SaaS Marketing

Why Outsourced Lead Generation Is The Best Way For Driving ROI With Minimal Efforts?

Ameet Mehta
Mar 3, 2022
12 mins read
Why Outsourced Lead Generation Is The Best Way For Driving ROI With Minimal Efforts?

Lead generation is undoubtedly an integral part of marketing strategy, but the entire process of generating leads for B2B is intricate. Going by the stats, 68% of companies have said that the lead generation process is grueling [Source]. According to CSO insights, 61% of individuals in B2B marketing believe that B2B lead generation is a hefty task. [Source]

Weaving all these POVs together, one thing can be mentioned: “a lead generation is a profitable option for business.” Still, it requires consistency in effort and expert guidance to help marketers achieve their targeted goal!

However, note that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. You say that outsourced B2B Lead generation is a significant way to generate high-quality leads. Many organizations outsource B2B lead generation agencies to drive more convertible leads. Fair enough, right? Before checking the advantages of outsourcing leads for your B2B business, let’s take insights into the process as an integral part of B2B marketing:

Outsourcing B2B Leads: A Strategic Marketing Blueprint

Now cut through the point, as a marketer or a business owner, you should assess your capabilities to have a clear idea of opting for outsourced B2B lead generation agencies. Worth Mentioning that a business thrives or dwindles on the brink of failure based on how they hook the target market interest in their products or services.

And hence lead generation is a crucial aspect to consider. When you do not have the required resource, outsourcing for lead generation can help you to drive ROI without much effort. In terms of inbound leads, outsourced B2B lead generation can offer you fast results with a minimalist cost, provided you are not into hiring a costly lead generation expert. 

Outsourcing agencies for lead generation have their perks. To clear out the cloud of confusion in outsourcing B2B lead generation, in this article, we have encased all the know-hows of outsourcing for lead generation for your B2B.

Things You Should Know About Lead Outsourcing

B2B organizations, especially their initial years of a business, can be a guiding star to get the most direct ROIs. Outsourcing a lead generation organization can minimize your business complexities by getting qualified marketing leads among your target market. Besides, outsourcing services give you quick results at lower costs. When you want to have an internal team for lead generation, you need to hire a team of experts, and the price, without a doubt, sores up.

Besides, the training process and the team adaptability to deliver the sense of business goal to the team take time. The entire process is time-consuming, and you have to offer the team the right side of resources, which also comes costly. So in such a scenario, outsourcing comes as a realistic scenario. The process is the best at hyper-targeting leads due to their expertise, provided you have a predetermined spend and have direct attribute output. When you have a crystal clear match to determining the ROI, it helps you get the essence of the formula of the go-to-market channel you can embrace with the hired agency.

But one of the essential questions is when you should outsource an agency. And business decision-makers often dwindle upon the concussion. What are the fundamental factors to consider when we should hire an agency? Sharing insight on that query, it is to be mentioned that when you own a business, it vital for you to assess the capability of your marketing team before making a decision. 

Clear communication with the team is essential, and along with them, you should check if KPIs are achieved or not. Further, understanding and getting a precise idea of your team’s expertise is crucial. It also may happen that your team may often wear many hats of responsibility, where adding more responsibilities can hamper the team alignment and work quality. So, carefully assess all these factors, and take a call whether you need to train someone in-house or hiring an agency makes more sense in that scenario. 

Insights On MQL And SQLS

As we are all aware, in B2B, there are primarily two types of leads, i.e., Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQL). Organizations adhere to passing leads from the marketing channel to the sales channel; that is a kind of race!! Yes, you read it right! The entire process of transforming MQL to SQL requires strategic planning and tactics. Simplifying the process, for instance, you have guides and ebooks on your website or, say, a freemium version of a tool, or fill up a form – so if a prospect downloads the ebook/checklist – that’s an MQL. MQL activities also include:

  • Adding an item on the shopping cart or repeating site visits, or spending substantive time on your site.
  • Adding items to your “favorite list”.
  • Adding items to a wishlist.

