9 Factors To Consider While Choosing A B2B Lead Generation Agency
Naseef KPO
Founder & CEO, Skalegrow - B2B Marketing Agency | IIM Bangalore | Speaker | Mentor | Helping 20+ B2B Marketing Leaders & CEOs Do Marketing Right | Building India's Largest B2B Marketing Community | ?? Book a meeting now
Marketing agencies operate in different models. Some offer conventional marketing services like SEO, content writing, paid ads, website development, etc., whereas there is another segment of companies that offer lead generation services to B2B businesses. In this edition of the Elevate Your Marketing newsletter, we will focus on the latter.
[There are agencies that do a bit of both. But even they tend to focus more on one of the two areas].
Some of the services offered by B2B lead generation companies include:
Being someone who has worked with multiple such agencies and having had pleasant as well as extremely poor experiences, I wanted to share my 2 cents on the factors you should consider while selecting and working with B2B lead generation agencies.
Setting the context
It might be surprising to at least some of us that this kind of business model exists. But there are hundreds (if not thousands) of lead generation companies out there that use a combination of techniques to generate leads for their clients. Companies like Callbox, Cience, Martal Group, Unbound B2B, etc., are a few examples.
Since the spectrum of services offered by these companies is quite diverse, not all the factors I list here might be relevant to every single one of them. What I have attempted to do is to discuss (at a 10000 feet level) the most important things you need to keep in mind before you initiate an outsourced lead generation project.
That said, let us dive right in.
9 factors to consider while choosing a lead gen partner
It's close to impossible to have every lead your agency generates (be it a content download or confirmed appointment) turn into a high-value opportunity. But there are definitely ways in which you can reduce the chances of failure. And here are the factors you need to consider to achieve the same:
Let's now delve into the details.
1. Business need
This is nothing but the need to outsource your lead generation efforts. I have seen many marketing leaders outsource lead gen simply because everyone else is doing it. Essentially, if there are ways for you to generate the leads you need by leveraging your internal resources, that's the best. Go for outsourcing only as a last resort.
Now, how would you know when is the right time to outsource lead gen?
Given below are some of the situations where you might want to consider having a lead generation partner:
In addition to the above reasons, you could work with a lead gen partner to simply experiment if it works. After all, marketing is all about trial and error.
2. Lead qualification criteria
This is one of the areas where lead generation agencies try to trick you (no offense to them, but unfortunately the whole lead gen agency business works on the principle 'how to get the most out of clients with less time and effort'. I am not saying everyone is the same. Of course, just like in any other industry, there are diamonds in the rough in the lead gen space as well).
Now coming back to the point, Why does this become tricky?
The reason is that different businesses have different criteria for qualifying their leads. And they sometimes go much beyond the usual firmographic and demographic criteria such as industry, region, revenue, number of employees, job title, and job function.
Depending on how an agency categorizes the leads it could generate into different cohorts, the way in which it charges you also changes. For example, some have a standard pricing for MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads), SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads), and confirmed appointments.
What happens in many cases is that most of these leads the agency ends up generating do not have an expressed intent to buy your products or services. They tend to focus just on the firmographic and demographic criteria since such leads are easier to generate with the reach and audience the agencies already have. At best, what they do is add a few qualifying questions, which again fail to capture the intent of the prospect most of the time.
So what's the way out?
The approach should be to clearly state the criteria of leads you want to generate, especially if you want to capture the intent of the prospect. It could be done by means of any or all of the following:
3. Industry experience
Repeatability is one of the best indicators of success. And it holds true when it comes to lead gen as well. A company that has successfully completed multiple lead generation projects in your industry is quite worth evaluating.
The question is, how would you know if an agency has helped companies like you in the past?
The very first step to knowing this is to look at their website. Look at details like customer names, testimonials, customer story videos, etc. Following are the other steps you could take to gauge your potential lead gen partner's experience in your industry:
By consolidating all the information you received from the above, you should be in a good position to understand whether the agency has done it before in your space or not.
4. Campaign content
Wondering what I am referring to as campaign content?
Literally everything content in your lead generation campaign - from landing pages to the hosted PDF to banner ads and social media posts.
There are two reasons why you need to do this:
So always keep an eye on the content the agency uses to generate leads for you. Make sure to check every landing page, form, email campaign, newsletter, (and if possible even social media post), etc. This helps to improve the effectiveness of your campaigns. Eventually, it's a win-win situation for your company as well as the agency.
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5. Qualifying questions and the nature of the prospect's response
Qualifying questions are nothing but additional questions prospects have to respond to for being qualified as leads. These questions can be asked in the form of:
Your responsibility as the one who spends money is to include the right qualifying questions in the lead gen process. You also need to choose the right method of asking. For example, adding an additional field in a form doesn't help much in most cases as prospects tend to fill them in a hurry to access the asset behind it.
