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This post was originally published in December 2022 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
With so many outsourced B2B lead generation services available on the market, it can be understandably difficult to determine which one is right for your organization. In this article, we will help you choose the right lead-generation service that will effectively build brand awareness, boost the top of your funnel, and increase your revenue.
You should base the service you choose on the specific needs of your organization. How qualified do your leads need to be? What gaps, if any, are there in your lead generation process? How much time or money can you realistically invest in an outsourced service? By carefully considering these questions, choosing the right type of service for your business will be much easier.
In this article, we will explore the 3 different categories of outsourced B2B lead generation services and what you need to consider based on which option you choose to invest in:
Let’s dive into outbound lead generation services.
Outbound B2B sales lead generation services involve sales development reps reaching out to prospects in your target audience and promoting your solution. One of the primary benefits of these services is direct outreach tailored to each prospect.
Let’s take a closer look at some common types of outbound lead generation services.
The primary objective of outsourced cold-calling and appointment-setting services is to establish sales meetings and qualify leads through cold calls and emails.
By outsourcing your cold-calling and appointment-setting operations, you gain an SDR team that can build relationships and nurture leads at a fraction of the cost of building a similar team in-house. This service offers the most qualified leads compared to other lead generation services due to its ability to warm up prospects until they’re sales-ready.
In your search to choose the right vendor, be mindful of which firm you select and how much control you will have over the entire sales process. While some firms offer a pay-per-lead service, we recommend partnering with a vendor that offers time-based contracts. For example, we offer month-to-month contracts for our appointment-setting services.
The reason we do this is to ensure that you’re getting quality leads – not just a large quantity of poor leads. Where pay-per-lead firms are incentivized to provide volume regardless of quality, firms that rely on renewals must continually show ROI to retain clients — like EBQ.
You should also consider your outsourced partner’s location in your decision-making. Working out of significantly different time zones or through a language barrier can create inefficiencies, miscommunication, and even missed opportunities.
If your interest lies in getting the most qualified leads, we strongly recommend outsourcing your cold-calling and appointment-setting efforts due to the sales-ready leads you will receive and the money you will save.
Social selling services use social media to generate leads and feed your sales funnel. Reps achieve this by performing targeted outreach through direct messages on social media. For B2B social selling, LinkedIn is the primary social media platform used.
This service has three main benefits:
Compared to cold-calling and emailing, it can be difficult to find success with social selling because prospects don’t often agree to purchase a product over social media platforms – that’s just how it is. As a result, this service is best suited for increasing brand awareness, and less for creating sales-ready leads.
Always be mindful of what you want to get out of your outsourced lead generation service. If you want highly qualified leads, then social selling may not be the best option for you.
Conversely, if you have more interest in establishing your brand and building awareness around it, then this service could potentially be a great opportunity.
Outbound content syndication services provide reps with a clear, straightforward goal of getting prospects to download a piece of content, register for a virtual event, or agree to be sent additional information.
Consider these sales rep goals to help decide if this service is for you. By outsourcing this service, you’re typically provided with reps who go through a very large list of prospects. This allows them to reach a larger audience at a rate that is far more cost-friendly.
However, these large lists can come with issues. They’re often not strictly targeted, so your results may vary. Depending on which vendor you partner with, you could have reps reaching out to people on your behalf who don’t match your buyer persona and therefore aren’t likely to purchase.
You also may end up receiving only a few qualified leads. Some leads may not be a good fit for your solution or may need a lot of additional nurturing. That said, if your goal is to increase prospect volume and brand awareness, this type of service may be a good choice for you.
Learn what it takes to identify prospects, get in touch with decision-makers, and set more meetings for your sales reps.
In any situation, the type of outbound sales lead generation service you choose depends on the quality of leads you’re looking for and the goals you’ve set for your pipeline.
As the name clearly suggests, demand-generation marketing services seek to drive awareness of and demand for your product or service. Marketing services help you generate inbound leads — leads who then initiate contact with your company. Since these leads are familiar with your brand by this point, they’re already warm by the time they speak to a rep.
Be mindful though that there are many different types of B2B marketing services out there. For our purposes, we’ll highlight some of the most common types.
Outsourced email marketing automation services provide your business with tech-savvy marketers who assist you with building email campaigns and managing your marketing automation platform.
Potentially the most crucial benefit of outsourcing email marketing is gaining access to experts who already have a deep understanding of the ins and outs of your platform and are well-versed in marketing automation strategies and best practices. What’s more, these experts actually come at a much more affordable cost than what you would spend hiring email marketers internally.
In addition to building email campaigns, these firms can also help with segmenting prospects for account-based marketing. Some firms can even assist with setting up your platform to automatically score and qualify leads for your sales team to follow up on.
However, even with so many apparent benefits, there are still some things you need to consider.
First, you will need a partner who has a thorough understanding of your audience, your database, and your messaging. You should also look for a firm whose marketers are certified in your chosen platform (Pardot, Marketing Cloud, HubSpot, etc.) to ensure the entire process is as seamless as possible.
