"Fantastic Customer Success Manager"

8 weeks in to working with Lead Forensics and my customer success manager Lewis has already gone above and beyond the call of duty, helping me to set up and track my campaigns and liaising with some of our other partners to get the job done well, taking the time to teach me things along the way. He's fantastic, a massively helpful resource.

"Think carefully before signing anything!"

We signed up to Lead Forensics 2 years ago and our contract is due to finish at the end of December. We won't be renewing and here's why.

Firstly, if you're a business that sells widgets to other businesses that buy widgets I can see how this might work. You see that business X has been looking at your website and you ring them up and ask to speak to someone in the widget buying department and off you go. The positive reviews on here are testimony to that.

However, we work with schools, universities, festivals etc. We 'sell' workshops and shows. In the case of schools, the person who does the purchasing will be a teacher. The specific teacher could be one of many in the school. There's no way to identify who that might be from the LF data and even cross referencing it with lists of staff names and positions (if available) is unlikely to help. If you follow up on that 'lead', you might as well be cold calling anyway.

We were told by our account manager that we would need to speak to someone on average six times before making a sale. Having been a teacher, whose primary function is to teach and not to take sales calls I appreciate how annoying it is to receive unsolicited calls during the small amount of free time that you might have during the day. The odds are that you aren't going to be speaking to the person that visited your site anyway. Constantly calling is going to be very definitely counter-productive.

The real fundamental flaw for businesses like mine is that there is content on the site that a teacher or anyone just interested might take a look at during their lunch break or in the evening. If we follow these ‘leads’ up it’s a completely pointless exercise which just wastes everybody’s time. But there’s no way to tell who these people are.

Also, working with schools, we tend to get ‘leads’ that tell us that someone at a county council or university or some such visited our site. These institutions may have several thousand employees and it could be any one of them.

Ultimately the numbers speak for themselves. In two years we have had no sales as a result of Lead Forensics. Yes, that’s zero. We actually got more sales by paying someone to do 10 hours a month calling schools and asking for an email address that we could send some information to. It cost a lot less and, on average, generated one extra event a month.

To qualify that, I must say that we just gave up with Lead Forensics after about 14 months. It was interesting to see who visited but there was very little point in spending time trying to follow up.

After several months and the dawning realisation that this wasn’t going to work for us, despite the promises we were made at the start, we asked if we could get out of the contract. We were told a resounding ‘no’. Fair enough. Disappointing, but it’s a contract which we signed so we’ve bitten the bullet and carried on paying.

As a small business it’s basically the worst financial decision that we’ve made in nearly 20 years of trading and it annoys me to think of what else we could have done with that not insubstantial sum of money.

As for service; I think we had four different account managers during our first year. One of them lasted maybe a week. We haven’t heard from anyone at Lead Forensics for probably a year now.

About two weeks ago I emailed a letter on headed paper (as stipulated in the contract) notifying that we wouldn’t be renewing and asking for confirmation that the contract would terminate as planned and not roll over. We were emailed to say that a customer ‘success’ manager (couldn’t resist the quotes there) would be in touch within 48 hours to complete the process. We didn’t hear anything so last Thursday I emailed again. Still nothing.

The moral of this story is that you need to think very carefully about signing up to this. Think about who visits your website and why and if it’s going to be possible to differentiate them.

We made a mistake and it’s cost us a lot.

"Jordan was fantastic"

Jordan was fantastic, explaination of the system wa first class.

"During the last few weeks training I feel that the cloud of being new confusing software has been lifted and the sun is beginning to shine through."

During the last few weeks training everything seems to have "popped" into place from being new, and puzzling, to being something I am now going to be quite excited to work with.

"A very comprehensive solution and helpful customer success manager"

A very comprehensive solution to identifying and targeting leads.

Nathan has been a constant source of support during the on-boarding process and has always been on hand to answer any questions or queries I had

"Lead Forensics - First time user"

Today was my first time using Lead Forensics, and what I have learnt with the expert help from Holly Cull is truly amazing. As a business we will be able to make so much more use of the information available and I now look forward to growing our business from the support this software/application/system offers...Well done and thank you all!

"It's time to go legal with these lot…"

It's time to go legal with these lot now. Unending spam mails from a series of fake named individuals, up to 6 times a week and now the calls have started again. Mails to them, conversations with the over zealous humans and their clearly un-functioning unsubscribe feature have no effect. Evidently in cohoots with ICO as past complaints to them have gone unanswered too.

If you want your own business to inherit the same poor reputation that this crowd have earned themselves, then do sign up. If targeted marketing is your ambition, then find someone else - they're badly out of control and several times each week, prove that again and again.

Credit to the brain dead individuals that sit there inventing names of the 'Sent From' for this irrelevant, unwanted and disturbing garbage.

Something seriously needs to be done about their appalling operation.

"Spam, Spam and more Spam!"

All they do is spam. I wouldn't trust this company if this is how they act.

"Extremely persistent spammers."

Extremely persistent spammers.

I keep blocking them, and they keep sending from another domain.

Update in may 2021 - I've managed to block out a large number of their domains, but they've just changed the pattern, and an email recently got through again. They're still very active, as I can see from my mail server logs.

They now seem to be using email-lf.com

As is usually recommended, I never communicate directly with spammers, as that just confirms to them that the email address is in active use.

The talk about getting in touch with them so that they can unsubscribe you is in my opinion rubbish, since a responsible mailer wouldn't subscribe anyone who hasn't asked for it in the first place. The fact that they keep changing their domains shows very clearly that they're aware of their emails being blocked, and they do what they can to circumvent it. Instead of placing the responsibility on the receiver to unsubscribe (my mail server is hit by about 600 spam emails per day), they should engage in more responsible email practices, including automatically unsubscribing addresses that bounce.

If Lead Forensics would engage in more responsible email practices, and sticking to one domain rather than constantly switching, and scrubbing their email database from addresses that bounce, then this would just not be an issue.

"USED TO WORK HERE"

USED TO WORK HERE, PAUL THOMAS IS THE DRIVING FORCE OF IDIOCY IN THIS PLACE.....STAFF JUST DOING WHAT THEY MUST FOR A PAY CHEQUE, STAY AWAY!!!