Even though these are not a comprehensive list, the best way to figure out the MQL depends on diverse information like lead scoring, analytics, product delivery, and demographics. Weeding out the It’s a start; sales-ready leads is a process where you need expertise. Outsourcing can be an immense help to leverage this expertise unless you have a committed team with pro entries in lead scoring and nurturing. 

And during lead nurturing, the marketing team sends them a “Book a call” link and asks them to get on a demo call- when a leader does that, it becomes an SQL – Sales qualified! An SQL is interested in the product or services you offer. The Sales team directly engages with them and communicates with the prospects to solve their queries and push them to the buying funnels. MQL to SQL conversion can be aided by Email marketing or website content, such as blogs, infographics, etc.

Besides, there are product-qualified leads. These are the prospects already utilizing benefits from the product or services, either by a free trial or by directly buying that product.

Outsourced B2B lead generation: How It Works?

In lead generation, demand generation is a crucial aspect the outsourcing agency implies diverse tactics increase demand and acquire leads:

  • Content Marketing: The market team publishes quality content that can resonate with the target market’s main point. Here different content formats grab the reader’s attention, including blogs, webinars, podcasts, videos, and eBooks.
  • Account-based marketing (ABM): The market signifies the major decision-makers inside a specific company or account. And accordingly, a personalized marketing campaign is weaved to acquire those leads. 
  • Growth hacking: B2B growth marketers offer unorthodox techniques to craft the demand and rapid business growth, such as incentives, contests, and free tools – altogether known as the growth hacking process.

In sales, the process includes:

  • Outbound Email: The sales rep communicates with the leads via email to spruce up the conversation. Many agencies use email marketing to automate the process. 
  • Cold Calling: The process includes the telephonic calling of the B2B leads, where the representative explains the service features or details about the product. It focuses on qualifying the lead for further engagement. Cold calling is done manually, or it also is done via automated technologies such as marketing chatbots.
  • Social Media Selling: Sales department follows leads on social media such as Facebook or LinkedIn, intending to engage with the prospects. The primary focus here is developing and strengthening the relationship with the prospects over time and crafting a community of loyal followers.
  • Sales cadences: The amalgamation of all these strategies implied by the sales team to boost the B2B lead response.

Glance On The Advantages Of B2B Lead Outsourcing

Lead outsourcing is the practice of hiring an external department of sales to promote a company’s products or services for a lower cost. Digging the data, it has been found that outsourcing lead generation generates 43% better results [Source], shadowing the in-house lead generation.

#1. Cost-Reduction

Another aspect to track is the cost of the lead generation tools; with outsourcing, you can cut down the expense of these tools. Furthermore, marketers can utilize this aspect to extract substantial knowledge from the dedicated B2B lead generation agency. It will help them skip the trial & error to build a strategy that converts in the long run.

Besides, if you decide to handle lead generation in-house, there are infused costs in hiring, training, and paying the team. The entire training process can take around a year with the overhead cost and the effort. If your organization’s sales rep has less than a year of sales experience, outsourcing can ensure you more leads due to the agencies’ higher skill sets.

#2. Precise Insights

Adding one more aspect here regarding SaaS, your in-house marketing team probably is well acquainted with the product. To scale your growth, assessing your target market is vital. You have to get the idea of how your target audience perceives you, and here, help from the third party outside your in-house team can bring that much-required insight.

When you diligently hire the right sales development team as the lead generation, you can set specific criteria aligning your needs and business goals so that our control over them remains the same as in-house! You are getting an expert team with minimalist effort; that’s a smart move.

#3. Saves Time

If we go by the figures, it is a wise step to leave your lead generation to an agency while letting your in-house team concentrate on other growth marketing tasks. In that way, you can reduce the wasted labor hours, and the team can have ample time to focus on nurturing prospects that are vetted by the outsource team.

