Outsourcing B2B Lead Generation 2021: Top 10 Reasons to Love Outbound
If you’re involved in any B2B organization, you’ll be quick to learn that lead generation is an essential part of doing business. In fact:
62% of B2B professionals said that increasing their lead volume is the top priority.
Demand Gen Report
However, it’s not always easy to generate enough leads to guarantee a quick return on investment (ROI)—or any profitability, for that matter.
A whopping 68% of businesses reported struggling with lead generation, and another 61% of B2B marketing folks think lead generation is their top challenge.
CSO Insights
That’s where outbound lead generation comes into play, a forward-thinking approach to business that gets your brand out there, cuts your costs, and finds only qualified leads. There are many reasons why you may be looking to outsource lead generation, whether you’re trying to expand into new markets or get added support for your sales team.
And we get it. We’ve built our own business on outbound lead generation (we’re drinking our own champagne, if you will!). Here are 10 of our favorite reasons why we love outbound at CIENCE in 2021 and how your company can benefit from adding a little—or a lot—of outsourcing into your lead generation strategy.
Reason 1: Outbound Gets the Most Direct ROI
Due to the complexities and uncertainties of doing business today, many B2B companies choose outbound lead generation to get the most direct ROI. Instead of waiting for inbound results that may take 6 to 12 months (or longer!) down the line, you can get a quicker return from outsourced lead generation services at a much lower cost.
Think about it—there is generally a high turnover rate for internal sales (the voluntary rate is 16%; involuntary is often higher) not to mention the expense alone of hiring a solid internal lead generation team (truly experts in their field) to ensure a sure-fire ROI. If you stop to consider the cost of doing your own outbound lead generation strategy, the ROI of SDR outsourcing becomes a much more sensible solution.
Outsourced lead generation is best at hyper-targeting the leads you want to do business with. Given the fact that you can predetermine spend here, then directly attribute output (usually in the form of held meetings), there is crystal clear math to determine return on investment. It may be the cleanest formula of any go-to-market channel you can embrace.
Reason 2: Increases Your Brand Exposure
Did you know that most consumers—80 percent of buyers (according to 2018 Google SERP study)—will pick a familiar brand when searching for products online, regardless if it comes up first in the search engine results?
The trend doesn’t change in B2B buying scenarios. Although people are much more savvy these days in their product research and knowledge, brand awareness still remains the critical component that gives you that competitive edge and builds loyalty in your brand.
Outbound lead generation services can give you sales development experts that can put the right outbound messaging where you need it—from advertising and phone calls to email marketing and online communications—to get your brand noticed and your prospects hooked. You’re essentially getting more “at-bats” to increase your brand exposure—a grand-slam solution that can build trust in your brand and ultimately get you better results.
Reason 3: Supports Multi-Channel Marketing Campaigns
According to CIENCE’s VP of Sales, Michael Maynes, the best possible outreach strategy is a multi-channel one. But with so many channels out there, how do you execute a successful outbound multi-channel campaign to achieve your desired goals? Businesses are constantly looking for that golden ticket that works. But what if you want to utilize several golden tickets to reach your target audience and beyond?
The strategic implementation of an outbound multi-channel campaign can be tricky—time-intensive and resource-heavy, you need carefully planned tactics and orchestration to successfully find those prospects. That’s where an outsourced lead generation strategy comes in—to do the heavy lifting for you.
A strong outsourced lead generation can help you utilize highly targeted outbound channels and build data from many sources, then tapping into new channels to go after those qualified leads. Want to stop waiting for inbound to see results? Invest in a multi-channel marketing campaign that puts power into both.
Reason 4: Increases Inbound Conversions
Did you know that outbound plays a significant role in closing inbound deals? In fact, according to a 2019 CIENCE study, a significant 17% of the inbound-closed deals were ones that were outbound assisted. We call this effect the outbound assist, or the percentage of inbound leads (or converted inbound leads) that were initially targeted by an outbound channel, such as a phone call or email message, that result in inbound-closed deals.
It’s not surprising that outbound has become a key contributor to the inbound success rate due to these reasons:
- Spreads the word to consumers about your products and services
- Increases awareness about solutions that your business provides
- Gives your brand or company more exposure
- Attracts more visitors to your website
It’s not uncommon for prospects in a sequence to come back around to your brand when they are in-market for a solution like yours (think of this as similar to retargeting).
As a more direct way of approaching your target prospect, outbound methods leverage conversion opportunities and support inbound leads.
Reason 5: Precisely Targets Your ICP and Buyer Personas
B2B companies should take a good amount of time at the beginning of a sales cycle and marketing campaign to develop a solid ideal customer profile (ICP) and target a user persona. But what if you have limited resources or lack the expertise to create guidelines to manage your lead generation process?
