Generate more leads in 2024: Why outsourcing sales & B2B lead generation works.
Generating leads is a great way to expand your B2B business. However, over the past years, we’ve seen a significant change in the lead generation landscape. Where in the early days businesses would mostly purchase bulk leads based on demographic or geographic characteristics, lead generation has become more personal and technical. Even in B2B enterprises, a personal connection and relationship with a business partner has become significantly more important.
This makes it that lead generation is not only more time consuming for businesses but also more technical than ever. Data scrapers, analytics and automation tools are daily features of the lead generation operations. This is why we’ve seen the emergence of lead generation agencies in the past years.
In this blog we’ll walk you through all the benefits a lead generation agency can offer by taking charge of your lead generation process, so it’ll be easier for you to consider: to outsource, or not?
80% of sales interactions will take place online by 2025.
How do lead generation companies work?
Typically, B2B lead generation companies wield two primary tactics: inbound and outbound. Inbound lead generation is more marketing focused; sharing content, SEO proof blogs and paid ads. Outbound covers the outreach and online sales through emails, calls and LinkedIn. The idea is that B2B lead gen specialists can implement these tactics much more efficiently and effectively than your internal sales team.
Through LinkedIn there are three options to generate more B2B leads:
- Sharing content;
- Promoted content through ads;
- Outreach (connection requests or InMails).
Note that some lead gen companies may also use web content to drive people to landing pages that, for example, ask for an email address. And there are others who sell bulk leads acquired by certain data.
One of the biggest tactics of B2B lead generation is through LinkedIn. Which makes sense. LinkedIn is the biggest professional network platform that exists. If your audience would be anywhere, it would be there. Lead generation agencies specialized in B2B LinkedIn are using advanced data techniques that not only generate leads that are the closest possible to your ideal customer profile, but also result in a higher ROI.
Be careful though. 4 years ago, the moment people realized LinkedIn is the best platform for B2B lead generation, it has been used as the main B2B lead generation platform. Because of that, many messages people sent out came across as spammy. Which is why LinkedIn created new rules and regulations to keep the platform’s quality high.
Spray and pray doesn’t work any longer. The platform focuses on quality content, quality value and quality outreach. And as B2B lead generation agencies grew with the platform, they know how to do that.
Structured Follow Up
We’ve all been there: you get a bunch of leads, you start approaching them by phone or email and sooner or later you realize you have no overview of those leads’ statuses. One of the most important things within lead generation is keeping a clear overview and follow up of all your leads and where they are in the sales funnel. Losing track of this means a waste of time and money, and a low ROI.
The biggest pitfall within lead generation is a structured follow up. Working with a lead generation agency takes away the hassle of sales administration. You don’t have to worry about finding the right leads, scraping the right data or follow up on those leads until they’re ready for a sales pitch. Which saves you time to focus on other things in your business!
49% of new B2B customer sales cycles take 1 to 6 months; 46% take 7 to 12 months.
You can focus on your expertise
If you want to start with lead generation, you’ll probably start with finding out how to generate leads. And then you’ll learn that there are many different ways to generate them. And many types of platforms, content, data scrapers and so on. Is it making you dizzy already? We get that!
In the early days of B2B lead generation, one salesperson was in charge of everything: cold calls, going to meetings, sending out quotas and closing deals. Nowadays we have SDR teams and outsource the early stages of the sales funnel.
Over the past years, lead generation has grown into a data savvy, creative business with many different ways to get to an end goal. Trying to learn about these techniques and applying those to your own business can take your months, if not years.
Time is money!
Why invest all your precious time in learning what content works with which target audience, if you can also just do what you do best? Which is probably sales meetings with potential clients.
We deliver them already warmed up for you. I cannot get easier than this!
Technical Knowledge
Data scraping is one of the most important factors in lead generation. Data scraping, in its most general form, refers to a technique in which a computer program extracts data from output generated from another program. Data scraping is commonly manifested in web scraping, the process of using an application to extract valuable information from a website.
Why would you need that in lead generation? Because the most effective way of lead generation is by using data scraped off for instance LinkedIn. By using data scrapers in your lead generation, you will define and target your ideal audience as precisely as possible, which brings the biggest value into your lead generation results. And unfortunately, it is not easy.
Time Saving
Outsourcing B2B lead generation saves you a lot of time. We’ve mentioned it before: lead generation involves a lot of different tasks, such as data scraping, sales administration and regular follow up. These are all daily tasks that eventually could be too time consuming. Especially because the key to growing a business is having the ability to focus on expanding their business, not on operational tasks.
Add volume to your current sales efforts
Generating leads manually only takes you so far. Lead generation agencies have different tools available to upscale your lead generation game, without compromising the personal touch in their approach. Some of our most successful campaigns are sending out birthday messages! By doing this by a good data scrape and using an automation tool, we can send this to thousands of people.
Conclusion
Hiring a lead generation agency to do the work for you, might be more beneficial than you initially thought. Not only will they be able to deliver you more highly qualified leads and add volume to your sales pipeline, you also have the time to focus your efforts on other aspects of your business.
B2B lead generation has developed in such a way in the past years that technical expertise is a must. The key to the best qualified leads that fit a customer profile lies with perfectly scraped data. An agency that knows how to do this well could be the key to your sales success.
Our best advice when it comes to finding the right lead generation agency is: try to find a partner who focuses on sustainable results. There are enough businesses in the lead generation market who can offer cheap and fast results. However, usually these methods don’t add to the values of your own organization, and don’t align with the shift in the B2B brand where personal communication and connection becomes more and more important.
Try to find an extension of your own business culture in the agency you will be working with. What is important within your own organization? Try to look at potential partners from the same angle.
Interested in finding out if lead generation is something for you? Let’s have a chat and find out what we can achieve together!
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