Should You Outsource Your Marketing Team for Lead Generation?

Every business owner will strive to make sure his marketing team is doing its best to promote their company and bring in leads for the sales conversions. Keeping your business processes internally is important as it keeps costs low and you have the control over all activities.
But slowly you notice that internalizing all your digital marketing activities might not be working out as well as you would have planned.
Companies who outsource marketing have specialized agencies on their side continuously working with them on every campaign with new initiatives to make sure they provide fruitful results.

Requirement of in-house team for lead generation

When your business culture is dependent on privacy and business leaders are not comfortable sharing business information with B2B lead generation companies. In this case, it may be more appropriate to go after your own leads.
When business sales volume is high and the profit from individual customers is low. Then revenue gained from new leads might not be enough to cover the cost of gaining those leads. Therefore, businesses in such situation should develop an entirely new lead generation strategy altogether.
Third-party providers generally cannot compare to the passion and product/service knowledge displayed by your own employees. So, if your product or service is highly complex and involves skilled data to sell, outsourcing lead generation may not be the best idea.

Outsourcing the marketing team

These days it is common to outsource various parts of a business be it accounting, book keeping, customer support services and even HR team is outsourced. Therefore, there is no surprise to see marketing joining this list.
Outsourcing their marketing teams gives companies access to a higher calibre professionals, without the overhead of hosting an internal department. Also, provides them with the ability to source all sub-disciplines from a single location which adds considerable value to the company operations.

Prerequisite of outsourcing your lead generation

• When you plan to tap into niche market and require to meet bigger targets
• Expansion to another location with different target market
• When you need fresh ideas from experts
• If you have lack of knowledge about how to quickly generate the leads
• Many B2B lead generation companies offer you pay on results services, which means you only pay if their lead turns into profit
• Leave lead generation to external experts and enable in-house sales teams with more leads

Top benefits of outsourcing your marketing team for lead generation

• Lower risk and cost

  Operational inefficiencies like missing skills, overall attrition rate and alterations in prioritization are some of the critical factors that severely impact the bottom line.
  Having an experienced and reliable outsourced team mitigates such risks of operational inefficiencies, and to a great extent decreases the cost break down which come across while hiring and retaining the in-house staff.
  

• Talent access

  Outsourcing companies gain access to teams that have worked on the cutting-edge of marketing methodologies. Since they have worked with many other businesses in the past, they have developed improved practices based on trial and errors.
  While it is possible for a company to build this competence organically, but it might take a very long time to accomplish, and that it will take a big hit every time someone leaves the company.
  

• Time savings

  Having a proficient sales and marketing team operating at the peak of efficiency reduces the time involved in seeing results. Outsourcing of certain marketing activities allows the subscribing company’s team members to focus on what they do best.
  

• System optimization

  Outsourcing ensures access to top notch, experienced technical professionals. These professionals will properly assess, develop, and optimize your existing systems to make a positive ROI.
  

• Employee growth

  Outsourcing can be utilized as a smarter technique for teaching employees and other members of your organization to undertake important responsibilities in a collaborative team structure to improve their overall growth rate in the coming time. This further leads to build better internal sales skills and marketing competencies.
  

• Development

  Start-ups are underfunded and understaffed. Engaging with an outsourced marketing team can enable their swift progress. As external expertise and experience help in rapidly putting together as well as executing winning marketing plans in a timely manner.
  

Disadvantage if you outsource your lead generation

The fact is no-one outside the company can sell a product better than the individuals in the in-house team of the company. As they know the product and services better. Outsourced agencies can learn about your product, but they can never sell it better than you.
However, if you decide to outsource, you should give as much information as possible to the external agency and help them with messaging as well as sales support. Even try to educate them about your own industry, business, market and company.

Some business scenarios where outsourcing lead generation makes better sense

• Verifying Contact Information

  If you have a high volume of leads coming in however there is an issue in getting precise contact information, you could outsource this function so your sales team can move forward with verified contacts.
  

• Qualifying Leads

  In the same way, organizations with a higher volume of leads don’t have enough time to qualify all of the leads manually. Also, sometimes, your marketing team is even not sure how to go about it to yield more sales opportunities.
  Working with a marketing agency or outsourcing an experienced consultant can help with your lead qualification process which might be worth it to improve your sales team effectiveness.
  

• Booking Appointments

  There are lots of consulting services out there than can manage appointment bookings for your sales team as they have good experience and contacts in that business domain. By outsourcing this marketing task saves tedious up-front work that takes time and efforts away from closing deals.
  

Things to keep in mind while outsourcing your marketing activities

• PPC Campaigns

  Usually marketers make the big mistake of thinking that, once they have set-up a Google AdWords or social media paid campaign, it will yield results on its own. Proper PPC campaign management takes consistent monitoring; otherwise you can find yourself wasting money rapidly.
  If you don’t have the proper ability or enough time to do what it takes to handle a PPC or other paid lead generation campaigns, it will not impact your marketing and promotional strategy. I think it’s better to invest in outsourcing this work to a marketing agency that knows what they need to do to yield better results.
  Keep in mind that many agencies have minimum budgets so you will have to invest in the campaign, as well as the additional cost of maintenance that comes with the agency work.
  So, if PPC is decisive to your marketing strategy, this supplementary cost to maintain your campaigns could be of great significance, especially because you don’t want a beginner to handle your PPC budgets.
  

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

  SEO is more than just creating content around specific keywords. You need someone, or a team of people, who understand on-page SEO, technicalities of web as well as mobile platform optimization and even have flair of digital marketing.
  So, whether you’re outsourcing or keeping SEO in-house, it’s critical you really work on leads or website traffic rather than on just the Google rankings.
  And if you even look to outsource link builders, be cautious with the use of black-hat tactics and stay away from techniques like link farming or link buying which can hurt your long-term marketing plans.
  

• Social Media & PR activities

  If you are not comfortable with someone else becoming the voice for your company through social media and PR activities, then your subsequent step should be to hire an outside consultant that can help get you through the preliminary tasks.
  This step will include the overall social media setup comprising signing up on social media websites, profile creation, customized background design and initiating posting with automated social media management tools. Usually these are the prime stumbling blocks to getting started with social media set-up and activities for any of the business.
  After the preliminary setup and arrangement, have your social media consultant spend some hours with you and your team to showcase the fundamentals of social media promotional activities including general postings, uploading of images and group postings.
  Than your team can gradually build required expertise needed for social media and PR activities with the consultant or outsourced marketing agency just guiding them on driving innovative campaigns in alignment to current industry as well as market trends.
  

Conclusion

Finally, distributing your lead generation activities to an expert team or a consultant outside the company as well as having your in-house team collaborating with them can assist you to fill your sales funnel rapidly.
Also, when you outsource the marketing and tactical tasks to the external experts, you can focus on the much critical responsibilities of actively growing your business in other required areas.


source https://www.leads-junction.com/outsource-lead-generation/