By outsourcing lead generation, you can expedite the research process with trained professionals who use sales intelligence to best determine your ICP and buyer personas. Your business can then design a solid marketing strategy based on these criteria:
- Ideal Customer Profile (or ICP) – This is a thorough description of a company most likely to become your next customer. You should create a specific ICP for every outbound marketing campaign to use as a guide for finding high-quality leads.
- Buyer Persona (or BP) – This allows you to understand your potential buyers and communicate with those leads at every stage in your sales funnel. This includes information on previous, existing, and potential customers’ psychological traits, buying habits, and behavioral patterns.
Outbound lead generation experts have a profound understanding of who your customers are and who they aren’t—you’ll get research specialists who can build data specifically for your company to validate the lead requirements and fulfill your outbound strategy.
Reason 6: Identifies Decision-Makers
In a lead generation strategy, reaching the decision-makers is a top priority. Good lead generation is about finding and speaking to the right people, but how do you know how to precisely target them or even know where to find them? With the average number of people on a purchasing team at 6.8, what’s the likelihood you’ll be able to decipher the who’s who in charge of:
- Accepting appointments
- Driving purchase initiatives forward into their organization
- Closing business deals
An experienced outbound SDR can map out organizations and identify decision-makers, with the analytical skills to separate the good leads from the bad. By utilizing SDRs to begin conversations with qualified prospects, appointments can be set with the most qualified decision-makers, eliminating wasted time that can impact the productivity of your team.
Reason 7: Penetrates New Markets
With inbound marketing, your lead generation strategies often revolve around getting a specific targeted audience to view your content—which oftentimes keeps you confined to a niche. But with outbound, you can attract new markets and even test out new ones throughout the sales cycle.
An outbound lead generation marketing plan can play a powerful role to not only reach your target audience but reach new markets as well. With an army of multi-talented outbound specialists to lead the charge, you’ll be able to expand your leads to new demographics and geographic locations.
Outbound is also great for testing out new markets where you can get an immediate response from the market and adjust accordingly. Your SDRs can offer valuable insight into what is (and is not) working in your campaign strategy.
Reason 8: Goes to Market Faster
Inbound, events, public relations, channel partner, product led growth (PLG), or networking-based go-to-market motions all take time. While those strategies can be strong components for your overall business goals, they take much longer to develop. Outbound lead generation, on the other hand, is best at targeting the high-quality leads that may be ready to purchase your product or service, which allows you to go to market faster.
Plus, the ability to develop a first-mover advantage in the minds of decision influencers at target accounts is actually the key to sales dominance and true market leadership. Setting both an agenda and benchmarks for how your ideal buyers should be thinking about a product or service like yours is how smart companies differentiate themselves.
Increasing the size of your marketing funnel with more outbound generated leads will add more opportunities into your sales pipeline, which will translate into more closed deals and speed up the sales cycle. By outsourcing lead generation, you can focus on a rapid go-to-market strategy that increases sales and potentially increases revenue.
Reason 9: Sets Your Sales Team Up for Success
The success of your team relies heavily on a healthy sales pipeline. By outsourcing a team of talented SDRs to find those qualified leads, you can effectively empower your in-house sales team to focus on core tasks with increased efficiency and success. By nurturing your leads, you can increase sales opportunities by approximately 20%, according to Demand Gen Report.
This will ultimately strengthen the partnership and trust between sales and marketing. It also enables you to build a more specialized sales organization—which is highly correlated with better conversion rates—where you have sales executives focused more on closing than prospecting. On average, sales reps spend only 26.6 percent of their time selling to customers (13 hours per week).
While outsourced lead generation teams can focus on lead development, appointment setting, and cold outreach, an in-house sales team can spend more time converting these high-quality leads and closing deals—a win-win strategy for all parties.
Reason 10: Lets You Call the Shots
With inbound, you get what you get, but with outbound, you get who you want.
Trish Bertuzzi, The Bridge Group
My mantra. Companies are starting to realize that outbound lead generation is certainly a reliable and cheaper way to get a better return on your investment and improve the sales cycle. But how much control do you have when you outsource lead generation?
Like other services that you may outsource, such as website design, social media, or pay-per-click (PPC) ads, this is where your research to find a quality lead generation service really matters. Finding the right outbound lead generation service means you’ll have as much control as you would if the SDRs were sitting in your office and working directly for you.
With an outbound lead generation company, you can look at all of your B2B campaigns and make sure there is a gradual improvement in the quality of your leads. Your results are shown in detailed reports that are set against metrics that you can monitor—you’ll have complete control to see exactly how your campaigns run and if your outreach team has succeeded (or failed), and make quick adjustments to best suit your business.
Get the Benefits of Outsourcing Lead Generation
While some marketing strategies may work better in-house, other tasks that can cause you more headaches—and money—than good, like generating outbound leads, are best left to the SDR experts who can execute them most effectively.
No longer a stranger to marketers, outsourcing lead generation has become a vital component of business with proven value and healthy returns. As a part of an integrated marketing approach, you’ll be able to use outbound lead generation strategies to realize and grow your company to its full potential.
