Business lead generation is one of the toughest elements of the sales funnel. Sure, closing the deal is challenging – but your bottom line relies on finding quality potential clients after you’ve exhausted your existing business network. You have no other option than to look for more sales leads.

In today’s economy, outsourcing is fast becoming an effective way to handle many back office functions. Lead generation is one of many areas where companies can streamline their business processes. Still, many companies opt for lead generation tactics on opposing ends of the cost / risk spectrum.

Traditional Lead Generation Options

High cost, high-risk

Many take the path of (seemingly) least resistance and do personally do inside lead generation, or hire an onsite sales team. This age old method works well enough, but inside salespeople have notoriously high attrition rates, and hiring teams that work well together and share your goals is a lengthy process. But more importantly, maintaining and sourcing a quality in-house team is costly, and these lead-generators may not be able to deliver as promised.

Low cost, low risk

There are a slough of low cost, low risk options for gathering quality leads – but many of them require a good deal of personal legwork. Small business owners personally scrape sites like LinkedIn or Facebook for quality leads or get membership for relevant industry groups or associations. These methods may put quality leads at your finger-tips, but if you’re expecting sustained lead volume, these efforts will leave you disappointed. As with any low cost and low risk lead generation tactics, your mileage will vary.

Alternative Lead Generation Options

Purchase a list

Traditionally, many companies consider “outsourcing lead generation” as purchasing pre-qualified lists from “lead generation services.” These lists are hit or miss, and prices vary. More and more, these scraped lists are just not worth the personal time investment needed to chase down a useful leads from a dicey list.

Hire a freelancer

Freelancers can be great assets to your bottom line. Freelancers from Fiverr sell gigs starting at $5, whereas Upwork’s freelancers vary more widely in terms of skill and cost. The associated risks are similar to purchasing a list; some freelancers may provide tremendous value, but others will barely scrape the surface of useful industry leads. Which leads to…

Hire an outsourced team

Purchasing lists and hiring freelancers requires extensive knowledge of the lead generation process and is still time intensive. Why not leave lead generation to the experts for a flat rate? Whether you need email lead generation or marketing outreach, your best cost to effort ratio happens when you get highly qualified leads at a set price. Outsourcing lead generation to a team like SupportNinja eliminates the burden of sourcing (and even contacting) qualified leads.

Outsourced teams cut out the guesswork, legwork, and micromanagement often associated with other most other forms of lead generation. An outsourced team’s success depends on your success with the leads they generate. Unlike lists, which are one-off solutions, or hiring freelancers or inhouse salespeople who get paid regardless of how good their leads are, your outsourced team needs you to be successful.

Here’s what an outsourcing email lead generation will give you:

• Multiple data-points that back up the quality of each lead
• Complete customer profiles are generated for each lead
• Peace of mind knowing that your leads are good

Give it a try! Whether you need to kickstart your lead generation efforts with contact lists, or have a team follow through with potential clients,SupportNinja’s lead generation team has you covered.