We all like to treat ourselves to a restaurant meal every once in a while, right? I don’t know about you, but the thought of getting groceries and cooking at home sounds exhausting after a long day.
The same applies to lead generation. While you could handle your lead generation efforts on your own, it’s much more efficient to invest in a B2B lead generation outsourcing company that does all the prep work for you.
So put away those pots and pans, and let’s get into the benefits of outsourcing your B2B lead generation efforts. In this blog, we’ll cover the following topics:
What Does It Mean To Outsource Lead Generation Services?
Outsourced lead generation is when a company hires a third party to help build a sales pipeline. A B2B lead generation outsourcing company uses a variety of lead generation strategies, including outbound sales and inbound marketing efforts.
When it comes to outbound sales, sales development representatives (SDRs) reach out to prospective businesses to pitch your company’s products or service offerings through cold calling or cold emailing. Through this lead-generating strategy, SDR teams set sales appointments with key decision-makers (KDMs), a process commonly known as B2B appointment setting.
On the other hand, inbound marketing is a lead generation strategy that marketing teams use to attract potential buyers to your company. Specialists do this by crafting and implementing a digital marketing campaign for your business’s content marketing materials so your target audience can easily find you through search engines.
B2B companies need a lead generation strategy because it brings in new business opportunities on a regular basis. Even if you’re not looking to grow your company, lead generation is necessary for maintaining day-to-day operations. While we’d like to keep all of our clients forever, we understand that’s not realistic. With a lead generation program in place, you keep your business afloat and your hard-working staff employed.
While many businesses like the idea of internalizing all of their operations, it’s not always feasible for their budget or sustainable for the long term. Many small to medium-sized companies choose to outsource their B2B lead generation efforts because of its benefits. By outsourcing lead generation, your employees can focus on what they do best: running a successful business.
Benefits of Outsourced B2B Lead Generation
Small to medium-sized businesses that outsource B2B lead generation gain a competitive advantage. Here are a few of the core benefits of B2B lead generation outsourcing:
Saves Valuable Company Time
Your company time is incredibly valuable, and it should be treated as such. By outsourcing B2B lead generation services, you can save a significant amount of time.
While internalizing lead generation efforts may sound ideal, many business owners forget about how long it takes to:
- Develop and implement a lead generation strategy
- Find, hire, and train new sales and marketing team members
- Prospect, nurture, and set sales meetings with leads
B2B lead generation outsourcing enables you and your internal account executives to focus more on day-to-day business operations. It also allows your internal sales team to spend more time crafting the perfect sales presentation, increasing the likelihood of converting a lead into a long-term customer.
Protects Your Company’s Bottom Line
Many companies underestimate the costs of internalizing departments—and lead generation is no different. In addition to saving time, B2B lead generation outsourcing saves your company a significant amount of money to go towards other investments.
B2B sales lead generation isn’t just hiring an SDR team and having them make calls, send emails, or write content for your website. If it were that easy, everyone would internalize their lead generation efforts. With B2B sales lead generation, you also have to consider:
- SDR salaries
- Company benefits
- Sales incentives
- Onboarding costs
- Costs of sales tools and technologies
And those examples are just the beginning. Many small and medium-sized businesses don’t have the funds for those things, which is why B2B lead generation outsourcing is essential for their business growth and sustainability efforts.
Gives You Access To High-Performing Sales Teams
Unfortunately, turnover in the sales industry is high, and high-performing SDRs are hard to find these days. When you outsource B2B lead generation, you don’t have to worry about finding top talent if your SDRs decide to work elsewhere.
When you invest in B2B lead generation outsourcing, you invest in more than a single SDR—you invest in a team of sales experts. A B2B lead generation company gives clients access to a variety of sales and marketing experts with different specialties, including:
- SDRs
- Sales managers
- Data analysts
- Training specialists
- Email marketing specialists
- Content creators
Equips You With the Necessary Sales Tools and Technologies
Sales tools and technologies are costly and can negatively impact your company’s bottom line. Outsourcing B2B lead generation gives you access to all the tools and technologies you need for a sustainable sales process, including:
- Customer relationship management (CRM) software
- Email marketing automation tools
- Data enrichment technology
- Streamlined communication platforms
In addition to obtaining these tools, your SDR team has to know how to use them. Training SDR teams on these platforms can take up a significant amount of time. B2B lead generation outsourcing eliminates the need for training because the outsourced SDR team already knows how to use these tools, ensuring you get the most out of your lead generation program from the get-go.
