Who Really Owns Your Leads?

Leads, leads, leads! In this industry, having leads is the foundation of getting prospects into your business and ultimately having them join your opportunity and/or team. Most opportunities that are available to us also have a way or a system that allows you to create leads or "opted in prospects". These systems are designed to allow you to have some sort of splash/landing page that intrigues the visitor into filling out a form for "more information".

The "more information" usually consists of being able to access a flash movie presentation, an audio link, a free e-book or other documentation and then the visitor's form information usually is passed into some sort of follow-up email auto-responder that performs a trickle up-sell campaign of some sort. These types of systems are essential to any online home business opportunity and failure to incorporate one into your daily business-building efforts could result in your own failure.

But do you really "own" the "leads" that you are creating with these systems? And if not, who does? If for any reason, you decide to change the opportunity or possibly add another opportunity to your portfolio of "multiple streams of income", are you allowed to market that new opportunity to them without risk of reprise? If you created and have written your own e-book, would you legally be allowed to market that product to those leads? This is the question we want to look at in this article.

The truth of the matter is that 95% of "in-house" systems available on the market that are tied in with its own opportunity, strongly prohibit any kind or form of cross-marketing advertising to the leads produced by their systems. Even if the lead never joins the opportunity that you may be working currently, you still could find yourself not in compliance with the terms and conditions of your marketing system.

We have seen time and time again that when a person may leave an opportunity to join another and then try to "cross-recruit" any members that may be in their own down-line, team members that they have brought into the business can face legal action by the company who owns the opportunity.

What we don't realize is that the same policies apply to leads and/or prospects that may never join that particular opportunity. The majority of the time, you are not allowed to export those leads and market to them something not offered by the company that provides the system they were created by.

Now in this industry, "Multiple Streams of Income" play an important role when cashing our paychecks that we make in this industry. It is vital to our business that we be allowed to market different opportunities or products to the same individual. Even thought the prospect is eager about joining a home based opportunity, the one they opt-in too may be out of their price range. Should this deter us from presenting them with another lower dollar opportunity? Of course not!

Possibly you as the sponsor or team leader may have an excellent knowledge on team building techniques that you would like to share with your leads. You may want to charge a small fee for the hosting of your product and the time and effort you put into it. Surely you would want to be able to market your product to your prospects.

But unfortunately as stated above, the systems that are tied in with any given opportunity prohibit you legally from doing so. Before doing anything like this you will want to examine the Terms and Conditions of any system that you agreed upon when signing up and purchasing.

This industry changes on a day to day basis, as well as possibly determines what or how many opportunities you may wish to promote at any given time. The time and effort that you put forth in creating leads and prospects should also give you permanent and absolute ownership of them as well. If you are still utilizing a marketing system that is tied in with its own opportunity, be sure to read the fine print to see if who really owns the lead you worked so hard to get!