7 questions to ask your lead generation agency

What clients should really ask lead generation agencies

Choosing a lead generation agency can feel difficult. Every website promises results, expertise and proven processes.   The problem is that most buyers have never purchased outsourced lead generation before, so they are often unsure what questions to ask.   

Many believe they just need numbers dialling to get the results they want and any dialling will do!    

Whatever  their approach, they frequently ask questions that are either impossible to answer or tell them very little about whether an agency will become a valuable long-term partner.  Typical poor examples include:

How many leads will you guarantee? How many calls will you make?  How many people do you have in your team?

These questions are understandable, but they rarely tell you whether that agency can genuinely help your business grow.  If you sell a complex B2B product or service, activity metrics such as dials made are of little value on their own. Selling mobile phone contracts or SIM cards is very different from opening conversations for specialist manufacturers, technology providers or professional service firms.

Complex B2B sales are rarely won or progressed in a single conversation. More often, they are won through a series of meaningful interactions that build understanding, credibility and trust over time.   At Your Lead Generation, we are not simply trying to get someone off the phone as quickly as possible. We want prospects to engage with us so that  when they are introduced to you, the relationship is already warm and the conversation can move forward.

So, what should buyers be asking instead?

Here are 7 of the best:

1. How will you learn about our market?

No agency can produce meaningful results without first understanding your market, customers, proposition and sales process.

Ask questions  like; How do you get up to speed?  How much time will you spend understanding our business?   Also, caveat emptor – never mind the questions you ask – what are they asking you?

If an agency appears to have all the answers before understanding your business, be cautious, you don’t want a generic approach – if it was that easy you wouldn’t need the support you are looking for.

2. What happens if campaigns aren’t working?

Every market behaves differently.  Experienced agencies know that some assumptions are proven  wrong quickly once conversations begin. The important question is not whether things always work perfectly, but how quickly the agency learns, communicates with you and adapts, everyone should be prepared for some sweat and work to get it working.

Ask them to give examples of campaigns that needed changing?  What did they  learn? How did they respond?

Good agencies should talk openly about learning and refinement.  You don’t want a fight over who is right you want someone to work with  you so you win more business.  Getting to that position might not be the easiest thing for either of you.

3. What market intelligence will we receive?

Lead generation should produce far more than appointments.  The amount of conversations that they are having with your target market should also be building intel around the buyer behavoiur of your market, competitor information, gaps to explore etc…

Added to your own knowledge of the market these insights often become more valuable than the immediate leads themselves as it can all be fed back into your marketing and sales process to help you win more.

4. How do you measure success?

What metrics does the agency work with to have their own internal checks.   As a guide at Your Lead Generation we have 3 numbers which, over time, help create greater commercial predictability around the pipeline being built.

Market engagement rate (MER).   The number of verified and  relevant decision-makers reached and engaged with. Strong engagement rates can be achieved when targeting and positioning align.

Opportunity progression rate (OPR).  From these conversations, a percentage of organisations will progress into qualified opportunities

Client Converstion rate (CCR).  As the campaign matures, qualified opportunities can be measured against conversion activity.

The predictability indicator, for example only:   A list of 100 qualified organisations are approached: 20% progress into meaningful decision maker conversations = 20 engaged discussions 50% of those demonstrate suitability and interest = 10 qualified opportunities   A percentage of these then convert and buy.

Over time, this data creates a clearer understanding of market behaviour, buyer readiness and the level of outreach activity required to support long-term growth objectives.

Typically, over a 6-month period, campaign data begins to stabilise sufficiently to support more accurate commercial forecasting, targeting refinement and pipeline

5. Who will actually be speaking to our market?

This is perhaps the most important question of all and you really need to understand how an agency approaches your sales development work as they are representing your company;  who will make the calls and where is their specific skill or expertise, are they UK based,  can you meet/speak with them, is there a dedicated person/people working on our account? how do you organise the workload?

Our clients are selling high-value products or services.   Our team members’ curiosity, judgement, communication skills and ability to build rapport matter enormously so that we generate relevant, qualified conversations with organisations they genuinely want to do business with.

B2B telemarketing skills are, in my view, hugely underrated and through our work I am very keen to position high quality human outreach at the very top of B2B sales skills.

At Your Lead Generation, our team come from a wide variety of backgrounds including retail, banking, hosptitality, horse trading and other practical, target-driven environments where judgement mattered and results mattered.  We value reputations very highly at Your Lead Generation – that is yours, and our industry.

As an example, one member of our team is currently outperforming an IT company’s PPC campaign by around 7:1 and this is how the relationship as progressed over the past 12 months.   The very first list she called for that client resulted in me being dispatched two hours down the motorway to explain that the market was not buying what the business thought it was selling. We have since restructured much of their approach, which is something that happens surprisingly often. The result is that we are now having conversations with larger organisations, whilst the PPC campaign continues to promote the original message because nobody quite believes the market feedback yet. Also we have now ultimately staked out their geographical market and they have a solid database to puruse over the next 3 years as contract renewals come around.   Is your data that valuable?

6. How often will we review and adapt the campaign?

Markets change.  Messages that worked six months ago may no longer resonate. Agree how often will we review progress?  Ask how are campaigns refined and what How what market feedback you can expect?  Continuous improvement should be built into the process.

7. What happens if the market tells us something we don’t want to hear?

The best agencies tell you the truth and sometimes that truth is uncomfortable.

Your proposition may need refining. Your target market may be wrong. Your pricing may be out of line. Your messaging may not resonate.

An agency are  your eyes and ears in the market, they shouldnot simply tell you what you want to hear.  Ultimately, you  are buying insight, learning,   relationships and a clearer understanding of how your business is currently received by the market.

In conclusion

Complex B2B buying decisions are rarely linear. They involve uncertainty, competing priorities, internal politics, risk, timing and emotion. They are navigated through conversations, not automation.   The best sales development professionals do far more than book appointments.

Not everyone can do this well.  If you think about the very best buying experiences you have had I suspect they were characterised by great conversations, genuine curiosity and human understanding. I doubt they resulted from a sequence of automated emails. Technology undoubtedly has an important role to play in modern sales, but just because something is difficult, nuanced and profoundly human does not mean it is broken, nor does it mean it should be automated.

Perhaps it is time we placed a little more value on the extraordinary skill involved in helping another human being make a good decision.