August 22, 2022

B2B Lead Generation Outsourcing: What, Why, When & How to Do It

Every company needs an internal lead management setup to create demand for its products and services.

B2B lead generation is a critical and challenging task. In fact, 61% of marketers state that lead generation is the most difficult part of their job.

Lead generation is a technical, personal and time-consuming task. Therefore, sales departments have to dedicate a lot of their time to generating highly qualified leads. This, in return, left them with less time to focus on lead nurturing strategies, managing sales pipeline, relationship building, etc.

Thereby, many sales and marketing teams strive to choose an ideal vendor and outsource their B2B lead generation services to save time and money.

But is B2B lead generation outsourcing safe? Where can I find a good lead outsourcing partner? How can I streamline my outsourced and in-house lead generation strategies?

Well, hold your questions, people! We know you have a gazillion questions in your mind regarding B2B lead generation outsourcing. So, let’s tackle them one by one.

What Do You Mean by B2B Lead Generation Outsourcing, Anyway?

As you already know, lead generation is a process of finding, connecting, nurturing and converting potential B2B buyers. And lead generation outsourcing means inviting an external lead generation company to help you drive leads to your sales funnel.

Mostly, small companies outsource companies to speed up their lead generation process. They aim to reduce internal sales workload by outsourcing lead generation work.

Every company needs an internal lead management setup to create demand for its products and services. But progressive companies delegate some lead generation tasks to use omnichannel marketing strategies.

Combining both inbound and outbound B2B lead generation can deliver more leads and reduce the sales cycle.

When to Outsource B2B Lead Generation?

Foremost, you can never fully outsource lead generation. But, yes, you can delegate some parts of it, like you can hire lead generation companies to find relevant leads via emails or cold calling.

But, you need a dedicated in-house team to filter out qualified leads and customize marketing strategies to convert them. Then, you can just delegate some outbound marketing methods like cold emailing or social selling to external teams.

Besides this, B2B lead generation outsourcing can be a good solution in case:

  • You don’t have the resources to hire competent lead marketers and tools.
  • You wish to support your internal marketing and sales team by assigning some operations to external organizations.
  • You prefer to focus on the different types of lead outreach campaigns.
  • Looking for fast lead generation turnout.
  • Require professional support to generate relevant and qualified leads.

Why Is B2B Lead Gen Outsourcing Beneficial for Your Growth Business?

Outsourcing lead generation services can help you in many situations. For example, both SMBs and large enterprises can leverage external lead gen partners to grow their businesses, such as:

Focus on Core Tasks

Lead generation is a small part of the big picture. When a lead walks into your sales funnel, it is nowhere ready to purchase. So you still have to nurture, engage and communicate with leads to turn them into your paying customers.

And that requires time, a lot of time. But unfortunately, sales reps don’t have that much time.

So, you can outsource lead generation tasks to a professional company and make room in your team’s schedule to focus on optimizing your sales pipeline.

Better Turn Around Time

Using an external lead gen team, you can increase your internal capacity. You can target more inbound and outbound channels to stimulate leads from different sources.

In addition, your sales reps can reach out to hot leads faster. This will eventually boost your sales conversion rate.

Improve Your Internal Marketing Functions

If you don’t have a full-stack marketing team, you can never target multiple marketing channels on your own. Heck, you can’t even develop constant content for your various social media channels.

Since it is no secret that you need consistent and omnichannel marketing to generate leads; thus, you need an outsourcing partner to increase your marketing headcount.

When you get potential leads served on a silver platter, you can better focus on analyzing their behavior and preferences. This will help you create personalized marketing strategies to improve your marketing ROI.

Test and Experiment

Today, every company is trying unique and innovative lead generation strategies to attract more people. They are using various tools, techniques and tricks to bridge the gap between their potential customers.

But the one-man army can not experiment and monitor all the different marketing channels. Thus, call in a lead generation company to handle traditional lead generation approaches for you while you can focus on experimenting with new strategies.

Low Cost

Compared to hiring in-house lead generation teams, outsourcing can be more cost-effective. Most companies charge a lump sum amount for the services you have used.

For example, if you want prospects' email addresses for email marketing, you simply have to pay a standard fee to the company.

On the contrary, if you hire a new person to build your email list, you have to pay a monthly salary along with other employment perks. Besides this, you have to provide them with adequate tools, a computer system, desk space and other infrastructure to do their jobs.

All this can add up to a huge burden on your finances. So, it is easy and economical to outsource some lead generation solutions.

Which B2B Lead Generation Services You Can Outsource?

Outsourcing lead generation solutions work differently for your sales and marketing operations. Let’s break the outsourced lead generation process into sales and marketing operations to understand which one to outsource:

Sales Operations

Here are the sales operations that you can outsource from the B2B lead gen companies:

Cold Calling

Cold calling is useful for engagement and connecting with your sales qualified leads. You can better explain your products or services over call and get a real-time response from your leads. So, you can delegate cold calling tasks to third-party companies as they have a full team and tools at disposal.

Cold Emailing

Cold emailing is a time-consuming outbound marketing approach. Writing an email message to follow up on time can take up lots of time. In fact, a study shows that sales reps spend their entire day just writing emails. So, you can outsource the cold email sending part and only focus on recipients that respond to your emails.

Social Selling

Sales reps often follow B2B leads on social networking channels like LinkedIn or Instagram. However, it is again a time-consuming and outsourceable task. You can outsource the task to generate leads from different social media channels to an external team.

Sales Cadences

Sales cadences are strategies that the sales team use to increase B2B lead response. For example, many companies use lead magnets to gauge the response from potential buyers through case studies, newsletters, etc. So, you can pass on this work to professional teams to increase email open rate, social media engagement and more.

