Generating leads is the first and most crucial step towards building your sales funnel. That’s true whether you’re an early-stage startup without an in-house sales team, or a small business owner with many responsibilities on your plate.
But that doesn’t mean you have to do everything on your own.
If you don’t have the time or resources to go looking for new leads by yourself, you can outsource those tasks to a lead generation company. These companies can get you access to sales-qualified leads no matter the industry you’re in.
But what really is a lead generation service, and what can you expect when hiring one? More importantly, what are some of the best lead generation companies out there right now? In this article, we go over all of that and more.
What Are Lead Generation Companies?
Lead generation companies are agencies and services that fill up your sales pipeline with high-quality prospects who go on to become loyal customers.
These companies are made up of sales experts who can find new leads for your business and chase them down using a variety of marketing strategies.
The exact methods and strategies can differ from company to company, but a lead generation service usually starts by creating industry-specific databases that identify prospects based on their shared interests.
These databases serve as the foundation of your sales process and enable you to market directly to your target audience.
There are various types of lead generation companies. Some are sales agencies that collect and identify new prospects for your business. Others are software companies offering tools and services to build your own leads database. There are many options when starting a lead generation business.
For example, Datanyze’s Chrome Extension gathers accurate information on high-quality business leads through LinkedIn.
With a click, it can provide verified contact information on B2B prospects, including email addresses, mobile numbers, and direct-dial phone numbers.
Advantages of Hiring a Lead Generation Company
Do you really need to hire a lead generation service? Well, according to Hubspot, 61% of marketers find lead generation to be their number one challenge.
Outsourcing your lead gen efforts can take the pressure off your marketing and sales teams, enabling them to focus on closing deals instead. That said, each situation is unique. Let’s go over the key advantages of outsourcing lead generation so you can decide if it’s the right step for your business.
Get ready to launch faster: Any lead generation company worth its salt is made up of experts with a proven process for identifying leads and turning them into prospects. This allows you to get to market fast, without having to wait around for entire departments to play catch-up. That’s very useful when you’re short on time.
If your product launch is looming, outsourcing certain responsibilities to a lead gen agency can help you achieve success and avoid disaster.
Outsource sales and marketing tasks: Early-stage startups and small businesses don’t have tons of capital to spare. Building an in-house sales or marketing team from scratch takes time and money, but hiring a lead generation company can help you achieve the same results—if not better—for a much lower price tag.
Depending on the services they offer, lead generation companies can even take the place of in-house sales and marketing teams.
Nurture leads and perform outreach: Lead nurturing is a complex process that involves drawing potential customers towards your business through inbound marketing. You can nurture leads and perform outreach using a combination of blogging, email marketing, and cold calling techniques.
Of course, these types of inbound marketing activities take plenty of time and resources. Thankfully, a lead generation company can help you pull it off — even if you don’t have a dedicated marketing team in-house.
What to Expect When Outsourcing Lead Generation?
Choosing a lead generation company can be extra intimidating if you don’t know what to expect. So, before you find the best lead generation company and start making use of its services, you’ll need to understand how lead generation works.
Leads are prospective customers who are likely to take an interest in your product but haven’t yet had a chance to interact with your business. Getting these people to warm up to you can be tough, so you have to use the right mix of outbound and inbound marketing techniques to draw them towards your offering.
The first step in the process is to build a leads database. From there, lead generation companies reach out to individual leads through multi-channel marketing and land you an appointment with a potential customer.
The Best B2B Lead Generation Companies in the World
There are lots of lead gen services to choose from, but not all of them are right for your business. When looking for a good lead generation company to work with, make sure you know what industries they specialize in and ask important questions about how they collect leads.
Datanyze: Best B2B Leads Database
Datanyze is a B2B lead generation service that helps you get accurate and verifiable contact information on B2B prospects. That includes email addresses, mobile numbers, and direct-dial phone numbers.
You access this data through an easy-to-use Chrome Extension, which allows your reps to find prospect contact information directly from any LinkedIn profile. It works on company websites, too. This saves a lot of time that would be spent hopping between different tools.
Along with contact data, Datanyze serves up a list of meaningful icebreakers for kicking off conversations with prospects. For instance, you can quickly find the job role and professional interests of any prospect, along with information about the company they work for.
There are more than 120 million professionals in the Datanyze database, and the service is fully compliant with GDPR and CCPA.
All the leads you collect with the Chrome Extension are added to your online contact list. The information here is accessible for everyone in your sales team, and it can be exported to other platforms with just a few clicks.
Datanyze’s online dashboard also provides administrative tools for business owners wanting to manage their company account and assign lookup credits.
The best part is, Datanyze is super affordable. The service is free to try for 90 days, and paid plans start at just $39 a month.
Belkins: Best B2B Lead Generation Agency
Belkins is a lead generation agency that addresses all your top-of-the-funnel sales needs. It provides a full range of services, from lead research to email marketing to appointment scheduling.
Belkins is a sales agency that sets you up with dedicated SDRs who perform cold outreach on your behalf. Its services cover lead generation, appointment setting, email deliverability, and influencer marketing.
So, what’s the catch? Belkins’ services rank topmost in the industry, but they come with a significant price tag. According to the company website, you can easily end up paying up to $360,000 a year for setting appointments with 1,500 prospects per month.
Belkins is a good solution if your business doesn’t have a huge in-house sales team and needs a comprehensive service for gathering and converting leads. It’s an especially great choice for B2B enterprises, for whom a single closed deal can mean thousands of dollars a year.
