The Seed Pay-Per-Lead – FAQs

What is the definition of a 'lead'?

A 'lead', as normally referred to in business, is merely a name and a contact address and number. Companies selling 'leads' typically just sell prospect lists (lists of businesses & contact details) that fit certain criteria. The onus will be on you to contact that person and introduce yourself, your company and its services, and convince them that they should buy your product or service. Therefore, these are effectively 'cold contacts' that have not expressed an interest in buying your product or service.

A 'lead' from The Seed is so much more: it is a genuine business enquiry from someone who is actually interested in buying your product or service, emailed directly to you and eliminating the need for time-consuming and non-productive cold calling.

A 'lead' from The Seed is analogous to someone filling in the 'Contact Us' form on your own website. They have already read about what your company offers and now they are getting in contact for more information or a quotation.

Click here for example leads

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What is The Seed Pay-Per-Lead? How does it work? How can it help grow my business?

For information on what Pay-Per-Lead is, how it works and the benefits of it to your business, click here

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Can I stop at any time? Is there a minimum term commitment or tie-in period?

The Seed offers a true pay-as-you-go service. There is no tie in period, no minimum term commitment and no obligation to continue using the service if you don.t feel it works for you. You can login to your management area at anytime and deactivate your account which will stop the leads being sent to you. Any remaining money in your account will be refunded to you on request.

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What do you do to verify each lead is genuine?

As soon as a lead is received, our Customer Services team call the enquirer to verify the lead is genuine before passing on to our customers. They ask the enquirer a number of questions targeted at the category that the lead relates to and provide as much information as possible when sending through the validated leads. We aim to send validated leads on to customers as quickly as possible. The majority of our leads are forwarded on within 1 hour of being received.

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Where do the leads come from?

When you sign up to The Seed you will be asked to enter a brief profile of your company. Once your account has been activated this profile is distributed across our network of partner sites. Our network consists of sites with content on the same theme as the categories of business we sell leads in. Your profile will appear next to relevant content on the partner sites. They will see your profile and if they are interested in the services your company offers they can send you an enquiry (lead) via the online form. For example, a general business portal website with articles and advice on all aspects of running a business might have an article about the benefits of Direct Mail within the marketing section of the site. Our module would appear on this page showing the profiles of some of our Direct Mail customers.

Click here for example of partner site

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How many other companies are there in the same category as my business? How many companies are leads sold to?

Although we may have lots of companies in the same category we only ever show 7 companies at a time. When our module is displayed on a partner site it only has a maximum of 7 companies listed. For instance, if a user is viewing a page of content related to Direct Mail our module will show up to 7 of our Direct Mail customers. This means your profile will only ever be shown next to a maximum of 6 other company profiles. If the user is interested in getting more information or a quote from the companies displayed they get to select which companies to send the lead to. The user can obviously select up to a maximum of 7 companies to send lead to but typically it is less than 7 as the user might only want quotes from 3 different companies and might not want to speak to as many as 7 different companies.

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What is the quality of leads like? Can I get a refund for poor quality leads?

We strive to maintain the highest quality leads possible. All our marketing is targeted specifically at people looking for services in the business categories we sell leads in. Our team call and validate each lead before it is passed on to our customers. Due to the fact that you only pay for each lead you receive we believe our Pay-Per-Lead service is one of the most cost-effective forms of marketing there is. See how much more cost-effective it is compared to advertising and calculate your Return on Investment (click here)

The overall quality of our leads is very high but obviously the quality of each individual lead varies from lead to lead. As I.m sure you can appreciate it is impossible to judge each lead on its individual merits. It is logistically impossible to charge a higher amount for the top quality leads and a lower lead price for the lower quality leads. The cost per lead is therefore calculated as a median value that reflects the fact that some leads will be of exceptional quality and some leads will be of poorer quality. We believe that this range in lead quality is also reflected in the low lead price. For more information about the average breakdown in lead quality click here. For this reason, we do not give a refund based on the quality of individual leads. However, we will give a refund for a lead if it is a genuinely erroneous lead. See below for a definition of an erroneous lead.

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I've just received an erroneous lead. How do I get a refund?

An erroneous lead is not a poor quality lead. We do not give a refund based on the quality of individual leads . see above. An erroneous lead is one that is not genuine. We will refund your money in any of the following circumstances:

Duplicates . you receive duplicate leads from the same organisation
Not contactable . You are unable to make contact with the lead as neither the email address or telephone number is valid
False lead . You find that the enquirer has no knowledge of submitting the enquiry

There should be no need to dispute a lead for reasons 2) or 3) as we call and validate every lead but we have the facility just in case. You can apply for a refund for an erroneous lead by logging into the management area and disputing the lead within 30 days of receipt. Once this claim has been verified by our customer service staff a refund will be applied to account.

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What size company is The Seed suited to?

