Business growth is at the top of every company’s goal sheet, making top of the funnel sales and marketing activity increasingly more important. While many companies have at least a few people on their internal sales and marketing team, more and more are beginning to outsource lead generation and appointment setting in an effort to quickly scale.

Choosing an outsourced B2B lead generation partner is a big decision.  You're handing over the internal control of your brand for top-of-the-funnel prospects and it's important to really make sure your lead generation and appointment setting partner meets all of your most important qualifications.

It’s important to note that although another company is handling your sales team’s day-to-day lead gen efforts, your in-house team, or a specific contact person, remains in full control of the campaign. An outsourced lead generation agency works with your team during the onboarding phase to fully understand your brand and campaign goals to become an extension of your brand. As the client, you’re able to request recorded calls to ensure your brand is being portrayed correctly along with ensuring high call quality.

Client Success: Expanding Lead Generation Resources to Achieve Business Goals

Because the decision of which outsourced agency you choose to work with is no small task, we’re going to walk through five considerations we think are most important when determining who to partner with.

1) Expertise in your industry

When considering the importance of expertise in a specific industry, let’s first consider the goal of your campaign:

1. Is the goal to build awareness around your product, service, or company?

2. Is the goal to conduct market research and collect survey responses?

3. Are you expecting your outsourced lead generation team to have in-depth knowledge of your industry and set high-quality appointments and sales meetings for your outside sales team?

The answer to the above questions will help you decide if your B2B lead generation partner must have expertise in your industry or not. There are many service providers that are willing to ask the basic, qualifying questions and will provide you with very top-of-the-funnel and only slightly warm leads, which fits the requirements of many buyers. 

If your goal is that of point three, we suggest that you work with your potential lead generation agency to determine past experience or knowledge of your industry. If there aren’t specific case studies available that are relevant to your company, ensure an in-depth training during onboarding and regular calibration meetings can be performed.  

Related Post: How to Follow Up with B2B Leads to Increase Sales

2) Proximity to your business

We talked about the importance of location of outsourced CX solutions agency so we want to review whether or not it’s important for your business. Is it important to you that you meet your sales representative or visit the company headquarters of your appointment setting partner? Although we’ve reached a time where virtual conference calls or team video meetings are a common part of almost everyone’s days, we still think the proximity of your business to your service provider makes a difference in the success of partnerships. 

While it may be easy enough to jump on a flight and go meet the team before launching your project, you’ll want to determine if that makes sense for your business plan. We have successful lead generation partnerships that are both within driving distance and a flight away, so the call is ultimately up to you and what’s best for your company and goals. 

3) Ability to effectively use multi-channel lead generation

Are you just looking for a cold calling campaign or would you like to take a more account-based selling approach? The approaches and the outcomes they drive, while both can lead to company growth, are considerably different. 

Client Success: How a Multi-Channel Lead Generation Partnership Led to a 5-Fold Increase in Leads

Account-based selling is a multi-touch, multi-channel lead gen strategy coordinated between both sales and marketing to pursue targeted, high-quality and high-value accounts.  It uses marketing tactics such as content marketing, social media, and website conversion strategies. Marketing is then combined with individual sales ownership in order to attract leads, develop relationships and warm them up, then close them with a seamless experience. 

Comparatively, most exclusively cold call approaches use cold lists and an auto dialer to slam through as many calls as possible in hopes of finding a needle in the haystack.  While this approach can work well for certain projects, we've seen much greater success with the account based selling approach - a capability important to consider when determining the best lead generation partner. 

4) Direct communication with the lead generation team

There are many B2B lead generation services that are run just like call centers, with multiple sales representatives cold calling for your account. Everyone has a basic understanding of your organization and it's offering but no one knows it intimately since your program could be one of many the agent supports. 

There are other lead generation services that allow you to receive weekly data, or even daily if you prefer. You’ll be able to receive quantitative information such as number of phone calls or emails sent along with qualitative data like information on what went well, what needs improvement, and how to pivot the sales strategy. Essentially, your outsourced lead generation team becomes an extension of your sales team, as if they were a part of your organization.  This kind of relationship leads to much more successful partnerships and is very important to consider when selecting a partner. 

5) Fractional pricing to ensure the quality of appointment

We meet with many B2B companies that are looking for pay-for-performance (PFP) pricing. While on the surface this looks like the most equitable scenario for both parties, we've seen that it actually can degrade the quality of lead or sales meeting that a lead generation agency hands off to your sales team.

When a lead gen service provider is tempted with passing through leads in return for a pre-agreed upon fee, it's more likely that you will be passed leads that hit your bare minimum requirements just so your outsourcer can recoup on the time spent uncovering those leads as quickly as possible. You're more likely to have to weed through slightly warm leads in order to find the hot ones yourself.

When a partnership is based on a fractional agreement, where you pay the service provider as if they are a fraction of your team, the quality of the lead tends to be higher. We are huge advocates that fractional lead generation outsourcing helps lead to business growth because the agreement allows for internal and external teams to work towards the same goal together.

If you're in the process of hiring an outsourced B2B lead generation service provider, make sure you consider these 5 things. What other considerations are important to you?

ABOUT INCEPT

Incept is an outsourced call center service and B2B lead generation company that brings the human element of conversations back to customer experience. Our team of lead gen experts partner with your team to grow your sales through lead generation, cold calling, and appointment setting

We’ve worked with some of the largest brands in the world to develop lead generation campaigns with one main goal - strengthen relationships at every touch point. From B2B lead generation, to organic and paid social media campaigns, to live chat, Incept is one of the best call center outsourcing vendors to assist all your CX and lead generation needs.

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