Sanjan Sharma · Founder & Director
Sanjan Sharma is an entrepreneur and technology and digital growth professional with 8+ years of experience across digital marketing, technology, SaaS, education, BFSI, banking, B2B sales and business growth.
Choosing a b2b lead generation agency is mostly an exercise in telling two very similar pitches apart. Both will show you a dashboard, a logo wall and a number of meetings per month. Only one of them will still be worth paying for in month six.
Ask these six questions in the first call. Each one takes a minute and each one is hard to answer well without having done the work.
1. Where does a b2b lead generation agency get its list?
The list decides more of the outcome than the copy does, and it is the question most often answered vaguely. A bought database, a scraped export and a researched account list behave completely differently, and only the third survives contact with a real market.
So ask who builds the list, how long it takes per hundred accounts, and what they do when a contact bounces. Moreover, ask to see a sample of fifty rows before signing. A b2b lead generation agency that cannot show you the list is selling you volume.
2. What a b2b lead generation agency does in month one
Nothing good happens in the first thirty days, and a b2b lead generation agency that promises otherwise has either done no outbound or is about to burn your domain reputation to hit a number. Consequently the honest answer is research, warm-up, testing and very few meetings.
Therefore treat an aggressive month-one forecast as a warning rather than confidence. Ask instead what month three should look like and what would have to be true for it.
3. Who writes the messages, and will you see them?
Your name, not the b2b lead generation agency’s, goes on every message that leaves. However, in a surprising number of engagements the client never reads the sequence that is being sent under their brand until a prospect complains about it.
Insist on approving every sequence before it runs, and insist on seeing the real replies, including the rude ones. A b2b lead generation agency that filters the replies before you see them is managing your perception rather than your pipeline.
4. How do they handle a market that is not the US?
Buying cycles, title conventions and what counts as a polite first message all differ between Dallas, Toronto, Melbourne and Dubai. A b2b lead generation agency sequence that works in one lands badly in another, and the failure is invisible from a dashboard because it shows up as silence.
So if you sell into more than one market, ask what changes per market. In short, if the answer is only the time zone, expect one market to carry the results and the others to quietly produce nothing.
5. Get the qualification bar in writing
A meeting with someone who cannot buy still appears in the report. Because of that, the bar has to be agreed before the first week: the function, a problem they named themselves, and a reason it matters this quarter.
Furthermore, give your own rep a documented right to reject a meeting with a reason, and review the rejections together fortnightly. Any b2b lead generation agency that resists a rejection mechanism is optimising for the number you pay against.
6. Who owns the data when it ends?
Nevertheless the question almost nobody asks is the one that costs most later. The researched account list, the reply history, the sending domains and the sequences are assets you paid for.
Get it in writing that they transfer to you within thirty days of the contract ending. A b2b lead generation agency that will not agree is relying on switching cost rather than results to keep you.
When to do it in-house instead
If your market is a few hundred named accounts, a founder sending thirty considered messages a week will beat any b2b lead generation agency. If nobody internally can state the qualification bar, fix that first, because an agency will simply inherit the confusion and charge for it.
For the ratios a real programme produces, our four LinkedIn outbound accounts turned 5,076 invitations into 1,086 replies and 370 booked sales calls.
On what you may lawfully send, the GDPR Article 6 text is the primary source for European contacts. Our B2B lead generation service sets out how we run it, and how to spot a real lead generation company covers the wider market.