Getting an outsourced lead generation agency to help generate leads is one of the best ways to supercharge an organization’s potential for growth.
It allows organizations to focus on product development and their other specializations, while allowing an experienced third-party to bring in the leads.
In this guide, we explore what to expect from an outsourced lead generation agency.
An Initial Round of Meetings
Regardless, if your potential lead generation firm found you or if you found them, the first steps will involve a series of meetings involving high ranking DMUs from both parties.
Your marketing and sales teams will also be present during a couple of these meets.
A lot of things will go on during these meetings:
- They will assess your organization and its place in the industry
- Your current product portfolio and your target customers will be analyzed
- Goals and expectations will be drawn out
- KPIs will be determined
- The lead generation system will be explained
- Pricing will be discussed
This list is nowhere from complete. To add to this, there will be interviews, more meetings, and a lot of phone calls.
During this stage, it’s important that you don’t commit to a single lead generation firm just yet. Keep your options open so that you can pick the right agency for your unique needs.
Contract
After the initial rounds of meetings and interviews, we get to the contract.
The contract is critical. It helps manage expectations between a business and their lead generation agency, sets benchmarks, and puts down the limitations of each party.
It also serves as protection for both parties in the event of any untoward incidents.
Make sure that you get proper legal advice before signing off on any contracts, and that you fully agree to the terms stipulated in the document.
You can always renegotiate should there be any problems.
Schedule of KPIs
This can be in the form of a calendar, a Gantt chart, etc.
It’s basically the list of the objectives in the contract with assigned timeframes.
This differs from one agency to another, but they’re a great way to know what you should be expecting on particular dates.
Building Ideal Customer Profiles
Some lead generation agencies actually take the time to match your products and services with the ideal customer profiles that you should be targeting.
This helps you build your market share and it helps them with personalized and targeted campaigns.
Related: Lead Generation for Startups: Profiling and Engaging Ideal Customers
Funnel and Campaign Creation
After building ideal customer profiles, they can start building out campaigns in collaboration with you and your team.
These campaigns will be built around personalized funnels that help bring in prospects, screen them, and nurture them until they’re ripe for conversion.
Forget simple funnels, expect multiple touchpoints with flowcharts that predict various responses and sub-campaigns that market to those who drop out of the pipeline.
A Steady Supply of Leads
Since you did hire a lead generation agency, you should expect a steady supply of leads coming through to your sales team.
These leads should at least be:
- Qualified – the prospects should be in the right industry, matching ideal customer profiles with the capacity to pay for the product or service that you offer.
- Complete – this means that the leads need to have information that helps the sales team close the deal. Things such as demographic details, additional contact information, sales history, unique characteristics, etc.
Different Channels
Depending on the specialization of your lead generation agency, you should also expect leads to come from different channels – that is depending on which channels you want to focus on.
Lead generation agencies can pull leads from:
- Cold prospecting
- Email outreach
- Telemarketing
- Retargeting
- Display Ads / PPC
- SEO
- Content Marketing
They’ll even advise you on which channels you should focus on.
Related: Effective Ways to Generate B2B Leads in Australia
Multi-touch Campaigns
If you’re working on an omnichannel focus with your business, your agency should be able to handle that as well.
They can integrate the various channels that you’ve chosen to work with to help create a unique experience for anyone who’s interested in what you have to offer.
Related: 6 Winning Multi-channel Sales Tactics Examples for Software Companies
Reporting
There are different types of reporting systems with outsourced lead generation agencies.
Some offer a live dashboard available via a unique URL where you can get actual numbers, others opt for a weekly email report, and there are some agencies who do a little bit of everything to make sure clients are informed.
These reports are important because they allow a client to assess how a campaign is being run and what else is needed to move forward.
Performance Meetings
Apart from reports, regular performance meetings are a norm with outsourced lead generation agencies. These can be tied-in with major monthly or periodic reports.
These meetings allow the client to ask questions about the current campaigns that are in place, make any necessary decisions to move the campaign forward, and interact with their lead generation specialists personally.
Campaigns can be assessed in terms of performance and KPIs revisited in case the lead generation team falls short.
Getting an outsourced lead generation agency is one of the best ways to take your company to the next level. It helps minimize costs since you get to benefit from the specialization of the agency, and you get to focus on what you do best.
Lead generation agencies are one of the best ways for a company to scale quickly and efficiently. Find out more about how Callbox can help you bring in qualified leads so that you can grow today!
