Outsourcing Lead Generation? Yes!

The following article aims to highlight the key benefits for your company derived by outsourcing lead generation.ç
For this, I will guide you through two background concepts — Why Lead Generation is Important & Why it is difficult — to then jump onto the key section of this article, Why is outsourcing the right choice?

Why is lead generation important?

“You are out of business if you don’t have a prospect!” – Zig Zaglar

Personally, I love this quote by Zig Zaglar. It perfectly summarizes the importance of Lead Generation for any business, whether B2B or B2C. No matter how good you are at selling, without an audience of people potentially interested in what you do, a.k.a. potential clients, there is no way you can sell.

But isn’t Lead Generation simply about educating audiences about my business?
I’m afraid not. The key point of generating leads, lays on the careful selection, scoring, and qualification process of prospects, with whom it is essential to build solid and trustworthy relationships.
During my research, I came across a very nice article clearly explaining the evolution of Lead Generation, its importance, and the value of business relationships.
Everything started with the key challenge of an overloading flow of information for customers, leading to a radical change in the buying process.
At the time of scarce information, sellers reached out to buyers, whom ere expected not to be prepared about nor aware of the seller, and thus willing to discover more.
Nowadays, with an overload of information, buyers are the ones who hold the reins of the sale. They easily scan through the vast amount of information that is provided to them, dig further into what mostly appeals to them and then com to you, with clear ideas of what they want and what to expect from your sales team.

What does this mean?
Your business needs to have in place an excellent Lead Generation strategy to reach and impress your buyers, before they even think about contacting the sales department of your competitors. Hence, you need to build a relationship with your potential customers by understanding and anticipating what they want and when they want it.
Lead Generation activities help you throughout the whole process, from awareness, through qualification, nurturing until the moment right before the sale.

Importance, clear. But how do I perform it?
This leads onto our second topic:

Why is it difficult?

“The most important things in life are hard to achieve, and the same applies to Lead Generation”

I couldn’t find a quote that expressed my thoughts, so I just wrote my own.
Nowadays, the market is more complex than ever, more crowded than ever, and within the crowd the competition is skyrocketing. Making the customer feel unique is essential to stand out. And you can achieve this, by strategically building relationships with them. However, doing so requires time, involve numerous resources, and a very big portion of your marketing budget.
Therefore, it is crucial to have in place processes and methods that allow you to focus only on quality leads.
And here it comes the hard bit.

It’s time consuming.

It takes around 30 minutes for a marketer to conduct research and find insights about your prospect companies. On top of this, it takes around 30 minutes to write a single follow-up. Multiply this by all the prospects you have. In terms of time, this is a heck of an investment, not to consider the time spent in finding the right profiles.

It must be accurate.

The generation of the Ideal Customer Profile requires attentive actions. No news here: the more details you know about what you are looking for, the easier the search is and greater the likelihood to find it. Thus, the more accurate the ICP, the more likely you will generate high quality leads.

Team alignment.

It’s well known that within business, the sales and marketing teams have problems communicating. And this is a big obstacle to the efficiency of Lead Generation activities, as marketing might invest time in qualifying and nurturing a prospect, to pass it onto sales, which might then express its discontent about the lead and drop the ball.

It’s not all about the money, but…

I don’t want to look at things from the price point of view, but yes. Lead Generation is expensive. And this is a further factor that makes it very hard. You need to consider investing a lot upfront, to then see the results only months after.

And here we come — Lead Generation if an essential activity for your business, yet very hard. This should be enough for you to agree that outsourcing Lead Generation is the right choice.
But let’s dig deeper.

Why is outsourcing the right choice?

Four aspects of your business that outsourcing would have a positively impact on:

1. Improve business efficiency

The key benefit lays on the cross ground of costs, time, and resource management.
Having your own in-house Lead Generation team involves investment on various fronts.
First of all, you need to consider the hiring process. Your HR department will have to invest a considerable amount of time and resources, constantly, to find new people to perform the job. Most of the time, the latter will require a certain period of time to be trained (training process) in order to perform Lead Generation activity. This period might as well vary in length depending on the person’s experience and understanding of the tasks.
On top of this, for each new client or cross-selling opportunities that you have in your hands, most likely you will need to hire new people fitting the scope of new projects (building process).

Let me give you an example of this last process:
You have been working across the Dutch market and now you want to expand across Europe, specifically in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and France. Unless you are extremely lucky to find people speaking more than 3 languages at native level, most likely you will find yourself looking for and hiring people coming from those countries.

But let’s go further.
You decide to stop performing in the Netherlands to focus further in Europe and expand across eastern Europe. What will do you do with your Dutch speaking team? You will struggle to find new roles for them. Yes, it’s feasible. But will these employees still be an asset for you, or more of an additional fruitless cost until you decide once again to perform in Dutch speaking countries?

By outsourcing Lead Generation, your business would benefit from:

• No need of hiring and training processes (cost)
• Experts starting to perform from day 0, as soon as you sign the contract (time)
• Letting your most valuable resources focus on more important tasks and avoiding the building process happening within your walls, together with the problems that might arise from it (resource management)

2. Proven strategy / methodology

Generating new leads, as we said before, is not that easy. You need to generate quality leads in order to accelerate your pipeline. To achieve this, it’s essential to put in place efficient scoring and qualification processes. If your business is not familiar with lead generation, the mise-en-oeuvre of these processes can require several attempts and surely long time.u
A company specialized in performing such activities already has a proven strategy to quickly identify the most valuable leads for your business (through the ICP), gather useful information and considerably ease our the job for your sales people.

3. The right technology and tools

Further factor to consider, having an in-house team implies costs of infrastructure, tools, and materials. And, when the budget is not enough to allow your business to provide your team with the right technology to perform lead generation, I can tell you, what you will get is nothing near quality leads.
By outsourcing, you won’t even need to think about these costs. Rather, you will have the chance to invest more in the preparation of your sales team.

4. Better feedback and results evaluation

This last benefit derives from the fact that, considering all we have mentioned so far, an in-house lead generation team might not be capable to identify what was the winning factor that allowed them to provide the sales team with good leads.
What I mean by this is that, companies specialized in lead generation worked hard to find their key differentiator between them and their competitors, whatever that might be. The key differentiator is what allows them to come to your sales team and confidently promote their service.

Lead generation companies have, therefore, developed metrics to evaluate successful practices and strategies, which can help you to measure your business’ results and improve your overall performance.