All founders will eventually run into this same issue at some point.
You have built your first Crore of revenue from referrals from your network and by leveraging some well-timed LinkedIn posts to create an inbound interest in your company. But, by the time you enter the growth stage, it seems like everything stops working out mathematically. Referrals will no longer be scalable to you by this point. Your sales team is spending 60% of their week prospecting instead of selling something. And your board of directors now wants an answer why you have had a decline in pipeline coverage over the last two quarters.
This is typically the time when you start googling “B2B Lead Generation agency,” as well as making an expensive decision by hiring an agency that is just there to sell you leads rather than actually build a pipeline with you.
There is a difference – and it’s a huge difference. Let’s dig into what the top lead generation services providers really do, and how you can tell the difference between one of them and someone who simply scrapes lists to sell leads.
Why In-House B2B Lead Generation Hits a Ceiling
Whether you want to hear it or not, you can’t expect to rely on one person in your business as your only resource for B2B lead generation in 2022. It’s not an issue of talent but rather an issue of maths.
To do this right, a “paid media wizard” is required to work within platforms such as LinkedIn and Google AdWords as well as a writer familiar with buying committees, designers for landing pages and advert creativity, an expert who understands how to run marketing automation and clean CRM data, and lastly, a strategist to link all these efforts together with revenue. That’s a total of five separate, unique skill sets that you need to hire individually, putting at least one person on your payroll each from the five skill sets specified; this will become a very difficult and perhaps impossible task for most emerging growth companies.
As a consequence of having only one person handling the tasks associated with B2B lead generation, that person will juggle each of the individual tasks only at an approximate 60% quality level, causing the compounding effect of B2B lead generation to never really occur. The advertisements are good, but the landing page is a huge leak; leads are generated but no one is following up with them; sales complains about quality of leads while marketing complains about lack of follow-up; and there is no longer any momentum to the process of lead generation.
Specialist agencies can eliminate the maths problems. You get a complete team that has been trained and either already learned from making these same mistakes using someone else’s budget years ago or you can hire a complete team for a fraction of the cost of two senior team members.
What Separates the Best B2B Lead Generation Agency From the Rest
As someone who’s been in the lead generation space for over two decades now, it’s safe to say I have an unpopular opinion: the vast majority of lead generation services are terrible. They do not even fall into the mediocre category; they are just plain bad. The reason for this is they optimize themselves to the metric they get paid on (lead volume) rather than the one that counts (closed revenue) — and therefore you can see the huge gap in incentive.
The top 5% of lead generation services are quite different from these other companies, though. Here’s how they operate and what they do that’s different:
They start with your ICP, not your ad account.
A reputable partner will spend the first couple of weeks asking questions about your best clients prior to building out your advertising campaigns (i.e. who are your fastest closing clients, who expanded their business with you and what was the reason they made a purchase from you). If an agency tells you that they can generate leads for you in a week, it is very likely that they are going to scrape lists and, therefore, provide you with “leads” which will destroy your IP reputation and the goodwill of your sales team.
They qualify ruthlessly.
Lead volume is not a good measure of quality — therefore 100 MQL (Marketing Qualified Leads) that never answer their phone are not equivalent to 8 conversations with decision-makers at suitable accounts. Great agencies build opportunities for qualification into the entire process – through intent-based targeting, firmographic filters, lead scoring, and the ability to disqualify leads that are not a fit.
They run demand generation alongside capture.
While running demand gen, many companies never implement it because it’s too difficult to track how successful it is for getting clients. B2B demand generation (what is normally known as ungated content, LinkedIn thought leadership and educational content that is based on the problems that your audience has) builds the pool of clients that you will then convert to leads through an executed lead capturing campaign. If you decide not to implement B2B demand generation, your lead costs will continually rise year over year as you utilize a shrinking pool of clients who are aware of your service.
They report on pipeline, not impressions.
Agencies provide you with tracking on sales pipeline activity vs. impressions. Before hiring an agency, you should always ask the agency one question: “What will you consider to be a failure?” If they cannot answer your question with numbers and/or revenue then you should continue your search.
The Modern Lead Gen Stack: ABM, Demand Gen, and Precision Paid
To achieve scaling more quickly you don’t have to do more…you have to do the right things in the correct order. Below are some of the systems that top B2B marketing agencies have in place today.
Account based marketing for your highest-value targets.