Streamlines the Sales Process
A successful B2B lead generation program doesn’t come easy. A streamlined sales process requires a lot of trial and error when you approach it internally. However, by outsourcing lead generation efforts with a trusted third-party provider, you can skip the hassle of finding a solution that works and generating qualified leads.
B2B lead generation outsourcing companies work with businesses in various industries and many markets, so they know what yields results and what doesn’t. An outsourced company gives you a tried and true way to prospect, nurture, and set sales appointments with leads in the sales pipeline.
How To Choose the Right B2B Sales Lead Generation Company
Think about the last time you hired a B2B product or service provider. What came to mind when you were considering your options? Price? Service quality? While choosing a B2B sales lead generation company is a similar process, there are a variety of other components for you to consider.
Before you sign on the dotted line with a B2B lead generation outsourcing company, it’s essential that you:
Ask About the Different Industries They Work With
As you evaluate all the outsourced lead generation companies out there, you need to look at the different sectors they serve. While they may say they can work with any company in any industry, it’s essential that you figure out the impact they’ve made on businesses through case studies and testimonials. This ensures that the lead generation company you’re working with understands your business model and the types of clients you serve.
Explore the Types of Lead Generation Services They Offer
Do you want to focus on outbound or inbound lead generation? What about both? Many B2B companies make the mistake of hiring two lead generation companies—one for outbound appointment setting and one for digital and content marketing.
Hiring two separate companies for these services is expensive and a lot to juggle, so it’s best to find a company that offers a wide variety of lead generation services. With an all-inclusive provider, you have a great opportunity to combine lead generation methods, creating a seamless sales process.
Let’s say you’re a commercial cleaning company looking to find new business opportunities through an outbound and inbound marketing strategy. An SDR cold calls a qualified lead that says they may be interested, but they want more information before setting a sales appointment. In that case, your SDR can send them a sales email with relevant content marketing materials that direct them to your website.
If they browse your website but still haven’t agreed to a sales appointment, they can receive targeted ads that take them to a landing page, providing top-of-mind awareness and encouraging them to schedule a sales appointment. Since you decided to integrate both lead generation strategies into your business growth efforts, you reduce the amount of time they spend in the sales cycle and increase the likelihood of converting them from a lead into a qualified sales appointment.
Learn Their Approach To Meeting Sales Goals
How does the outsourced lead generation company plan on helping you meet your sales goals? It’s essential that you learn about the company’s approach to meeting sales goals to make sure it’s a process that you’re comfortable with and yields sustainable results.
When it comes to B2B appointment setting, Abstrakt’s SDR teams practice the following outbound lead generation tactics:
- Prospecting: The prospecting phase is when data analysts find business opportunities and implement them into the sales pipeline for SDRs to contact and determine if they’re a fit for your company’s services.
- Lead qualification: Lead qualification is the process of identifying whether a prospect meets your ideal customer profile. SDRs find out the KDMs’ names, email addresses, direct phone numbers, number of full-time employees, and other vital company qualifiers.
- Lead nurturing: Lead nurturing is when an SDR routinely follows up with qualified leads in the sales pipeline to guide them closer to the end of the sales funnel.
Many leads in the sales pipeline stay in the lead nurturing phase for most of the sales cycle. In this phase, leads receive email marketing materials and follow-up phone calls from SDRs to encourage them to set up a sales appointment with your company. Once the KDM is toward the end of their sales cycle, the role of the SDR is to schedule the meeting so you and your internal sales team can present a customized pitch to the KDM.
Key Takeaways
An in-house lead generation program is to cook at home, while B2B lead generation outsourcing is to eat at a nice restaurant after a long day’s work. While you can internalize your lead generation efforts, it requires a significant amount of time and money to make it sustainable for the long haul and yield predictable results. And as a growing business ourselves, we know this is no easy task.
At Abstrakt Marketing Group, our SDR teams help B2B companies across the United States build and sustain their sales pipeline through a variety of lead generation and appointment setting tactics, including:
- Cold calling
- Email marketing
- SEO content services
- Social media marketing
- And more
Contact us when you’re ready to put your lead generation in the hands of high-performing sales and marketing experts!
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