Almost every business wants more leads – I’ve yet to meet one that didn’t. It’s a major piece of the work I do as a marketing advisor to software companies, service businesses and even ecommerce.
Aside from your own internal lead generation programs where you’re managing the channels directly and leveraging your website to convert, you can also generate business leads from third-parties. Here’s a guide and first-hand account on how they work and my assessment of how effective they can be.
I’ve worked at and been a customer of a few different lead generation companies so wanted to share a bit of an insider look at what they offer and whether I’d recommend them. Note that this is primarily for software-based businesses though there are lead gen service companies for lots of other industries.
There are a few types that I’ve describe:
- Inbound phone qualified leads
- Inbound form fill leads ported directly to your database
- Outbound phone qualified leads
Inbound Phone Qualified Lead Generation
For the first, inbound phone qualified leads, I ran marketing for the company, first focused on content marketing, SEO and marketing automation moving into the VP of Marketing role adding paid search under my purview.
This company was somewhat like your traditional review site, having detailed profiles of products and comparison matrixes. Where we differentiated was having assets like requirements checklists/templates for respective software categories so prospective buyers could assess vendors based on a long list of the most important features. In fact, these requirement templates are how we started to win with SEO at the beginning. They were long-tail phrases with lower search volume and not as competitive. Just go search for “CRM requirements” and check out the #1 listing (below ads) and you’ll likely still see a variation of the content I created.
The buyer journey to ultimately become a lead for your business would be as follows:
We drive traffic via organic and paid channels to our site. Visitors can convert as leads for us in a number of ways: requirements templates, pricing guides, comparison reports, and individual pricing/demo requests. Companies like these also use content syndication programs for a lot of the same assets I just mentioned to scale generated leads. From here, a team of professionals are standing by to phone qualify the lead. Depending on the software category, a customized phone call is booked and held – asking some high level qualification questions, the fundamental data needed to hand-off to a software vendor. They then explicitly ask if they’d like to hear from vendors in this category. If it’s a yes, they use database filters related to the questions they’ve answered and recommended vendors pop up. The key here is that all of these vendors are paid participants in the lead generation program. So if you want these leads, you need to sign up with the lead gen business to get them. Intros are sent and then it’s up to your team to schedule the next call. This may have evolved since I left to actually booking the next meeting for you but you’d need to find out if that option is now available.
I am still warm on this type of lead generation program because:
1) there is buying intent shown based on the asset they converted on – with some asset conversions revealing more intent then others. Hint: individual price/demo requests are the strongest intent signal.
2) A qualification phone call is held in which you are paired with the prospective buyer because you already meet many of their requirements
3) You can customize the filters where you’ll be a recommended vendor e.g. based on industry, company size, etc.
Like with anything your mileage will vary on converting these leads to pipeline but I presented this one first because I believe it’s still the most viable.
Inbound form fill leads ported directly to your database
There is some parallel to how these leads are initially attracted to the lead gen company’s site – organic/paid search, organic/paid social, referral sites and so on – your traditional traffic acquisition channels. The key difference is, if you’re a paid participant, people can convert on your profile e.g. “Request a Demo” and these leads can be mapped directly to your marketing automation/CRM tools like HubSpot or Salesforce. From there it’s up to you to schedule, convert, nurture and so on. There is no warm hand-off, it’s just an alternate journey for a buyer to want to learn more about your product without speaking with someone first.
If you are not a paid participant in these sites, you won’t have a call to action option for demo requests (I am generalizing but they all work somewhat the same – though I don’t believe my earlier example has this option. Every lead gets phone qualified first as far as I know). More importantly, aside from not having that option, competitive products will be shown instead in an “ad slot” close to where your Request a Demo button would be. In other words, if you’re not paying, a paying customer of the lead gen company can steal some of your traffic and leads. I am not sure how well this performs for competition but it’s certainly a consideration for a free vs. paid profile. The cost, as always, is a consideration, especially if your product can be listed in multiple categories.