The beauty of The Seed is that it works for absolutely any business wanting to generate new business while keeping costs down. Be it a one man band or a company with 200+ employees, every business can benefit. Our fully-automated system allows you to easily cap the maximum number of leads you will receive each day or you can pause / unpause your account at anytime if you need to.

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How many leads will I receive? Can I set a limit?

The number of leads deliverable varies between categories. Some categories receive a higher volume of leads than others. However, whatever the category you can easily control the maximum number of leads you receive each day to suit your capacity to act on them. Not only can you set a limit on the number of leads you receive every day across your account, but you can also limit the number you receive from each specific category. All this is easily done in the management area of your account.

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How much does it cost?

Pay-Per-Lead is just that - you only pay for each genuine business lead you receive. If you don.t receive any leads, you pay nothing. Your account gets debited by the price per lead each time you receive a lead. You need to pre-pay to add credit to your account but your account can be put live with as little as £50.

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Does the lead price change?

The price per lead for each category is subject to change from time-to-time in line with altering business trends and variations in supply and demand. These changes are generally very infrequent and current prices will always be displayed on this site.

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How long has The Seed been going?

Our parent company has been generating business leads on a Pay-Per-Lead basis since 2002. This was previously done by means of a manual system. The Seed has been developed in response to customer feedback as a fully-automated lead generation solution. The Seed took two years to develop and was officially launched at the end of 2005.

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How quickly can I start receiving leads?

Once you have carried out steps necessary to put your account live (click here for process) your profile will be distributed across our network of sites. How soon you receive a lead is dependent on the how much volume there is for the particular categories of business you selected. For higher volume categories you could potentially start to receive leads within a few hours. It might take several days for lower volume categories.

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Do the leads come from UK companies?

We currently only target the UK, this therefore means that almost all the leads come from UK companies. But, obviously, the nature of the Internet means that if someone is looking for your particular product or service, leads could come from anywhere in the world. Currently about 98% of leads are from the UK.

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I only want leads from companies within my local area

The Seed targets the whole of the UK, and as such, leads could come from companies anywhere in the UK. It is not possible to close the net in to target businesses in a localised area, so The Seed suits companies capable of dealing nationwide.

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Are my credit card details secure?

At The Seed we take security very, very seriously. We use the latest 128-bit strong SSL (Secure Socket Layer) encryption which ensures that any communications between your computer and ourselves is unreadable by anyone else. This means that your credit card details and other confidential information cannot be intercepted or altered by anyone else.
You can test this by clicking the GeoTrust SSL Security Seal on this page.

All transactions are processed securely by HSBC Merchant Services.

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Do you accept PayPal?

Unfortunately not. Most of our customers use our Autobilling mechanism so that their accounts always remain in credit. This would not be possible with PayPal. At present we only accept payment by debit or credit cards.

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My category of business is not featured

We are always keen to add new categories of business to The Seed and we welcome your suggestions. Click here to contact us and suggest a category.

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I am not receiving your emails. What do I do?

This may be because you are using a free email service or your spam filter is incorrectly configured. Here is what we advise:

Free Email Services (eg. AOL, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, etc.) - if you experience problems when using a free email service such as AOL, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, etc. it is because these services have extremely aggressive email spam filters. Due to the fact these are free services they have huge amounts of subscribers and consequently receive billions of spam emails a day. They therefore set their spam filters at extremely high levels and as a result many non-spam emails are also removed.

It is generally accepted that these type of free email accounts are unsuitable for business purposes; it is better to use a proper email account setup using your business domain name (eg. info@businessname.com). If you do use a free email service it is important you make sure our emails are not blocked as all leads are sent by email and we cannot be held responsible for you not receiving emails. If you do continue to use a free email service you can change the settings to always allow our emails through the spam filter. All the major free email services such as AOL, Yahoo Mail & Hotmail allow you to add a filter so that it allows through any emails containing ‘The Seed’ in the subject line. All automated emails sent from our system contain this in the subject line so they will be allowed through. If you do not know how to do this please speak with your email service provider.

All the leads you receive are sent by email and are also viewable online. To view leads online click on the number of leads in the ‘Manage Leads’ section or run a report in the ‘Reports’ section. We advise doing this regularly to make sure you are not missing any leads.
Spam Filter - if you have your own spam filter software installed on your system you need to ensure it is not blocking our emails as all leads are sent by email as we cannot accept responsibility for any that you do not receive as a result of software installed on your system.

To prevent our emails from being blocked by the spam filter you can setup a filter than automatically allows any emails that contain ‘The Seed’ in the subject line. All automated emails sent from our system contain this in the subject line so they will be allowed through. If you do not know how to do this please speak with your software provider.

All the leads you receive are sent by email and are also viewable online. To view leads online click on the number of leads in the ‘Manage Leads’ section or run a report in the ‘Reports’ section. We advise doing this regularly to make sure you are not missing any leads.

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