Lead generation is a process of finding, contacting, nurturing, and converting leads into potential B2B buyers of your products or services. This process is not easy. That’s why you can use the help of a lead generation outsourcing company to improve your sales development and bring efficiency to every sale you make.
What is a lead generation company?
A lead generation company is an organization that aligns sales and marketing efforts to create business opportunities, with an endgame goal of growing sales funnels for its clients. Such companies specialize in sales development and have a full technical stack and professional teams to execute lead generation for you up to perfection.Most importantly, a lead generation company feels like an extension of your own team because its initial goal is to help you grow.
Typically, when an organization makes a decision to look for an outsourced lead generation company, they don’t know what to expect. Obviously, there’s a need to fill the sales pipeline with quality leads, but there’s little understanding of how providers actually achieve this goal, and more importantly, what’s necessary for their particular business.
We have studied the top fifteen lead generation companies on Clutch and found that an overwhelming number of unique services are offered.
For a buyer, this abundance is overwhelming and may even cause buying analysis paralysis. Some of the listed services might perplex you as well. For example, there are lead generation companies that provide accounting, corporate IT training, custom software development, electrical engineering, film services, privacy shield notice, technical support, etc.
If you take a closer look, many of the “unique” services differ in name but indicate the same service. In the example below, data enrichment can be listed as research and analytics, B2B email list, database scrubbing, and email verification—which all refer to the process of collecting information about leads.
To not get lost in this chaos and make the right purchasing decision, a buyer needs to understand the lead generation process, its stages, and its components.
Let's look at how to filter how good a lead gen company is based on their data research:
In most cases, the buyer persona (BP) is defined by a company prior to creating a product or service. It outlines what you sell and to whom and describes what business problems and tasks you can solve for a particular business.
Without the BP, you’re unlikely to succeed. However, some organizations don’t have one. Experienced lead generation companies ask their clients for a detailed description of their buyer persona before they begin collecting data.
At CIENCE, we have a specific questionnaire called ideal customer profile (ICP) for our client companies to complete. Advanced techniques include predictive scoring and developing lookalikes for current best customers.
Data collection is the next stage of lead generation services. Your B2B lead outsourcing provider finds a target audience that matches your ICP and collects their unique details. Such details can include:
Based on this data, SDRs create personalized outbound campaigns to target your potential customers. Using the latest high-tech tools and software. they will keep your customer data fresh and safe on the platform.
Lead outsourcing companies use different channels to reach out to your target audiences, including email, phone, social networking platforms, and more.
These aren’t interchangeable. According to CIENCE’s VP of Sales, Michael Maynes, the best possible outreach is multichannel. If a business wants to succeed in lead generation, they need to make multiple touches via different channels within a certain window of time.
Here are forty tips from CIENCE experts that organizations should follow to select the right lead generation outsourcing company:
I would certainly look at how they solved particular problems for sales teams.
Andrew Khvatov, CIENCE Internal Team Lead
When working with the provider, check their performance at each of the “gates.” To set an appointment, you need a conversation. To start a conversation, you need good emails sent at the right time to the right person. To achieve it, you need to have the contact info of the right person. To gather that information, you need to know who you are looking for and how to go find them!
—John Girard, CIENCE CEO
During a discovery call, I would ask about their strategy. How do they organize any lead generation process? Does one SDR fulfill all functions: campaign management, data enrichment, template writing, outreach to leads? Or do they have different people running these processes? I’d rather work with a team of professionals because one person can’t do all these tasks efficiently.
—Rade Kemalova, CIENCE Internal Team Manager
Look at a broad scope of industries worked with to ensure creativity of strategy and variety of tactics.
—Eric Quanstrom, CIENCE CMO
Identify the experience of this company within your industry, analyze its target market. Are there any successful cases of providing services to companies in the same field?
—Anna Svetlichnaya, Head of Sales Operations Specialists Department
Special focus should be on the quality of test leads: are they easy to review, do they fit your Ideal Customer Profile, and were they delivered on time. It will be easy to identify if these leads are up-to-date after the first outreach. You’ll need to check the percentage of bounced emails and types of responses you receive. In case you get negative replies, saying that people are no longer with their companies, this is a trigger for you that the list might have been bought. At the very least it’s dated.
—Anna Svetlichnaya, Head of Sales Operations Specialists Department
Personalization. It’s important to show to a lead that we know why we reach out to them and what the outcomes of our cooperation are.
—Olesia Maksymenko, Head of Sales Development Department
You show that you’re interested in the prospects, their problems and try to provide some solutions.
—Michael Maynes, CIENCE VP Sales
I can get 20 meetings. It’s great. But why did I get them? Why didn’t I get 50 instead? Was it a language use that attracted or scared away people? Regardless of the number of appointments you get, you need a lot of transparency on what’s being executed and what’s not.