While the company also offers lead gen packages for growing startups and medium-sized businesses, the cost of keeping things running is just too high for us to recommend this platform to an early-stage startup or small business.
Callbox: Best Cold Call Qualifying Agency
Callbox rids you of the hassles of lead generation and lets you skip straight to closing sales. Its dedicated sales representatives help companies around the world, including the US, Canada, Australia, and Singapore.
Callbox is a lead generation agency that identifies leads, profiles prospects, engages prospects, and confirms appointments. Its marketing services can help you jump straight into cold calls with sales-qualified prospects so that you can close deals faster.
Callbox’s focus is on the B2B industry, with top-tier clients such as Hewlett-Packard and Forbes. Aside from lead generation, the company also offers other solutions and services, like event marketing, sales databases, and account-based multi-channel marketing.
While it does offer a number of different services, Callbox is highly industry-specific. If you aren’t in information technology, management consulting, manufacturing, healthcare, or finance, this may not be the platform for you.
Another point worth noting is that Callbox comes with its own customer relationship management solution (CRM). It’s a cloud-based solution that doesn’t integrate well with your existing CRM—unless it’s Hubspot.
Smith.ai: Best For Inbound Lead Generation
Smith.ai is an inbound lead generation tool that lets you nurture leads using live chat services on your website. It’s a virtual receptionist that answers phone calls and chat sessions on your behalf to qualify leads and send them further along the sales funnel.
When should you use a lead nurturing solution like Smith.ai? If you rely on inbound marketing to draw people towards your business, there’s a good chance you have lots of incoming leads on your landing pages, though not all of them sales-qualified.
Smith.ai serves as a screening filter for those inbound leads, providing them with real-time information before scheduling an appointment with your sales team. That makes sure your in-house sales team isn’t spread thin trying to chase down leads that never pan out.
Unlike other top lead generation companies, Smith.ai doesn’t bring in new leads for your business; it only filters existing leads that come through your website. For most B2B companies, that alone won’t be enough to serve as your primary customer acquisition strategy.
However, if you have a huge inflow of traffic to your website, Smith.ai’s lead screening and appointment setting services can help reduce your bounce rate and convert more visitors into leads.
Other B2B Lead Generation Companies to Consider
CIENCE: Best for International Lead Gen
If you don’t have an in-house sales or marketing team at your company, CIENCE is a lead generation service that might be worth your time. Its people-as-a-service platform lets you outsource lead generation and outbound marketing to a team of external sales professionals.
Apart from lead generation, CIENCE also offers lead response and sales enablement services to business owners, sales teams, and marketing professionals. With clients like Google, Microsoft, and Uber, CIENCE works particularly well for international lead generation.
LeadGeneration.com: Best for Sales Teams on a Budget
If you’re looking for a lead gen agency that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, you’re in luck. LeadGeneration.com offers cheap lead generation services tailored to your business’s needs.
Each client is assigned a project management team. The project management team works with your business to optimize your sales funnel across various channels. Leads are delivered to you in real-time and the team is constantly working to increase your lead generation volumes.
Overdrive Interactive: Best Enterprise-Grade Solution
Let’s suppose you’re looking for an enterprise-grade solution. In that case, Overdrive Interactive is a marketing agency that works with tech, healthcare, and finance businesses to provide end-to-end customer acquisition services.
Overdrive Interactive offers the widest range of services, including account-based marketing, search engine optimization, content marketing, lead generation, social media marketing, email list rental, and marketing automation solutions.
How to Choose the Right Lead Generation Company for You
Now that you know about the best lead generation service providers in the world, how do you pick the best one for your business?
You can start by doing your own research, perhaps using a reviews aggregator site. There are a few factors to consider, including the quality of the leads database and whether it complies with data protection laws. Let’s go over this in a bit more detail below.
Do Your Research
You can use search engines to look up customer reviews of any lead generation provider, or use a B2B review aggregator like Clutch.co or G2.com.
Use these services to look for lead generation companies that specialize in your industry and provide the exact services you’re looking for. You can use search filters to sort through service providers and check customer reviews for their specific pros and cons.
Consider the Source
Lead generation companies use a variety of different sources to gather prospects and leads. But if the agency you work with doesn’t get its leads from high-quality sources, it can seriously impact the performance of your marketing campaigns.
Look for agencies that build their own leads database instead of getting leads from third-party prospect lists. Ready-made prospect lists often contain outdated information and can cause your marketing emails to get flagged as spam.
Ensure Data Compliance
It’s not just the source of your leads database that matters, but also how that information was collected in the first place. Thanks to laws like GDPR and CAN-SPAM, failure to comply with data protection laws can be a costly mistake.
Ask your lead generation agency what steps it takes to ensure all data provided is compliant with international privacy laws. If an agency gets data from third-party sources without any control over how it’s collected, that can be a serious red flag for your business.
See if Datanyze is the Right Lead Generation Company for You
If you’re an early-stage startup or small business, you may not have the budget for an end-to-end lead generation agency. Or, if you’d rather handle sales and marketing in-house, full-service agencies may not be right for you either.
In that case, you can use a B2B lead generation tool like Datanyze to get detailed information on sales-qualified leads through LinkedIn. It provides highly accurate data using a combination of machine learning and human verification, saving you hours every week.
Datanyze’s Google Chrome Extension integrates easily with your current workflow and lets you connect with high-quality verified leads, while remaining compliant with existing data protection laws.
Want to take it for a spin? Sign up to start using Datanyze for free today!