What’s a Fake Lead?
I’ve been having quite a few one-on-one conversations with clients and folks in the industry about fake leads. I also see many social posts about this and I’m often tagged and pulled into the conversation. And since you can’t hear my one-on-one conversations, I thought I’d address it here, as most of those conversations are very similar.
Listen to this new 10-minute episode for a different perspective on what is and isn’t a fake lead, and what you can do to improve your conversion, and outlook.
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What’s a Fake Lead
What’s a fake lead? Listen to this episode. See where I’m going with this. Hi, it’s Alan Berg. Welcome back to another episode of the Wedding Business Solutions Podcast. I wanted to have a conversation here that I’m having one on one with people, and I’ve seen it online and other things, and I think it’s time to have this discussion more one to many, if you will, and I certainly look for your feedback on it as well.
And I’m not one to shy away from a difficult subject, and this is one that comes up a lot. And when I get to have the one on one conversations, it’s not that I’m trying to change anybody’s mind, but I believe that there’s Things that we don’t think about when we make statements like that. So let me, let me tell you where I’m going with this.
You see people talking all the time about fake leads. Well, I think we need to put different types of leads, different types of inquiries into different buckets. So let’s start with one that’s pretty obvious. There are obvious scams. That happened when it comes to people messaging us or emailing us or filling out our contact forms.
I mean, we have people that are just trying to scam us. If you go on your inbox every day on your email, I know I have it. I just had one, actually I had two of them just within the last hour. One of them looked like it was square cause I take square payments. But then when I saw the email address, I’m like, that’s not it.
Another was a docu sign. I’m thinking, I don’t have any documents I’m supposed to be signing here. And I went and looked and I looked at the email address again, and they’re clearly spoofing somebody’s email because it, it, it definitely wasn’t real, but they make them look real and really real these days.
It’s just, it’s so difficult to you know, go through your day without having to deal with things like that, but that’s a bucket. That is definitely a, that’s not a fake lead. That’s somebody trying to fish, P H I S H, not the band, but fish trying to get your information. And those are happening every day.
Right. So we have those, we have those scams and then we have spam, right? And spam is you just get stuff in your inbox that you didn’t ask for. You didn’t sign up for whatever. And for me, it’s like, you know, people send me stuff. Fine. Let me unsubscribe. I unsubscribe. And it’s the same thing I would ask of people.
I don’t mind if somebody unsubscribes from my list because you don’t want to get my stuff anymore. That’s fine. It bothers me when somebody sends a mass email out and you can’t unsubscribe. You know, because you can’t unsubscribe, they just keep sending you stuff. I have people that will reply to my emails and say, unsubscribe me.
I’m thinking, we have an unsubscribe link on the bottom of every email. We do it legally. We do it. It’s there on every one of them. You can unsubscribe yourself. I don’t say that to them. That’s my inside voice. I just go in, unsubscribe them, send them back. You have been unsubscribed. There you go. I see a lot of is people calling things fake leads because they don’t get a reply.
And the truth is. You just don’t know just like I don’t know if you reply to somebody And they don’t reply to you. That doesn’t make it a fake lead. What it means is they did not make you a priority at that moment, or they’re not interested and they’re just not telling you that, but it doesn’t make a fake lead.
It doesn’t mean they’ve booked somebody else. Right? So let’s say somebody goes to your contact form, fills out your contact form, fills all the information out. You send them a reply right away, like, you know, you’re supposed to. You don’t hear back. Is that a fake lead? You don’t know. It might be. Right? We do a lot of secret shopping.
Our secret shopping is definitely a fake lead, but we make it look like a regular lead. We don’t reply to you because we’re tracking to see how often you follow up. A lot of times the client is paying us to do it to their own company to see as well as maybe some competitors. So I will grant you those are fake leads because we are not going to buy from you ever.
We, we do, what did we do last year? 200 of them. So out of the hundreds of thousands of more than that, right. More than hundreds of thousands of leads that came into business across the U S R 200, isn’t the blip, right. And the one that you got, isn’t the blip, right. You got less from us than you did from real scammers.
Okay. But I see this, whether my Facebook messenger or I think about Facebook posts. Every day I have to go block somebody because they’re commenting on my post. The algorithm keeps showing you up as a, you know, the, you know, my friends and things like that. Those are scammers. We know that that’s fake.
So if you’re advertising on a platform, whether it’s Facebook or Instagram or The Knot or WeddingWire or any other site around the country, around the world, and you get an inquiry and you respond right away and you don’t hear back. You cannot say that that’s a fake lead because you just don’t know, right?
Maybe, just maybe, if you responded differently, you might get a different response from them. Now, I know that’s the case because I get people responding to me. I just got, matter of fact, my latest Google review was from a venue in Ireland who’s telling me that because of my podcast, my books and things, she’s getting 99%.
I don’t know if that’s really 99%, but she’s getting 99 percent of people responding. You can read the Google review on my Google reviews, right? That’s the case. And she’s got to get a CRM system now because so many people are responding. She needs to be able to keep track of that. Well, where they fake leads before, and now they’re not.
Or was it just because she’s responding differently, she’s getting better conversion. And that’s what I find with my clients. That’s what I find with audiences when I get feedback. Yes, there are definitely some fake leads out there, but the percentage is so much smaller than people are saying because you’re making a judgment based upon something that you just don’t have the facts.
