Fix the leads, fix the pickup rate

If you run a merchant cash advance shop and your leads aren’t picking up, whether they’re live leads, exclusive leads or aged leads, there’s a very simple reason why, and why your reps are always complaining: “These leads aren’t picking up. The phone numbers are bad. All these leads are bad.” There’s a very simple fix. Before I tell you anything, so you can actually trust me, real quick, who am I? My name is Alex Makowski. I run Infinite Bookings. We’ve been around for just over three years, and we are an MCA lead aggregator, a lead generation company. We have every type of lead under the sun: real-time exclusive leads, real-time shared leads, live submission data and aged leads. That gives us a big insight into which types of leads are actually picking up and which are getting the best results for our

clients, and which types of clients get the best results with which types of leads. We process a lot of leads: roughly a thousand net new leads every single week, working with 50 different brokerages. So we have a lot of data on the back end. Not just how many leads we can get, but what those leads are actually doing. How much are they funding for? How many of them are funding? What’s the pickup rate? I’m going to share that with you in this video. The main thing you have to do is stop blaming the dialler. Obviously your dialler has to be in check, and you have to have verification on all your phone numbers. But nine times out of ten, the reason these leads aren’t picking up is not the dialler. It’s not because you’re not FaceTime-audioing them. The problem isn’t the pickup rate on the dialler. It is who you are calling. It is

physically the type of leads you’re getting. I’ll expand on this, because we have aged leads that are twelve months old, and we also have real-time leads where our clients get a notification the second the lead opts in. So stop blaming the dialler, saying the dialler is causing people not to pick up. That’s that. Who else is calling your merchant? The main thing is that you want to get away from shared leads as much as possible. Now, I understand there’s no such thing as a truly exclusive lead in the MCA industry, but you can get leads that are exclusive to you, as much as you possibly can, where the only person they’re sent to is you, the second they opt in. That’s what gives you a true layup deal, if that person hasn’t

opted into any other ads right before or after. Most of the time they will have, but it’s not going to be nearly as many as if you were buying straight-up shared leads with 50 other brokers, or aged leads that were shared 50 different times. Literally, that’s what happens. I talk to these lead vendors and I don’t know how they go to sleep at night, knowing they reshare the same lists with 50 different people. This is really just an illustration: you don’t want to be competing. If you have cash flow that you can reinvest into leads, reinvest it into leads. It is the highest return you’re going to get, because you do not want to be in this situation. People have become accustomed to fighting other brokers all the time, when there’s a much more elegant and

simple way, where it can just be you and the merchant. That’s the ideal scenario, but you can limit how many other brokers are actually calling your leads. I alluded to this in the previous section: you can either pay with your time or you pay with your money. You pay with your time if you have no money. If you’re just starting out, or you’re a few-man shop without much cash flow to reinvest into high-quality leads, then yes, you’re going to have to do shared leads or aged leads: dial, text, email, and chase a bunch of leads. That’s completely fine. It’s part of the process and it’s going to work. You’re just going to have to put in more time and effort instead of money. But if you’re funding a few million dollars a month and you can afford real-time exclusive leads that only come to you, you should be

doing that, because it’s going to make all your deals a pure layup. Now, I don’t want to paint the picture that it’s all sunshine and rainbows. Even with exclusive leads, like I mentioned, there’s no such thing as a truly exclusive lead in MCA. Everyone is being shopped around. But it gives you a much, much higher chance of actually closing that deal, and of that merchant not getting picked up by some other broker. So you either pay with your time or you pay with your money. Say you’re just starting out and you have $1,000 you want to spend. Your best bet is aged leads, instead of risking it all on a few real-time contacts. Even though the real-time contacts are good, they’re a lot more expensive. So you get thousands of leads, you call them, you pay with your time. You start cheap and you close deals. You save

