Outsourcing your lead generation can be hugely successful or easily fail. This all depends on, amongst other things, what questions you ask the people you are outsourcing to and the type of outsourcing company you employ. Some people prefer doing in-house lead generation because they believe that the people in their company know the product better than an outsider would. Let’s look at some of the reasons an outsourcing company could be an option for you.

An outsourcing company can potentially be better for your sales than in-house lead generation for plenty of reasons. Outsourcing can be cost-saving to many companies because it helps to avoid paying for expensive advertising campaigns, employee training and there is no infrastructure setup needed.Besides saving you money, it also saves time. Your employees don’t have to expend time on making unnecessary calls. Lead generation companies do the hard work of phoning or contacting many people so that only the people who are truly interested in your product or service comes into contact with you.

The lead generation company has the appropriate skill sets within the company to be able to do the best job. In your company, you may have people who do not know how to cold-call appropriately or who bungle up communications because they do not know the most effective approach. With a lead generation company you get guaranteed sales skills because they get paid to do sales lead generation every day.

Outsourcing will also help you get to the people who make the buying decisions. Lead generation employees go through the laborious process it takes to get your product in front of the most important people in a company. They go through a multi-channel approach of networking, offline and online communication, building lists from multiple sources and communicating with the prospect’s social groups. This makes it possible to get through all of the red tape and find out who really matters in a company.

Lead generation companies also have more time to do in-depth research on the companies they will be contacting as well as client profiling (seeing what the client will accept when developing a selling approach). They also have the time to do follow-ups and gather feedback from prospects. These two things are often neglected because there simply is no time.

All of these things seem to sound very good but one needs to be careful in choosing the companies you want to do your lead generation. Many staff members at a lead generation company are only interested in getting a large volume of prospects because of incentives and may not have the best interests of your product at heart. Also, is the company you’re hiring more like a glorified call centre? If yes, rather look for a company that outsources so-called “inside sales teams” that will provide you with the staff that have the best skills for the job. Boutiques are always infinitely better but they do cost more.

There are plenty of cases where people spend a lot of time and money on an outsourcing company but see no results. On the one hand it seems like a waste to use a company that does something that you could (hopefully) do just as well internally. On the other hand, would you want to take so much time to cold-call prospects every day and waste hours that could be spent on other more productive product development endeavours? If you plan on doing it without an external company’s help, make sure you do the appropriate training, provide enough motivation and knowledge, and are prepared for the costs and time it will take to do it. If you make the effort to know what you are doing, either approach can be greatly successful.