I talked about building an effective B2B lead generation strategy in one of my posts. While many companies do have an in-house digital marketing team at their disposal to take care of the lead generation campaigns, some others like to outsource their scuffles related to B2B lead generation to an agency; an organization that is well-acquainted with the process and efficient enough to provide desired results.

But why do you think would a company want to outsource such an important aspect of their business to an outsider agency, and when is a right time to outsource rather than hire a team of in-house marketers for the job? Let’s find out.

Whether you have excelled in your business for decades, or you are just starting up a venture and want to focus on the basics of your business – on the products/services you are offering, and want to deploy your most valuable resources on the same, taking the help of a distinguished B2B lead generation firm is not a bad idea. In fact, it comes highly recommended by the industry leaders!

It is a wise decision to outsource lead generation in order to build a highly scalable business model wherein the sales and business leaders do what they specialize in, rather than trying their luck with every other aspect from the start to end of the lead generation cycle.

This will save a lot of time and they would be able to devote their expertise in converting leads into customers, rather than wasting time on finding who to contact.

Take, for instance, a scenario where you want to generate 10 workable (high conversion probability) opportunities every month.

For that, you would need 33 qualified leads, assuming the qualified leads to opportunities ratio to be 30%.

Assume lead to qualified leads ratio is again 30% which means you will need 100 leads/enquiries, for which, you will need to reach out to 1000 contacts, assuming a 10% response (enquiry) rate.

If a single Sales resource does market research, lead generation campaigns, and qualification, it will create a chaos and you would be robbing the sales person of his/her ability to actually deliver a great outcome.

A person indulging in qualifying leads and talking to prospects would barely be left with may be 20% of productive time to do lead generation, let’s not even talk about building contact database. It would be extremely difficult for him/her to bring new contacts to the top of the funnel.

And that is bound to produce undesirable results for the company and the senior leaders of the organization.

Someone at a company may be good at market research, while someone else may be great at running great lead generation campaigns. While one person may be good at creating creatives that speak for themselves, someone else might master the art of qualifying, speaking, and closing deals.

People in the lead generation industry carve a niche for themselves in certain aspects and as they become seniors, they are reluctant to move to the basics.

Also, why waste a skillful resource by assigning him/her to rather rudimentary tasks! As you leverage the services of a B2B lead generation agency, you are basically getting access to all those skill sets under one roof and beyond. Their lead generation processes are already optimized, they have different resources for all skill sets required and a company can really drive greater efficiency from their own sales personnel while keeping lead generation function outsourced to specialists in the field.

The inherent idea is to let the lead generation company do the market research, contact database development, and run lead generation campaigns for you, while you focus on doing what you do the best – making your products/services better, speaking to your customers, adding value in the conversations, and closing deals. The benefits with outsourcing come in a package; let’s have a peek at those.

When you ask a lead generation agency to take the front seat, you do not need to worry about hiring managers, telecallers, and sales persons on your own. The agency will have all the tools and professionals ready to start with your project right away.

They will be equipped with all the required technology to help you maximize your ROI from the campaigns. So, you will not be needed to carry out the cold-callings yourself; rather, they will do all the callings on your behalf and pass on the qualified leads for you to make the final conversion. This will save on a lot of time and resources that you can devote on other parts of running your business more efficiently.

One of the most important requirement out of any lead generation campaign is gaining insights. How effective is the overall strategy? How are the campaigns performing? Are you getting enough quality leads out of a campaign to continue it further, or should you scrap it off and get started with a newer and better campaign?

Now, when a start-up hires its own team of B2B lead generation professionals, they take some time settling in, gaining tips, knowledge, and best-practices related to your industry.

But a B2B lead generation agents have enough expertise already to start gaining momentum and insightful information the moment they start a campaign. This is particularly helpful if you want to take control of your B2B lead generation strategy in the days to come.

One instance that I can recall, a franchise based digital marketing company, WSI, hired Intelemark to connect its sales professionals with quality prospects. After some time of running campaigns for them, Intelemark suggested the WSI professionals to personalize their messages with staff-bio and pictures to the marketing collateral used for lead fostering. This move helped WSI enhance lead quality to such an extent that they reported closing half of the total leads generated as a result of the campaign.

Any B2B lead generation company has a team of expert sales and marketing professionals to aid you throughout your digital marketing funnel. Being an entrepreneur myself, I know exactly how much this means for a company that is just starting up.

While there is no dearth of experienced professionals, getting them on-board your newly-founded organization may be an uphill task most of the times. Tying up with an agency that already has experienced professionals on-board will work better in such a situation.

Among the issues entrepreneurs and founding members face often, budget-deficit is the foremost. You can’t deny the fact that it is a great barrier in the path of rise of any company. Cash crunches often hamper a company’s primary operations and cause salary delays, leading to loss of confidence among the employees.

In such circumstances, hiring specialists for each and every department may not always be a great choice. If you can get to a B2B lead generation company that can get you top-quality leads at a cost that is just a fraction of assembling and managing an in-house team of digital marketers, you should definitely go for it.

The best part about outsourcing your B2B lead generation is that you can pay per results, rather than the time and efforts invested; and this is a great advantage over an in-house team where the management bears the responsibility of the results and expenses are the same, irrespective of results.

While there are enough advantages for you to consider outsourcing your B2B lead generation in the early stages of your company’s life, every coin has two aspects and it’s the same with this particular strategy too.

The folks at the lead generation agency may not be as much informed about your range of products and services as you would be. It is essential to make them fully aware of all the features and aspects that you want to offer, else the whole idea may lead to nothing but failures.

The biggest cause of failures in terms of outsourced B2B lead generation projects is the fact that the agencies are not always the best match for your business. They might be immensely good at what they do, but if they fail to understand your business model, things would take a downslide from there.

So, it is very important to look out for their past projects, areas of expertise, and results delivered before signing up any B2B lead generation company. I will write about evaluating and selecting the right B2B lead generation agency in my upcoming post.