I used to work for a marketing firm and partnered up with ThomasNet to provide additional lead generation sources to our clients. The agreed plan was that ThomasNet would write an eBook for our client on a specific topic, they would then push the ebook out to their large database, and our firm would receive leads of people who downloaded the ebook. Sounded like worthy endeavor but was thousands of dollars for the investment. You pay up front but if you break it down, each lead ends up costing almost $100 if memory serves me right.

We encountered the following issues:
- First off, their team is just completely unprofessional. They were sometimes behind schedule in building the ebook by months and would only finish if you reminded them about tasks. The work they did was then filled with lots of errors or very unimpressive. I was sometimes embarrassed to share the work with our clients because our firm had a higher standard when we created work for our clients in the past.
- Second - as far as the leads go, the program was a complete fraud. Our team would receive the leads and follow up on them. The leads would sometimes have absolutely nothing to do with what our clients manufactured... example being a furniture company allegedly downloaded a book on thermal heatsinks. Also, I would have a client that manufactured packaging and another that manufactured thermal heatsinks... so completely unrelated... and we would somehow receive some of the same leads saying that people downloaded ebooks for both companies. The chances of that happening are extremely unlikely but we would see this happen all the time amongst all of our clients. The final straws were when our team would get email replies or have live conversations with the leads that would politely insist that they never downloaded an ebook on that topic and they would remember doing so. A few had said they were always getting several calls like this and they could never understand why. It was pretty obvious that ThomasNet was just picking people at random to fill the lead quota they promised us when we started the program. Our management did a very poor job on following up on this but when we finally confronted ThomasNet about this they pretended like they didn't know what the problem was and would lie that there was an error. We were told a few times they were looking into it but again they would never get back to us. It is extremely shady for a business of this size to do this to smaller companies. They think that they can't be touched because they are the big fish in the pond.
- Another area of scamming they would do... you could set your leads to filter to only the types of leads that would be a fit. For example, maybe you were targeting only companies of a certain size or region. If you didn't pay attention, they would often try to pass leads in that did not fit your agreed upon filters.
- Overall we participated in this program with several clients over the course of about 12 months. The results were terrible and it is beyond obvious they are scamming any customers that go into this program. They were always finding different ways to try and explain how the leads worked as opposed to the truth. Then when it came to the other work they did, such as the ebooks or even website we had them work on, they were always behind schedule and provided extremely poor work when finally finished. Run away as fast as you can. Do not give this company any of your money or time.