However, including qualifying questions in a direct call (between the lead gen specialist and the prospect) is a better way of gauging the prospect's interest. But of course, leads get costlier as the effort and difficulty on the agency's side increases. So, it's probably a good idea to keep a good mix of both so that you can balance quantity and quality.
Now, let us come to nature of the prospect's response. As a business, what we need is an 'expressed intent'. An expressed intent is nothing but an indication from the prospect that he/she is interested in exploring your products or services, or at least is facing a problem that your product/service can solve.
In an ideal scenario, the best way to gauge intent is to have as many open-ended questions as possible. But this comes with the practical challenge that prospects might not always be willing to speak up while shot with too many questions where lengthy answers are required. So, the best practice would be to have a healthy mix of close-ended and open-ended questions.
Note: A word of caution here. Agencies typically make the pitch of not including open-ended questions in their campaign. This is because it becomes more difficult for them to meet the desired lead volume. And it does come with the practical challenge I mentioned above as well. So, you could try negotiating with the agency to include more such questions, only that the cost might increase accordingly.
6. Method of outreach
Just like verifying campaign content, you also need to make sure that the agency is using the right method of outreach (that too in the right way) to generate leads. Following are some of the things you can consider while choosing the channels of outreach your agency uses:
One thing to note here is that agencies usually don't share this information with you beforehand unless you ask for it. So, if you are particular about the choice of channels, make sure to pick agencies that have strong capabilities in your preferred ones.
7. Quality of conversation
Let me explain this through an example.
If the agency is using direct calls as a medium to generate leads, the usual modus operandi is to have one or more lead gen executives dial hundreds of numbers every day. And they speak to the ones they get through to with the planned questionnaire. The biggest drawback with such an approach is that the calls tend to become robotic after a while.
In such a case, make sure you get access to the call recordings of all the leads that are passed onto you. Listen to them and ensure that the responses to the qualifying questions are genuine and intended. And to ensure access to recordings, ask the agency during the evaluation stage itself (you need to check if they have a call recording software first, and then confirm that the recordings will be shared with you).
Similarly, for all the leads that are passed onto you, ask for the trail - whether it's email, LinkedIn outreach, or direct call.
8. The pricing model and engagement tenure
It goes without saying that you need to ensure you get the biggest bang for your buck. Depending on the services you avail, the pricing also would vary.
For instance, if you are going for a standard lead generation service, an MQL could cost anywhere between $40 to $150. The more qualification criteria and questions you add, the costlier a lead becomes. Similarly, a confirmed appointment could cost anywhere between $500 to $2000.
Another example is a webinar. If the agency is handling the webinar end to end including the landing page, hosting, promotions, etc., the fee could be as high as $25K.
Now, let us look at some of the best practices when it comes to evaluating pricing.
The very first principle is, always negotiate. Remember, these are not FMCG products that come with an MRP or standard price. And agencies intentionally quote higher to leave room for negotiation (they are smart and know that companies negotiate ??).
Following are some of the other best practices:
Let's move to engagement tenure.
Just two points here. Firstly, always go for a pilot before going all in. You need to test the waters before going for an annual contract. You need to see if the agency is able to deliver the results you are looking for.
Some agencies don't offer a pilot. And that's okay. You always have the choice to not work with them. But most of the tier 2 or tier 3 lead gen agencies will offer you a pilot in hope of winning you post the short engagement.
Second, don't go for long locking periods (like 3 years), Once the pilot is done, in my opinion, the maximum engagement tenure you should go for is one year.
Some agencies don't go by time or period. Instead, they try to lock you in for a certain number of leads or the amount spent. Even in that case, put a ceiling to the maximum you would spend. This helps to derisk yourself in case something doesn't work for you during the engagement (a pilot might not always be an indicator of the experience you will have during the actual long-time engagement),
9. Experience and credentials of the team that will work for you
This piece of information is something most agencies don't usually share with you. During the evaluation stage, they usually have their best people to respond to your questions and travel with you till you become a customer.
Once this stage is over, some agencies (not all) tend to put junior resources for delivering the actual project (this happens a lot in the IT world too). So, you can ask for the details and experience of the people that will work for you on the project (in IT projects, it is a common practice to share the details of the resources that are going to work on a project. I am not sure why many prospects don't ask for it when it comes to lead generation engagements).
Here, you need not be too particular or adamant about the experience of the team members. Because, practically speaking, you don't get the best in everyone.
So, a best practice is to make sure the resources are decently skilled and experienced for the job with a lead who is capable of guiding them to do the job well. And you can be very stringent about evaluating the skillsets of the lead who will be the go-to person for you throughout the engagement.
That wraps up the 9 factors to consider while choosing a B2B lead generation agency.
This article was focused on outsourcing lead generation activities. If you are looking for a framework for outsourcing any marketing activity, the below article will be worth a reference:
That's all I wanted to cover today.
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