Every single day, I get at least one email from a lead generation company. Usually more than one. They all have a slightly different spin, but the promise is basically the same: “You don’t pay unless we get you qualified meetings.” Some promise five meetings a month, some promise 10, and apparently all of them have discovered a remarkable number of companies that are just dying to hire a marketing agency in Sycamore, Illinois.
First of all, do I look desperate?
I’m kidding, sort of. Because the truth is, who wouldn’t want a qualified lead dropped in their lap? I’ve owned an agency long enough to know that new business is never something you stop thinking about. Even when you’re busy, you know clients come and go, budgets change, companies get sold, marketing directors leave and things happen that have absolutely nothing to do with the quality of your work. There is always a need for new business.
So I have a confession. About a year and a half ago, we hired a new account manager at Green Closet Creative, and I wanted to give them the best possible opportunity to succeed. I thought that if we could put some qualified prospects in front of them, they could start building a book of business without having to create every opportunity from scratch.
After deleting hundreds, maybe thousands, of these lead gen emails over the years, I finally thought: Maybe I should actually try one.
So I did.
It did not go well.
The company we hired talked a good game about prospecting and generating qualified opportunities, but what we actually got was a lot of LinkedIn outreach. They were essentially working through connections and sending prospecting messages on our behalf. That alone wasn’t necessarily a deal breaker. LinkedIn can obviously be a useful business development tool. The problem was that there seemed to be very little understanding of the people they were contacting or our history with them.
There were people who had already told us they weren’t interested. There were people we already had relationships with. In some cases, someone would have an actual conversation with us and then receive another prospecting message shortly afterward as though that conversation had never happened.
It was embarrassing.
And that’s when I started to realize there was a much bigger problem with outsourcing this kind of business development. To the lead generation company, these were names on a list. To us, they were people.
That’s an important distinction, particularly for a business like ours. We’ve been around a long time, and our reputation matters. Many of our clients come through referrals, previous clients, community relationships and people who have known us or our work for years. I don’t want to burn through those relationships so someone can report that they sent 500 messages this month.
And maybe that’s the fundamental problem. Their success metric and ours aren’t necessarily the same. If they’re being paid to put meetings on our calendar, they’re motivated to put meetings on our calendar. I’m not particularly interested in having more meetings. Like most business owners, I already have plenty of those. I’m interested in meeting the right people at the right time, when there’s a legitimate reason for us to be talking.
For us, the experiment didn’t work. In fact, I think it did more to hurt our business development efforts than help them, and we stopped doing it.
But here’s the thing: I am genuinely curious about whether our experience is typical.
There are SO MANY of these companies. Judging by my inbox, new ones are being created every 15 minutes. Somebody must be hiring them. And unless every one of these businesses is surviving entirely by selling lead generation services to the next person who hasn’t yet tried lead generation services, somebody must be getting results.
So I want to hear from the people who have actually paid for one.
Did it work? Did you get legitimate prospects who were actually interested in what you were selling? Did those meetings eventually turn into business? Was the revenue enough to justify what you spent on the service and the time your own people spent working the leads? Most importantly, when the contract ended, did you renew it?
I’m not looking for a recommendation for a lead generation company. I’m not secretly shopping for one. And, just to be perfectly clear, if you work for a lead gen company, please don’t read this and think, “She just hasn’t tried OUR system yet.”
I promise you, that is not the takeaway.
I want to hear from business owners and sales and marketing leaders who have been on the other side of the transaction. Maybe you found a company that was fantastic. Maybe it was a complete disaster. Maybe you got just enough business from it to make the math work.
I really want to know.
Has anyone had a lead generation company consistently deliver qualified opportunities that actually turned into business?