—Michael Maynes, CIENCE VP Sales
I would also estimate the work of their inbound team. How fast do they answer my questions? Do they provide comprehensive answers?
—Rade Kemalova, CIENCE Internal Team Manager
On a separate note, it would be helpful to have a call with an SDR who’s currently working at this lead generation company to learn his/her background, evaluate the level of communication skills etc. Obviously, it doesn’t mean that this person will work on your account. However, you’ll be able to align your requirements with current employees and decide whether you want to proceed or not.
—Anna Svetlichnaya, Head of Sales Operations Specialists Department
Ask if they do research upon request or they have a ready-made contact list. If they have a list, they’re most likely resellers who purchase list from platform providers. In this case, you’ll pay more due to inaccuracy levels. Scraping – a robot that searches for data on the Internet instead of people. First, it’s illegal, because many state registries forbid this practice. Second, data quality is low (you will receive less than 25% of accurate leads), because most actual data is contained on social networking websites that can’t be scraped.
—Taras Ilnytsky, Head of Data Enrichment Department
You won’t find one single, definitive, credible market research report of the lead generation market on the web because there isn’t one.
Our CIENCE team came to the conclusion that the market is pretty broad, with no completely dominant vendor (800 lb. gorilla). Few third parties, let alone analyst firms, have attempted to study or estimate market sizing, although lead generation companies like CIENCE do this research for ourselves—which we’d like to share with you.
We can’t expect our competitors to share any data with us, so we decided to study the public information they provide. We picked Clutch as our main source for information.
Clutch is a platform that lists businesses along with the reviews from their clients. It also has the ranking and provides insight into 15 Market Leaders and 10 contenders. Their goal is to help buyers make the best purchasing decisions. At the time of the research, there were 201 lead generation companies registered on Clutch.
What we couldn’t track was the number of organizations closed during this period. Nevertheless, we see that the number of lead generation companies is steadily increasing. The fact that it has tripled over the past eighteen years proves that there’s a constant demand for outsourced lead generation services.
The methods of B2B lead generation dramatically changed with the massive “webization” of business that took place back in the 2000s. Most companies began using emails and created websites and official pages on social media as their virtual representative offices.
These events changed the way lead generation works, for both data enrichment and sales development outreach. Web presence made information about companies and employees more available. On the other side, it also made buyers more independent and demanding. In the end, it all falls to the execution of each company—whether to be stopped by obstacles or leverage new opportunities.
And taking into account the number of lead generation providers, market entry opportunities are abundant. One more interesting figure we obtained from Clutch was the average number of employees. We found that 73% of lead generation companies have fewer than 249 employees.
The percentage is quite different for Clutch’s market leaders: 53% of the top fifteen lead gen providers have 250+ employees. And for the top sixteen to twenty-five, the percentage drops to 30%. Having a large number of employees isn’t surprising. Lead generation companies employ people-as-a-service (PaaS) model.
Beware of small firms here. You need humans to do data enrichment and sales development work. The best lead generation companies hire and train researchers and SDRs. Now, let’s take a look at what a buyer can expect from organizations registered here.
Top lead generation industries
The top six industries for lead generation companies include:
We studied the service focus of lead generation companies registered on Clutch. As we mentioned above, there are 255 unique entries. To tackle this chaos, Clutch introduced a service focus that enables potential clients to see what a particular organization does.
When it comes to lead generation companies, Clutch provides two main service focuses: voice/call center and B2B lead generation.
Apart from them, these organizations provide other types of services:
The most popular are voice call center, and B2B lead generation and qualification.
As you can see from the chart below, most organizations have a small focus on B2B lead generation:
Of 201 lead generation companies registered on Clutch, only 31 (15%) had a focus that equals or exceeds 50%. The percentage is almost the same for the top 15 leaders at 20%.
Apart from lead generation, these companies also provide voice/call center services. Most companies (~72%) have a strong focus on this type of service (50% and more).
71% of companies provide non-voice BPO and back office services. However, 66% of lead generation companies have a weak focus that is lower than or equal to 45%.
This pricing implication is particularly important juxtaposed against in-house costs:
It’s notable that most companies that hit the top 25 lead generation services have the lowest hourly rate.
You can easily outsource lead generation at $25 per hour and get a $1,000 minimal project. If you work in business services, manufacturing, financial sector, retail, telecommunications, or healthcare, you are more likely to find a provider that fits you perfectly.
Outsourcing lead generation is a smart move; companies applying mature lead generation practices tend to achieve 133% greater revenue. The right lead gen company will do its best to become a part of your sales efforts and land you the best deals possible, even in the tough sales environment we live in.
The number of lead generation companies and services might seem overwhelming for a buyer to process. However, we hope that our expert tips help you achieve a better understanding of this issue.