Maybe You Should Hire One of Those Lead Gen Vendors
They’re infamous. Descending on your LinkedIn inbox and email like a swarm of dastardly hornets, the lead gen vendors greet you with impersonal and lofty promises.
“Would you be opposed to me booking you 20 to 30 qualified calls per month?”
Outraged at having been subjected to yet another lazy and unrealistic pitch, you howl at the moon. How, for the love of God, do we eliminate these cold pitches? They are ruining LinkedIn, if not the entire channel of email.
As someone who talks to a dozen B2B entrepreneurs per month about marketing, though, I’ve come around to a hot take: many entrepreneurs would be well served by hiring one of these vendors. Not necessarily because they work but because they impart a critical lesson: full-funnel marketing is a real thing you should probably be doing. And leads aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.
People want leads
I get it. The ultimate goal of marketing is to drive pipeline. Most clearly, that manifests in leads. Someone new becomes aware of you, and that person could hypothetically buy from you. For example, if I cold email 10,000 people and 10 people respond with something other than “I hate you,” that is 10 leads. If 10 adtech CEOs comment on my tweets, that is 10 leads. Ditto for 10 people in my audience signing up for a webinar.
So, many people, whether they admit it or not, view marketing as a pure lead gen machine. I will give you $5,000 this month. My average customer is worth $5,000 per month. My close rate is 25%. Go get me 10 leads per month, and this will be ROI positive. Don’t get me 10 leads? This isn’t worth my time.
This is a conversation I have all the time, especially with entrepreneurs who have spent little to no money on marketing. Except, as everyone with experience knows, marketing math is not as simple as it seems.
Not all leads are created equal
There are two reasons you can’t boil all marketing down to lead gen.
First, not all leads are created equal. Let’s return to my previous example. If 10 people who have never heard of me respond to a mass cold email with some interest, they are very far from buying. Sure, they are not totally disgusted by my pitch. But they have almost no idea who I am and no pre-existing trust. It’s going to take a lot to get most of them over the line, especially for high-value sales. Webinar leads could go either way — depends on how many times you’ve interacted with them beforehand or how good your brand awareness is. It also depends on how aligned the topic of the webinar is with your product and the prospect’s needs. Same with social leads. It would be unwise if I tried to pitch an adtech CEO who engaged with my content one time. But if that person and I have been going back and forth on Twitter for months, I will have a better chance of approaching them. Even then, they may not have the money for my service.
So, generating leads, while ostensibly the goal of marketing (or one of the goals), inspires a lot more questions than answers.
Second, generating a lead is just one small part of the work of marketing. To use the typical funnel analogy, generating a lead means you’ve ushered someone into the funnel. They are aware of you. It does not mean they are ready to buy. The more valuable what you’re selling is — that is, the further you go on the spectrum from a hyper-casual game install, where direct-response advertising excels, to an enterprise B2B software deal, which requires a very senior person’s sign-off — the more you need marketing for the entire funnel. You need to build trust with a lot of top-of-funnel marketing (e.g. PR and social content), show them how your solutions can help (webinars, white papers), and close the deal with social proof and face-to-face interactions.
In other words, for marketing to have its true ideal impact, you need full-funnel B2B marketing: building awareness and trust to generate and nurture relationships over time. There are no shortcuts. There are no magic tricks. You have to be present in your prospects’ lives by creating content and influencing influencers. You need to show them the value you can provide over and over. And eventually you may just get the chance to sell them.
But if you don’t believe me yet, hire a lead gen vendor
I’m not being entirely sarcastic about the value of hiring a lead gen vendor. In fact, I started my business three years ago and once hired one! A fellow entrepreneur recommended a cold email vendor to me. For about $3,000/mo, they blasted emails to thousands of business and marketing leaders. We actually broke even on the engagement because we got a couple one-time projects out of it. We stayed with them for two months, at which point they acknowledged it wasn’t working.
The twist? The two “leads” that actually led to deals had both heard of us before. It wasn’t a truly cold approach. Previous relationships and marketing touchpoints had paved the way. That’s the reality of high-value B2B marketing: it’s a long game, regardless of the final tactic that pushes a prospect over the line.
I had to hire a lead gen vendor to get totally sold on the marketing approach that works for me. And now I know what it is. I create what I hope is differentiated and smart content on adtech marketing. I generate and nurture relationships. And, for the most part, I wait for my audience to come to me when they’re ready. It’s not what the business gurus sold me. I can only accelerate growth so much by hustling. But it’s what works for my audience. And every business needs to figure that out.