your money. You reinvest the cash flow. You start getting higher-quality leads: live submissions for $10 a lead, $20, $30. And you constantly climb the ladder of what is the highest-quality lead you can get. Because the highest-quality lead, the highest-priced lead that is actually accurately priced, is going to give you the cheapest cost per funded deal and the lowest effort per funded deal, which is another metric people don’t focus on much: how much effort and time am I putting in to get this deal, compared with working with a better lead provider? And eventually you are just paying with money. That’s really what I recommend to all brokers. If I see a broker who’s just starting out and doesn’t want to risk too much money, I’m going to say: “Look, just get some aged leads, close a few deals from there, and slowly work

up the ladder.” But if I see people who are already paying with money and don’t want to put as much effort into each deal, which is a very good form of leverage, then you pay with money. Now, expensive doesn’t mean exclusive. There are a lot of big generic lead vendors, and I’m not going to name names, that charge $120 or $200 a lead, and it’s still resold to other brokers. Sure, you can close deals, but you’re fighting an uphill battle. That’s why niche providers like us, generating leads from Meta and other sources, can sell them at $50 to $90: we don’t have a massive New York office to pay for. We don’t have a payroll of millions of dollars a month. We simply have good leads, we mark them up, and we sell them to you,

shared or exclusive, whatever you choose. There is a time and a place for shared leads, but there is never a time and a place for leads that were shared with literally 50 or 100 other brokers. That’s the hard truth. The hard part is finding a vendor you can trust: one that has case studies, experience and connections in the industry, that understands what it actually takes to make a good lead and understands the ins and outs of your business. And it really comes down to which problem you want to solve. You either find a vendor you can actually trust, and it’s hands-off. You have no day-to-day management; the leads just get sent to you. You have less insight into everything, which isn’t a pro, it’s a con. And it needs to be someone you can trust. Once you trust them, you really have a solid lead vendor, but they’re always going to be

just another lead vendor. They can leave you, you can leave them; there isn’t that much commitment. If you do it yourself, there’s more transparency, since you have everything, and more control, but there’s a bigger time commitment. You’re still paying with your time, to a point. There are pros and cons. You have to run and manage it all, because, as I’ve mentioned in my other videos, ad creatives fatigue and campaigns stop working. That’s a very natural thing. But you have to decide. The worst thing you can do is not know, be indecisive, and try to do both at the same time, so that neither of them ends up working. So decide: are you going to build it yourself, or are you going to find a lead vendor? Then maybe, once you’ve found a lead vendor or two you genuinely trust and you’re funding deals from them consistently, you can start to

build it on your own. Once you outpace what the lead vendors are doing, sure, you can leave them. Either way, you want to stop paying with your time: dialling all these people, sending SMS blasts, chasing all these people. That is not the intelligent way of doing this. At the end of the day, if you fix the leads, you fix the pickup rate. That’s what this whole video is about: there’s no secret hack to fixing your pickup rate. The simple hack is to call higher-quality, higher-intent, less-shopped-around leads. That is the ultimate way to have good pickup rates. And that’s why we’re able to send real-time, exclusive, mobile-verified phone numbers to our MCA brokerages. The second a lead comes in, we send it to our client. They call it

within 60 seconds and they can get the merchant on the phone right away. They’re not chasing these people. Chasing people was 2010, 2015; sure, you could chase people then. Now there’s a much more intelligent way of doing it. So if you run a merchant cash advance brokerage, or you’re a broker at a brokerage, and you’re looking for high-quality real-time exclusive or shared MCA merchants doing $30,000 to $100,000 a month, maybe a little more, all in the top industries, restaurants, dental clinics, HVAC companies, landscaping companies, the perfect industries, requesting a bare minimum of $15K, although our average is much higher than that, with verified mobile phone numbers so you’re not calling landlines, business lines and receptionists, and no previous defaults: book a call through the link in the

description below. We’ll walk you through how our system works, how we generate the leads, how they get sent to you and the different lead products we have, and hopefully we can work together. If you’re not going to do that, at least take something from this video and implement it. Don’t just keep it in your head; actually implement what you learned here, because this is what generates us thousands of leads a month, and our clients are funding at really good rates: good lead-to-application and application-to-approval ratios. We track every data metric we can, and we have good rates. So implement it. Don’t just sit on the information and do nothing with it. We’ll see you in the next video. Thanks.