Outbound marketing, including LinkedIn Lead Generation and Cold Email are extremely effective strategies to close new clients and customers.
The problem: they’re extremely time consuming to do correctly.
There’s a lot of moving parts and to get everything right it takes months of preparing, testing, and iterating.
This is the point many entrepreneurs and companies turn to outsourcing lead generation. But is it the right move?
Disadvantages to Outsourcing LinkedIn Lead Generation
We’ll jump in by talking about the disadvantages, because, like anything, there are some negatives to outsourcing.
There are plenty of reasons you might not want to outsource your lead generation and sales. Here’s a few that come to mind:
- You miss the opportunity to control the entire process, which can be very effective when it comes to closing deals.
- You lose control over who is messaging prospective clients so they may get contacted by someone with an inappropriate tone (or worse, totally off topic). This is why it’s important to vet agencies before hiring.
- The agency might lack understanding about what makes your brand special and focus more on pitching generic products instead.
- Communication might suffer because of the agency format, as compared to hiring in-house
Now, to be honest, most of these disadvantages come down to inconveniences with hiring external agencies, but the reality is there’s tons of great agencies out there with systems that make these issues disappear.
Unless you’ve got a solid prospecting and lead generation process to follow, you’ll waste a ton of time and money hiring in-house or freelancers.
Which brings us to…
Advantages to Outsourcing LinkedIn Lead Generation
There are several advantages to outsourcing lead gen:
- You can focus your time on other aspects of running a business.
- If you are not an expert in lead generation, the outsourcing company will likely be more effective at it than you would be.
- If you’re spending too much money and need to start getting new clients or customers quickly, outsourcing is a wonderful option because it should cost less upfront.
- You get a full team for less than or equal to the price of one employee.
- Lead generation is a very competitive field, so companies get very creative with pricing structures; there’s many agencies that you only pay when they get results or have a money back guarantee (you definitely don’t get that with an employee or freelancer!)
If you do not have the resources or time to dedicate towards lead generation, then outsourcing is a great option.
You’re saving months of work, hiring and training, that you could be using to close more sales. This is a strategic advantage, especially when your sales team can focus on building relationships and closing deals, instead of building lists, living in LinkedIn, and writing & testing messaging sequences.
Again, if you don’t have training & systems in place, it will always be more efficient to outsource LinkedIn lead generation.
Red Flags to Look Out For
Your outsourced LinkedIn lead generation team or agency should:
- Help you dig deep into your ICP (ideal client profile) so they fully understand who and why they’re reaching out to the people they’re reaching out to
- Have solid systems that they can explain in-depth and show results on
- Have worked with companies before and have some level of confirmed good reviews
- Be able to map an approximate path to ROI (return on investment) before signing you on as a client
- Be upfront about this being a long term strategy, just like any other marketing and sales, and that results don’t come overnight
- Educate you and your team on LinkedIn features and sales strategies you should be using
If the agency promises results overnight – run.
If the agency doesn’t consult extensively to understand your unique business and customers – run.
Conclusion
Outsourcing makes sense for many entrepreneurs and companies. But, as with any decision there are advantages and disadvantages to outsourcing lead generation.
In my opinion, the advantages more than outweigh the disadvantages because with proper communication and good systems, most agencies can beat an in-house team when it comes down to results.
If you’re looking at an outsourced company, it is best if they have a proven track record in generating leads for your industry or niche so that it’s more likely the new relationship will result in revenue.
Also look out for pay per performance, competitive guarantees, and other risk-free situations, because there’s a lot of competition and agencies that perform will take that risk!