Finally, keep in mind that the intent of email marketing is to influence prospects to “raise their hand” and identify themselves to you by engaging with your brand. Once that happens though, your SDRs or sales reps will still need to nurture them further to convert them into a customer.
So, if your goal is to build a lot of initial awareness and fill the top of your sales funnel, email marketing services may appear like an attractive option for you.
If you outsource your content marketing, in return you gain access to specialized marketers who create and distribute informative, engaging content that attracts and converts leads. Content marketers are able to craft compelling, targeted, SEO-friendly content that leads website visitors to fill out a form to contact you or receive valuable gated content.
Some examples of work a content marketing partner can help with include:
The right firm will provide skilled marketers whose content expertise will directly result in an increase in website traffic and establish a higher level of authority and trust.
Be aware that these results aren’t immediate though. Content marketing can take some time to generate traffic and leads. For example, you won’t see a bunch of new leads just roll in overnight after your website copy gets an entire SEO-optimized overhaul. If you’re looking for quick wins, you may need to supplement this service with outbound efforts.
If you’re looking to outsource your content marketing, be sure that you take all of these factors into consideration. You will need to find a firm that can readily create content specific to your industry, has a deep, industry-level understanding of your audience, and can position your solution effectively.
If you’re lucky, you can even find a vendor that can handle all aspects of content marketing — writing copy and brainstorming content, designing graphics and visuals, and publishing content on your website.
EBQ is one of these providers that is equipped to handle such a robust task. Our marketing specialists can create, design, and manage your content to increase engagement and keep your brand top-of-mind.
Discover how to deepen relationships with customers and prospects using strong marketing messaging.
The type of demand generation marketing service you choose ultimately hinges on how well it will fit into your overall lead generation process and your required timeline to achieve results.
The overall goal of B2B lead database services is to assist you with building out and maintaining your database of leads. These services typically provide cold leads who will require additional nurturing and qualification but can potentially develop into customers down the line.
List creation services deliver a ready-made, built-out list of prospects for you to market to. All you have to do is specify your prospect criteria — such as industry, location, and job title — and you receive a list of contacts that match your target criteria.
These services create significant time savings for your organization because your team will no longer need to manually find relevant contacts. All that time prospecting can now be applied elsewhere.
Be very discerning in terms of who you select for these services though. Data accuracy is a crucial factor to consider when choosing a provider. Without accurate data, your team could easily end up wasting valuable time instead.
As you search for the right vendor to meet your goals, be aware that many of the big data vendors you’ve likely heard of often sell outdated contact data. We don’t have to tell you outdated data can potentially (and likely) be a significant waste of your money and your sales reps’ time as they try to reach contacts from this obsolete data.
Look for a list creation vendor that can offer a human element with more engaged, hands-on processes that ensure more accurate data. Being more scrutinous in your selection process will allow your reps to find more success in reaching out to prospects because they will be doing so based on up-to-date information.
As the name clearly suggests, outsourced data validation is a service you can call upon to assess and ensure that the prospect contact information you have — such as prospect phone numbers and emails — is entirely accurate.
There are a few variations of this service that you may come across. The first involves reps manually calling through a list of prospects to confirm that their information is accurate. The second service takes a more data-centric approach which involves scrubbing your prospect data, often through automation, to easily detect and correct any inaccurate records.
Regardless of which approach you use, all data validation services are meant to improve the overall accuracy of your data with the end goal of reps allocating less and less time to bad records that go nowhere.
Keep in mind though that, unlike other services, outsourced data validation doesn’t move leads any further in the qualification process. It simply confirms whether or not the data you have is clean and accurate.
Another type of lead data service is intent data services. The purpose of these services is to quickly and easily identify companies that are actively showing signs of interest in a solution like yours.
Since these prospects are actively seeking a solution, search intent data services help to facilitate getting better insights into their buying habits and allow you to promote yourself as a solution at the most opportune time in a way that resonates with them.
Intent data vendors identify these organizations through search data, artificial intelligence, and public signals of buying intent — such as RFPs or job postings. As you go through your selection process, consider whether a prospective vendor provides first-party data gathered through their own website or if they rely on third-party data only for their offering.
In our experience, we typically find that the accuracy of intent data services can often be a bit questionable, so it’s best to take the information you’re provided with a grain of salt.
For example, a prospect may no longer be seeking a solution by the time you receive their details or they might have performed an action that signaled intent when they weren’t actually looking to buy anything.
Learn everything you need to know about collecting contact data and maintaining the health of your database.
If your business requires a strong foundation for lead generation or you harbor concerns about the health of your existing lead database, lead database services may be the right choice for you.
If you’re looking for a partner who is capable of managing all aspects of your prospect database, our expert data services are here to help.
Whether you’re looking to receive more qualified leads or you just need more reliable prospect data, outsourced lead generation services are a cost-friendly, fast, effective way to boost the top of your funnel and generate brand awareness.
Understanding the benefits and drawbacks that each outsourced service brings to the table will allow you to choose the best service for your company.
With years of collective experience working for thousands of companies, EBQ is the effective partner you’re looking for with lead generation services spanning sales development, marketing, and data.
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