I ponder things.  I'm a ponderer.  I mull this way and consider that way and-- when I'm in the mood-- I ponder from many angles.  And recently I started pondering about this whole online lead question.  After considerable pondering, I became convinced of two things:  1) online leads are clearly diamonds in the rough and 2) a lot of people have a strange sense of entitlement when it comes to who should get to extract these diamonds.  

For years I've watched [and occasionally participated in] the debate about online leads and the many lead generation companies that provide them to REALTORS®.  Clearly there are folks who have used lead generators and have benefitted from them-- just as there are those that have used them and didn't.  Judging anecdotally from the commentary, more people have tried them and failed than have tried and succeeded-- a challenge certainly for the lead generators because success and failure both breed word-of-mouth marketing.  Is the failure-to-success ratio because of some inherent deficiency in the lead quality delivered or is it because so many users fall onto the wrong side of the typical sales production 80-20 curve?

The typical argument I've seen against the existence of lead generators is that they step 'in between' the lead and the REALTOR® that should be receiving the lead naturally.  The argument is that the lead generators usurp the natural order, act as an interloper and cart away value that should be going to "A" and rather, they sell it to "B" without adding value.  And there's a strong sentiment against them existing-- for just that reason.  But are they truly adding 'no value' and who, rightfully should be entitled to an online lead?  I guess it depends on whether you're 'in the 80' or 'in the 20' in several ways.

If you're in the 20 that jumped up and established an online presence early, learned the game thoroughly, and mastered how to drive lead volumes, you likely think that online opportunities searching your town should be yours.  You earned them with your online efforts.  But if you're in the 80, you disagree.  You prefer to receive 'value' by having someone else establish a presence, learn the game, and master the traffic rules for you.  Some of you in the 20 are also 'in the 20' with your sales skills-- but, of course, some of you aren't.  Getting the leads and closing the leads isn't always synonymous.  Likewise, a healthy volume of folks willing to pay a lead generator to deliver that 'value' they won't or can't deliver to themselves will find themselves falling similarly into the 80 with respect to their sales skills. 

When 20's get leads-- either from their own efforts or from a lead generator, they receive tremendous value.  When 80's get them, there's little 'value' received because 80's aren't especially good at extracting it.  Whether you're great at managing your own online lead generation or paying someone to do it for you, it's still a job for you to extract the latent 'value' from the lead.  And 20's do that better than 80's because they're simply better at mining for online diamonds than the 80's.  They see the rock in its rough state and they know what to do to extract it.  They separate it from the ore it rests in.  They polish it.  They cut it.  They make an ordinary rock with seemingly no value sparkle and they create wealth!  The 80's often never notice the rock, won't polish, can't cut and consequently perceive little value. 

Chris Hendricks