So I described the more promising version of this type of lead generation program because you are at least getting demo requests. I can get behind using these sites for demo requests because it’s a better conversion type but in my direct experience, lead quality was not strong. I had more success with a software company in a more well-known software category than one where we were trying to invent a new software category and so we had to be placed in a category that was the closest fit of which the competitive solutions were not actually competitors at all. Ultimately this created some confusion on what our solution was used for and didn’t result in many leads. Still, we leveraged our paid profile for awareness and customer reviews so it did have value.
The other option is content syndication. I’ll explain it even though I don’t recommend it. There are lead gen companies that can help syndicate your e-books, white papers, case studies or whatever else you want. In fact, I used it (my hand was forced) to get registrants for a virtual event. Of the 1000+ leads I got, 9 (NINE!) logged into the virtual event when it opened.
Your content is gated and syndicated across a network of sites and when leads convert, the lead profile is populated into your CRM/marketing automation solution. Quick tip here if you go this route is to make sure you have a “requested asset” field that you map the details of the content piece they converted on to segment and customize your nurture/outreach to.
You can customize your filters here as well to only receive and pay for leads that fit your target customer profile e.g. by job title(s), industry, company size and so on.
If you’ve tried these programs, you know the leads on the surface level can look great. They come in with rich profiles with the right firmographics and demographics. Here’s the kicker (somewhat theory but I’m pretty convinced): they did not fill out all of that information to get your content. These lead gen companies have built huge databases of prospects of which are cookied so when your gated asset is presented to them, all they have to do is click “request content” (or whatever the CTA is). Even their email is probably pre-filled in the form so they don’t even have the friction to manually enter it. The barrier to getting the content is so low that it’s almost an automatic response. Quite often when you reach out to these leads they don’t even remember anything about you or the content requested. I’ve seen this on both sides – it was part of the program I ran (a much lower conversion rate to a qualified lead than the inbound conversions) and I’ve paid for them and received plenty of feedback saying these were not sales-ready (if they remembered us at all).
If you’ve been following demand gen trends at all, the above is probably not news to you – pundits are very cold on this approach questioning why you’d spend $30+/lead for people likely to qualify at the same rate as pure cold outbound. I agree with them from direct experience. Yes, you can create a great story on how many leads you’re generating but if anyone is examining down-funnel metrics by source, you’ll likely not have a good story to tell anymore.
Decision: consider the third-party demo leads but steer clear of content syndication leads.
Outbound phone qualified leads
This one is only from the perspective of being a customer – I have not worked in a company that did outbound lead generation (as a third party).
The way it works is you provide a third party company with a target account/ICP list or a list of contacts directly procured from another 3P database company (like ZoomInfo, Seamless, Apollo and the like). You also work with them on outreach messaging – email, phone and social scripts. And then they pound the outreach trying to book you meetings. Yes, you can book good meetings with the right people using this approach. Yes, this may even lead to pipeline for you. I saw it first hand but I also can report that:
Not a single deal closed won
Many people were agreeing to meetings just because the rep was so persistent (not a good look for your company)
These reps are not as integrated as internal business development staff and so not as skilled with the necessary information sharing to build trust and rapport with a prospective customer
I tried two different vendors, one as a full year program that produced exactly $0 in revenue (for nearly a six-figure investment) and another that was such a mess that we got out in less than 90 days and some money back.
My opinion on this form is try a test pilot only if you are a better known category of software and have some strong awareness programs running in tandem. Run the program for around the timeframe of an average deal cycle (as long as it’s 6 months or less) and see what kind of results you can produce, comparing them to the performance of your internal business development team. Just be sure, there are clear lines on the prospects/accounts the internal and external teams are approaching so not to create additional confusion/frustration, especially for your internal team. Further, if you have some success with an external team, take those learnings and try to bring them back in-house (if you’ve paused or not started business development in-house).
There are all kinds of competing opinions on outbound prospecting, regardless if doing yourself or outsourcing to a third-party. It’s up to you to decide if it is a worthwhile test because it works for some and doesn’t for others. Some of this depends on the awareness stage of your business, too, so consider the timing and environment before “making the call” (accidental pun).