Offline opportunity what do you think?

I guess it would depend on a few things.

How much does he charge for his services? If they are higher ticket services, it might be good to go with the 20% commission.

Also how well does his typical customer convert. If his closing rate is high, you might want to stick with the 20% commissions.

Reason to stick with a cost per lead program is the fact that you get paid upfront and you don't have to worry about how well the leads convert. This might be good, since the online program is not proven yet.

Another option might be getting paid per lead up front and then later move to a commissioned type structure. This might work well especially well since you are doing a lot of work in the beginning to generate leads for his business with no payoff until the person converts into a sale.

Hope that helps....

No only no, but hell no.

I never work with bricks and mortar businesses on a percentage basis. In the 20 years I've worked as a marketing consultant and the 15 years I've worked with the internet, I've had hundreds of offers from even some very large companies to work on an incentive basis.

I did it a couple of times early on, and I can tell you there's a compelling reason to not do it - and one that you should share with your prospect that doesn't want to invest in their business by hiring you to set things up for them.

See, they want to hedge their bet. What if this guy doesn't work out for me? What if I agree to pay him all kinds of money and things don't work.

Let me ask a question.

If Pepsi pays the NFL $30,000,000 for a Superbowl commercial, and Pepsi's sales don't go up, did the network or the NFL fail to deliver their services?

No. There are so many variables in the middle, but the commercial ran in front of millions of people. You fulfilled your end of the bargain.

I tell businesses that want me to take a percentage of the action in exchange for my services that if they want to do that, then I will dedicate a major percentage of my time working to grow our company, because I want a substantial stake in equity ownership. If I am spending all the energy building their company, and in the end they can't deliver to their customer base, then I am equally at risk.

Flip it around the other direction, if things become wildly successful, how will they feel about paying me 20% or whatever for the rest of their lives? That might be great now, but in a year when they sit down with the bank for some additional operating or growth line of credit and the loan officer says no because they've got this really expensive ongoing expense of 20% even on recurring client deals, the business owner may regret their extremely short-sighted, expensive decision.

When a business owner asks me that, I just cut to the chase and ask them if they are just concerned about my service delivery and start there. It usually means that I hadn't completely sold them on the value vs. my costs yet.

I know guys like Jeff Walker are out there teaching people to take a cut of the action on a product launch, but the accounting oversight and auditing WILL become a major legal issue - and I guarantee will result in some lawsuits before it's over.