Target Your Best Prospects – Your best prospects, if your average contract value warrants it, should be the foundation of your marketing programme through Account Based Marketing (ABM). That’s not about casting a large net to find opportunities; it consists of selecting 100-300 of your best fitting target accounts and executing a series of targeted marketing touchpoints around the members of the buying committee within those accounts. While the number of leads produced will drop…the conversion rate of conversations to pipeline from ABM will skyrocket. At Oxper, our experience has been that conversations generated from ABM have multiple conversion rates to pipeline as compared to conversations generated from broader-based campaigns due to the fact that they were a fit before the first marketing touch point.
Demand generation to warm the market.
As opposed to using form filling materials, use podcasts, teardown posts, genuinely helpful guides and LinkedIn posts produced by a founder. The reason for using these types of strategies are to create warm leads who, when they see your retargeting ads or see your demo page will start the conversation by saying “I’ve been following you” as opposed to “who are you?”
Precision paid media to capture intent.
Use Paid Media To Capture Intent – Find active buyers with Google Search, use LinkedIn to layer the account lists, and utilise Meta for cost effective retargeting. The measuring of success should be based on the cost per opportunity (business metric) not cost per lead (Excel statement decoration).
Automation to make sure nothing leaks.
There must be no leaks with automation. The importance of `speed-to-lead` cannot be overstated; the effects of responding to an inquiry in under a minute are exponential when compared to taking hours to respond; using lead scoring, behavioral-triggers in your nurture program, and clean handoffs to your CRM will morph a bunch of ?leads? into a revenue-generating machine.
What have we left out? The typical suppliers are full of cold, rented lists. If B2B digital marketing has a `graveyard`, it is populated by companies who have `legally? bought their customers and ended up on spam/blacklist lists.
What “Scaling Faster” Actually Looks Like
Let’s illustrate this with a composite that we see on a regular basis.
A Software as a Service (SaaS) company who does ₹8 crores in ARR consumer- and referral-based only leads seeing their growth flatline, now engaging a B2B Lead Generation Agency to help grow sales. The first three weeks are reserved for conducting and agreeing on a go-forward approach based on target ICP, messaging to that ICP, and building out the infrastructure for executing these two elements, including creating any necessary tracking systems, CRM housekeeping, landing pages that actually convert leads.
The B2B Lead Generation Agency then, between weeks four and eight, launched paid campaigns and ABM outreach to a one-hundred and fifty account target list(s). By month three, the sales team is conducting twenty-five to thirty qualified conversations/month instead of the six to eight before engaging the B2B Lead Generation Agency. By month six, the compounded funnel created with B2B demand-generation content has seen a 30% decrease in cost per opportunity from launch.
There was nothing magical about this process; the difference is moving from improvisational execution to systematized execution. Is this the true value of engaging with an actual B2B marketing company? not secret tactics, but disciplined execution throughout the entire campaign at once.
Why Growth-Stage Brands Choose Oxper
Most of the lead generation companies out there are doing the same thing. They either run your ads, schedule your meetings or create your written content. Each time they do one of those three tasks they are creating a problem between tasks for you to deal with.
Oxper was created with a different philosophy. As a B2B marketing agency, we operate the entire B2B lead generation and sales process engine under a single roof with a full suite of B2B lead generation programs, account-based marketing programs, B2B demand-generation advertising, content marketing, SEO, Performance Marketing, Marketing Automation, and website and UI/UX design and development.
The key to this full-product offering is integration as we have one team operating all marketing disciplines so that they can work together seamlessly and effectively to produce the most qualified leads for your sales team.
We are not the cheapest option for lead-generating services on the market today; however, we do treat your revenue goal as our key performance indicator (KPI).
Pick a Pipeline Partner, Not a Lead Vendor
Most of the time when companies don’t grow rapidly, it’s not because their products weren’t great. It’s more likely because their pipeline generation is not running like a systematic approach but instead running through many different trial and error methods.
Working with a quality B2B lead generation agency offers clients the complete, pre-built system (strategy, specialists, tools and years of experience) necessary to implement successful pipeline generation as a system. In contrast, working with a poor B2B lead generation agency will result in receiving a list of contacts via CSV format and an invoice.
If you’re ready to work with a high-quality B2B lead generation agency, call Oxper’s office for a complimentary pipeline assessment that will provide an in-depth analysis into any weaknesses in your current sales funnel, identify where qualified leads have dropped out, and provide an actionable 90-day improvement plan. Even if you never do business with us, after receiving your complimentary assessment you will be well aware of the best place to make improvements within your sales funnel.