Marketing Operations

Demand generation is a challenging B2B lead generation party. Therefore, you can outsource the following marketing operations to increase your product’s demand:

Growth Hacking

Professional B2B growth hackers can understand your business goals, niche and targeted audience to create significant demand in the market. If you are launching a new product, let’s outsource the demand generation process while you can focus on other important aspects of the launch.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a whole lead generation strategy on its own. It helps to spread awareness, engage, retain and convert leads. But that’s only possible when you use personalized content marketing strategies based on your prospects’ needs. And it takes time and knowledge. Therefore, you can outsource a content marketing team to build a content plan and deploy it for higher grade generation.

Account-based Marketing

Account-based marketing is a robust marketing strategy that lets you focus on only high-value leads. This way, you can put your company resources on accounts ready to convert. However, it is tedious to find potential accounts in the large sales funnel. So, you can outsource someone to filter accounts in your sales pipeline based on their readiness.

B2B Lead Gen Outsourcing Challenges

Outsourcing B2B lead generation services can save time, improve efficiency and bring consistency to your lead generation efforts. But, it is only possible when you have the right strategy and outsourcing partner to support your goals. Otherwise, you might not be able to achieve the desired outcome.


Here are some common challenges that you might face while outsourcing your lead generation processes:

Unclear Target

When you don’t pass your ideal customer profile to a third-party lead generation company, your lead quality will be poor. As a result, you will not receive the high-quality leads you were hoping for. You should provide the correct buyer persona and segmentation details to your outsourcing partner to avoid this issue.

Reputational Risks

There is always a reputation risk when you outsource your work. If you don’t hire the right partner, you might risk your business message and technical resources. For example, your email marketing outsourced partner might send the wrong email message, leading to poor domain authority. This problem has only one solution – hire the best outsourcing partner in your industry.

Financial Loss

Obviously, when your lead generation outsourcing partner doesn't offer the desired results, your finances and time are lost. So once again, you need to find a good outsourcing solution to avoid this issue.

How to Find a Good B2B Lead Generation Outsourcing Company?

As you have noticed, a good B2B lead generation partner can make it easy to achieve your goals. The right company can help you find qualified leads in less time and budget.

But, it is not easy to find a good outsourcing company for lead generation today. Not because there are not many good companies available. That’s because there are so many amazing lead generation companies available that it gets difficult to choose the best one.

However, we have shortlisted the criteria to select the best B2B lead generation outsourcing company to make your life easier. So, just follow these steps:

Step 1. Define your needs

Foremost, you should define the purpose of outsourcing your lead gen services. Do you want to save your team’s time? Do you want special lead generation services? Or something else?

You should clearly define your requirements before looking for lead generation companies. This way, you can narrow down your research to the companies that offer the services you are looking for.

Suppose you want to hire a lead generation company for email marketing purposes. In that case, you should look for the companies that offer email marketing services.

Step 2. Check out data collection methods

Data collection is one of the most important lead generation activities. Your lead generation company will collect data based on your defined ideal customer profile and segment it into different groups like age, income, job title, etc.

Therefore, you should check the company's methods for data collection before hiring. This will help you understand whether they have the resources to collect first-hand data or rely upon second-hand data.

Mostly, companies use different channels to collect data like email, phones, surveys, polls, social media and so on. You should always first ask your shortlisted companies to provide full information on their data collection methods.

Step 3. Do proper due diligence

You should always do proper due diligence before outsourcing your B2B lead generation services (including well detailed business proposal). Nowadays, it is pretty simple to research information on any company online.

Here are things that you should research online:

  • Look for case studies published on their website to understand their expertise and lead generation methods.
  • Search for reviews and testimonials posted by their previous customers.
  • Explore all the previous projects and companies with which they have worked.
  • Look out for digital tools and platforms they are partnered with for a better lead generation.
  • You should also check out the certification and qualifications possessed by their team members.
  • Finally, go to their specific social media pages to see what comments people leave on their posts. 

Step 4. Gather information on team structure

After running due diligence, you should make a direct call or write an email to companies that have met your expectations. You should precisely ask about their team structure and lead generation methods in the call.

You should ask whether one SDR fulfils all functions like data enrichment, campaign management, writing templates, etc. Or, they have different team members to approach each lead generation method.

You should also inquire about their communication process. This way, you will know whom to contact when you need any information from your lead generation company.

Knowing the team structure will help you understand how the company works and do they have the proper infrastructure to support you.

Step 5. Ask for technology

Technology is essential to find, analyze and segment data today. However, without the help of the right tools, it is impossible to manage large databases. Therefore, you should inquire about all the different tools and technologies your outsourcing partner uses to deliver high-quality leads to your sales pipeline.

Nowadays, many companies are using artificial intelligence and machine learning to make data more robust. So, ensure that your B2B lead generation company uses all these latest technologies available to enrich your data source.

Ready to Outsource Your B2B Lead Generation Process?

Outsourcing B2B lead generation solutions can save your time and money and facilitate small teams to focus on their core operations. However, the success of outsourcing lead generation heavily depends upon your selected partner.

If you don’t outsource your leads from reputable and qualified companies, it can damage your business reputation and risk your technical/financial resources. Therefore, select your outsourced partner after full consideration and research.

Besides this, you should outsource specific lead generation tasks that consume more time, like content marketing, email marketing, etc. Also, never outsource your entire lead generation process. It will only create confusion and chaos in your sales and marketing teams.

So, hire the best outsourcing partner and select your outsourcing services very carefully. Just follow these two simple tips, and you can easily generate high-quality leads from your outsourcing company.

If you find this article helpful, do check out other lead generation posts on this website.

No items found.

Harsh Gupta

Share Post:

Comments System WIDGET PACK

Start engaging with your users and clients today