Because someone didn’t respond does not mean it was a fake lead. Period. You don’t know that. That is a fact. I am saying that factually. You don’t know. I don’t know. We can’t tell the difference. I’ve had people say, Oh, I can tell the difference. No, you can’t. Right. You got contact information from someone and you have no way of saying that that person is not a real person.
If you do, then you can say that. Like if you called us out for on our secret shopping, which I’ve had people say, Oh, I know who that was. And. And it wasn’t us, right? It was somebody else. They’re saying, oh, that was you that did that on Tuesday. I was like, no, we did that last week, right? You just don’t know.
So instead of calling something a fake lead, if you have that happen a lot, why don’t you say, well, maybe the way I’m responding on this platform isn’t, isn’t resonating with those particular customers. It could be. Other factors involved in that. It could be that you have a search criteria that you either didn’t complete on that platform.
So they’re not able to filter to a better clientele. It could be that you’re not putting your best foot forward in terms of the photos, in terms of the price point or things like that, that are not getting you the right type of lead. But, you know, if there are other people in your market that are getting that price point and they are doing business with those people, maybe it’s just the way you’re responding.
And I say, maybe because. I believe it is the way that you’re responding. And just because it works the way you respond to people from your website, and that isn’t responding the way if they inquire through Facebook they’re not or wedding wire or something, you, you do have to adapt to different audiences, different ways.
I do believe that somebody that inquires through your website should be responded to differently than somebody that inquires through some of those other platforms. Now, if you’re doing the same thing everywhere and it’s working great. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But if it’s not, instead of blaming, hey, it’s a fake lead saying, well, maybe, maybe I need to do something different.
That’s what I do. If I’m not getting the kind of response I want, if I do a MailChimp blast or something to my list, or if I send out an email to a small group, I say, well, that didn’t resonate. Change the subject line, change the messaging, shorten the message, add a graphic, take away a graphic altogether, no graphics.
I tried different things instead of saying, oh, it’s them. No, it’s always me. If I’m not getting a response, it’s my fault. I’m the one that, that is sending this particular message, not resonating with my audience. Do I need, again, need to do something so it’s not going into spam, right, on their, on their end?
Do I need to change the way the message looks on mobile because maybe I wrote it on my big monitor on my desktop and they’re getting it on mobile? Am I previewing it? Did I remember to send one to myself first to make sure it looks right? All those things, right? I’m not going to say it’s a fake lead.
And I have people that ghost me all the time, despite that I wrote a book, right? If you’re watching on video over my shoulder, there’s a book. Why are they ghosting me? I do the same thing. I teach you. Some people just don’t respond. Were they fake leads? I’m not going to call it that. They took the time to fill out the contact form.
I don’t know that. I’m going to say that is someone that changed their mind. That is someone that found somebody else and just doesn’t want to tell me. But if I stop following up, I have ended that particular string, that particular conversation. If I keep following up, I just might get better response. If you saw the episode that I did on secret shopping, you’ll see that there is a very big difference between how many people, how many times people are following up.
In the wedding and event industry. And I’ll say in all industries, because we’re consumers, we see it other ways as well, but I will tell you the people that are following up more are the people that are going to, going to convert more business because most of your competitors have given up way too soon.
The secret shopping, the stats that I showed and that I spoke about at wedding MBA were first of all, 18 percent of the companies we secret shop didn’t respond at all. Now were those fake leads? Yeah, but how would you know? You didn’t even respond. Half of the companies that did respond gave up then. The other half tried at least twice.
Only a third tried three times. And then it went down from there. And there were companies that are still following up after we stopped counting at 10 times. So what’s a fake lead? A fake lead, again, not a scam, that’s definitely a fake lead, not the spam that you get. It may or may not, may not be a fake lead.
The reason I say that about spam is because what makes it spam is you’re not interested. It’s like junk mail. When you get to your mailbox and you look through stuff, what’s junk mail? It’s the stuff you’re not interested in, right? So what, that’s a different category. But as far as inquiries go, somebody filling out a contact form or messaging you through Facebook Messenger, Instagram Messenger, The Knot Messenger, WeddingWire, your website, texting, WhatsApp, whatever.
Somebody’s sending in an inquiry that appears to be a lead. It’s not a fake lead just because they don’t respond. As a matter of fact, it’s not a fake lead until you can prove that it’s a fake lead. So what should you do differently? Well, that’s actually what you should do is do something differently. If you’re having a lot of people not responding to what you’re doing.
You have to look in the mirror and say, I need to do something different to try to get a better conversion from these people. You can hear many of the other episodes I’ve done on here and in my books about how to do that. I’m sure there’s conferences and things you can go to as well. So it’s not just me that’s singing this song here, but there’s lots of opportunities.
There’s lots of information and things that you can do to learn how to respond differently than you’ve been doing. Cause just because it worked before doesn’t mean it’s going to work now and it doesn’t make it. A fake lead. I welcome your feedback. Please don’t just slam me and say that I’m, I’m, I’m supporting these platforms or whatever.
I’m agnostic to that in terms of this, it’s the same through Facebook and Instagram and your website. It is through other things. It’s not a fake lead just because they don’t respond unless you can prove that that is not a real person who’s looking for your service, who might end up booking somebody else and you called it a fake lead, right?
We just don’t know. Thanks for listening.
I’m Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you’d like to suggest other topics for “The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast” please let me know. My email is [email protected]. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.
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