors ensures lead authenticity and safeguards your business against fake leads and potential fraud. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to vet your vendors and authenticate your sales leads.
Step 1: Research your vendors
Start by thoroughly researching each vendor. Look into their history, reputation, and past client reviews. Check their social media presence and online footprint. Be wary of any red flags, such as previous legal issues, shady-looking tactics, negative reviews, or a lack of online presence.
Step 2: Ask for references
Ask your vendors for client references. Reach out to these references and ask about their experiences with the vendor. This will give you an idea of the vendor’s reliability and the quality of their leads.
Step 3: Review their data collection and management methods
Understanding how a vendor collects and manages their data can shed light on the authenticity of their leads. Do they follow ethical data collection practices? Do they have mechanisms in place to ensure data accuracy and privacy? These factors can influence the quality of their leads.
Step 4: Evaluate their lead generation strategy
Ask about their lead generation strategy. Is it in line with your business model and target audience? Are they able to provide leads that are relevant and valuable to your business? Are their lead-generating methods compliant with industry standards? Do they have a consumer-first mentality when it comes to their leads?
Step 5: Test them with Assumed
Assumed adds a new level of security to your vendor vetting process. Assumed can verify the actions of vendors by using a ‘test’ or decoy lead when you fill out a form on one of the vendor’s landing pages. If the decoy lead received tons of irrelevant texts, emails or voicemails, you know something shady is going down with this vendor. This immediate feedback can help protect your business and know who to not work with.
Step 6: Regularly review and update your vetting process
Vetting vendors is not a one-time task. Regularly review your vetting process, updating it as necessary to respond to changing threats or market conditions.
By following these steps, you can effectively vet your vendors and ensure the authenticity of your sales leads. Doing so will also protect your business’s reputation, build stronger customer relationships and improve sales outcomes. Assumed’s unique capabilities make it a powerful ally in this process, helping you ensure lead authenticity proactively and reliably.
Remember, in the realm of sales leads, quality over quantity. It’s better to have a few authentic leads that convert than many unverified ones that don’t.