In lead generation, audience assessment takes a considerable amount of time, the process with content creation, promotion, and optimization is time-consuming. When you hand over lead generation initiatives to outsourced agencies, you’re saving yourself time and, in turn, money. And when a team of pros works for you, you have the quality, neither you have to worry about.

#4. Expertise

You need not worry about optimization and preparing a buying list, as the skilled professionals are laser-focused on your ideal audience, bringing rapid and high-quality leads. Rather than taking your shot in the dark, outsourcing the experts is a wise step, as they have the knowledge of whom to target and how to target, that have a profound undertaking of the market, the competition, and your product, as they are playing in that field for a long time.

B2B lead generation outsourcing as a way of pivoting the business, i.e., a fundamental change in the direction of a business, or it also can be a drastic shift into a new marketing strategy. It helps corporations test the viability of a new channel before bringing it in-house.

#5. Smooth Sales Process

In addition, outsourcing smoothens your sales process. This focused qualification process saves marketers time, but it also helps to observe quick wins in their business, leading to rapid growth to close the sales. It is undeniable that when makers save time in rapid growth, their ROI increases, and the business achieves rapid KPIs.

It also aids you in lowering the cost per acquisition. A company chooses lead generation while promoting a recently launched product or service through outsourcing; thus, the extra cost of lead generation for the new product or service can be reduced.

Saying about the advantages, lead outsourcing also comes with some disadvantages. While working with the outsourcing organization, you can look away from human factors such as if an employee has a holiday or may retire and the search for potential customers comes to a grinding halt. Furthermore, one of the significant drawbacks of outsourcing is that the agency has less institutional knowledge about your service or product than your in-house team. They understand the necessary experience with time, but it is always external or the peripheral world. Besides, sometimes you may lose control, as you can not monitor each teammate working on a project as these employees are not your in-house staff. But it always your business call as outsourcing makes sense when you don’t have a dedicated and experienced in-house lead generation team.

How Much Does an Outsourcing Lead Generation Cost?

The optimal cost of a lead is determined by the efforts agencies spend on its detection. Hence, as an entail stage of collaboration, go with a pilot project to discover how many qualified leads occur in an average sample of the target audience. Different things influence the cost of a lead. Like direct expenses for a campaign (like clicks or calls), cost of specialists per hour, marketing materials, etc. Furthermore, there are also external factors that rely on your product, such as the product features, price plan compared to competitors, the size of a target audience, the market situation, and the company’s brand. All these factors together act as variables that finalize the actual cost of your outsourcing lead generation process.

Final Thoughts

To sum up, before you outsource for your B2B lead generation:

  1. Ensure to assess your current sales cycle.
  2. Take your budget into consideration before outsourcing; often, budget plays an influential role in your decision to outsource a team.
  3. Check each nook and corner, and let not the budget be the sole thing driving your decision to outsource.

Besides, often corporations hold an illusion of control, but bursting the myth, you can not regulate your SDR entirely, as you can’t watch over them all these times; after all, sales is an independent operation.

Outsourcing lead generation helps to utilize the expertise without worries and free up your spare time, and you can gain the residual benefits to gain control, like where to employ your in-house team. Note that control does not imply merely watching over a conversation, but it’s more about the way of deployment and how you delegate tasks to the teammates that are the best at them.

Outsourcing offers you a dedicated team of professionals in charge of developing strategies, leading periodic database reviews, regulating pipeline efficiency, and constantly evaluating analytics reports, which eventually turn into closing sales leads.

About Ameet Mehta

Ameet Mehta Ameet Mehta

Ameet Mehta‘s expertise lies in building revenue engines for technology-enabled companies and private equity investments. He began his journey with TechStars Chicago and has since founded and acquired several companies through FirstPrinciples Holding Company. The FirstPrinciples portfolio generates over $7M in revenue/year with most companies in the SaaS space. He...

About Ameet Mehta

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