The boberdoo Opportunity Engine

While some clients come to boberdoo ready to start, or continue growing, their lead generation business, many show up at our door just trying to execute on a single opportunity. 

Yes, obviously, from a boberdoo sales perspective, it is always nice to have a new lead generation client that has already been in business or one that is well-funded. As I have talked about before, the three lead generation company killers have always been the inability to generate leads, the failure to sell leads or not enough money to outlast the learning curve. 

The single opportunity client is sometimes, but not always, a dud. Some have found the ability to glue a series of single opportunities together and that has proven to build successful businesses. Some never get it off the ground. Some ride it for three months and are done.

These single opportunities come in many different shapes and sizes. They might be pure data, including leads, clicks, calls, live transfers, appointments, intake or impressions. Many of the single-opportunity clients we see are lead buyers looking to act on a lead-selling situation. Some examples are:

1. Someone running display ads wants to run them nationally to get a cheaper rate, but can only handle leads in a specific set of states. They want to monetize those leads that they cannot utilize themselves. 
2. The same story applies to organic leads coming into a company website in geographies that are not covered.
3. Arbitrage opportunities still exist on both the vendor side and lead buyer side. A client secures a great new affiliate for their business and wants to utilize the same affiliate for a new vertical of leads that they wish to sell, rather than handling it themselves.
4. Pop-ups, exit traffic, interstitial ads and thank-you page real estate have all been single-opportunity efforts at one time or another. 
5. Some verticals, such as legal, have opportunities throughout the entire sales funnel, from clicks to intake. Lawyers are not necessarily the greatest salespeople by default, so we have clients that jump in at the bottom of the funnel to try and take inbound calls and convert them into fully signed legal clients.
6. Clicks to clicks. Clicks to leads. Clicks to calls. Leads to clicks (sounds backwards, honestly, but there are verticals where a big brand will pay more for a click than a lead). Leads to calls. Leads to live transfers. Leads to appointments. Raw calls to live transfers/appointments. Raw calls/live transfers to intake. There are many places where these opportunities can arise and be paired with a suitable vendor or lead buyer.

A lack of potential to scale is often the issue, but it is not the only one. Where the single opportunities fail:

1. Some things do not scale because the audience is just not big enough. We had a client many years ago who was doing well with Google clicks for B2B leads. However, once they tried to scale that up beyond a certain number of leads per day, the cost per lead skyrocketed, and the quality nosedived. It eventually led to the business's demise, as they overpromised the number of leads they could deliver.
2. Some opportunities have a short lifespan. Keyword costs jump. Competitors climb on the bandwagon and take some of your traffic. Lead buyers cancel their lead-buying program.
3. Risks and costs are higher today than they were 10 years ago. Dotting all those I's and crossing all those T's with lawyers, contracts, insurance, compliance and testing takes time and money. 
4. Many lead buyers present these opportunities, and although they have been buying leads for years, they have not been selling them. There is a learning curve.

After years of seeing these ideas come through, my advice would be to stop and take a breath. Figure out if this is an opportunity that can be grown or if it is big enough on its own to cover the time and money it takes to do things correctly. We love the entrepreneurial spirit that accompanies many of these opportunities and are actively working on a few new features specifically for these customers. If you have encountered other one-time opportunities in the past that you would like to share, we would love to hear from you - sales@boberdoo.com.