While you can definitely do a lot of things in-house for your marketing efforts and lead generation efforts, there are just some things that require the help of a specialized and independent agency.

And one of these things is B2B lead generation. B2B lead generation is extremely important for obvious reasons, and not knowing what you’re doing, or going through the more expensive route, is going to affect your ROI and general profitability of your operations.

Hiring an experienced, lead generation specialist will definitely help boost your revenues and take away all the pain associated with finding much needed business for your outfit.

How would you know that you need the help of a B2B lead generation agency?

1. You are not generating sufficient sales to maintain your business’ profitability. In this situation, the in-house marketing team/department is no longer chasing down the right volume of leads to keep everyone busy.

If the marketing team is generating leads but those leads are not converting to actual business, then the leads may be bad or poorly qualified to begin with. It’s not really volume you are looking for when generating leads, it’s the number of qualified, quality leads that truly matters in the end.

2. Your marketing team is working as hard as it can, but you are still not getting the results that you want.

The problem may be the fact that your marketing team is not big enough to generate the profitability required for your business.

There are many instances of many talented individuals getting burned out on work in marketing, because there are too few of them to begin with.

3. Your business does not have a huge budget for marketing. This is the third most common cause for poor leads over the long term. Generating leads requires manpower, lots of labor time, and monetary resources.

Shouldering all of these will increase your CPL and ultimately, if those qualified leads are not giving you the profit that you need to stay profitable or at least afloat, in-house marketing efforts are not enough.

4. The fourth common reason for needing a qualified B2B lead generation specialist is the fact that you are not familiar with digital marketing at all. You may have been in business for decades, but this is your first year/first few years attempting to bring your business online.

Here are some primary considerations to keep in mind when doing with business with a B2B lead generation specialist:

1. Check your current processes

All businesses have some lead generation process in effect, whether they are aware of the terminology or not. Whether is just conversions for sales or more specific B2B leads, there’s always something in place, because that’s what businesses are all about – selling. But the question is: is it working? How effective is the process you’ve built up for your business?

Before even hiring a B2B lead generation specialist, it’s imperative that you do some housekeeping on your end, too. The reason for this is that your website, and all its associated processes, should be in rude health even if you’re getting an excellent boost from a qualified agency.

The first step is always identifying your niche. How aware are you (as of the moment) of who you are supposed to be selling to?

Being highly specific is always a boon to marketers. Even if you are targeting multiple niches, each niche has sub-niches and the clearer your focus is, the better off your marketing efforts will be.

2. What’s the breakdown of costs or CPL?

“Cost per lead” or CPL is different depending on the industry that you are targeting. You can ask your lead generation agency for a comparison of costs, or at least a ballpark figure. You should also do your own research to determine how much you should expect to spend with all your lead generation efforts combined. Ultimately, the costs of outsourcing the lead generation to an outside agency should be lower than your own estimates.

But there are other factors to consider, too. Let’s say that your estimates are lower – because this is the first time that you have actually gotten around to generating your leads consistently.

There are many scenarios when the internal computation of the CPL is wildly different from the actual, especially when you’re doing SEM (search engine marketing) and you’re spending on advertising regularly.

Advertising on search engines and websites – these costs add up. And what do you do when one campaign fails? You try again.

Combine the costs of those failed attempts plus all the other expenses you have and divide them by the actual number of leads you are generating. That is your internal derived CPL for B2B lead generation.

3. What is your readiness to scale up?

Scalability is defined as the ability of a business to handle an increase in demand or work, meaning, it has the potential to grow economically when new resources are acquired or when demand is boosted.

In the case of lead generation agencies, the best ones can supply you with warm leads that actually provide you with new business.

But sometimes, there is an oversupply of qualified leads, and the business is left to contend with the now pleasant ‘problem’ of having too much business, too soon.

Some things to avoid when demand increases and you are not ready for the changes are:

– Breakdown of existing office/business culture of excellence and productivity.
– Slowing down or failure of existing processes of production
– Below standard customer service

It is common for businesses who deal with qualified agencies to increase their production by as much as half of their total capacity nearly overnight. Are you ready to handle this type of change, and are your employees ready, too? Because this is what you get with effective lead generation: lots and lots of business.

And sometimes, that becomes a problem when the business’ system isn’t ready to expand just yet – it becomes burdened with the weight of having too much to do, but not having sufficient resources to carry out the production.