Free Lead Generation: The Ultimate Sales Dystopia
Free lead generation — it sounds like a great idea, there are options out there to do it, so every business should get on board. Right?
If you’ve been around the marketing block before, you likely already know the answer is no. If something is free (especially something as important to business success as lead gen), there’s usually a catch that comes with it.
Lead gen is no exception. In fact, we imagine a world full of free lead gen to be something of a sales dystopia — one where chaos prevails as unfocused efforts lead to overload for B2B buyers and sellers alike.
The better and smarter alternative is a paid, professional lead-gen tool or service that customizes lead gen to your company’s unique goals and needs.
If you’re feeling unsure, this article will help you see why there’s no free alternative for the level of quality, expertise, and results you’ll get by investing in a paid lead-gen provider.
Quick Takeaways
- Free lead gen tools promise an easier time getting started and faster results, but these promises are mostly unfounded.
- The risks of free lead generation options include low-quality leads, data privacy issues, and wasted time and money.
- Professional, paid lead-gen service providers deliver automated and targeted strategies, expertise, a reliable network, and data-driven performance reporting.
Why do brands look for free lead generation?
It’s easy to see why free lead generation is so tempting for B2B businesses. There’s the whole free part, of course, which suggests money to be saved. But free lead gen tools also promise the advantage of an easier time getting started and a quicker path to real results.
In other words: Companies believe they won’t have to put in as much work before leads start coming in. Given that generating traffic and leads continues to be a top B2B marketing challenge, it’s no wonder marketers are eager to take the easiest route to success.
Alt-Text: Generating traffic and leads is the top challenge for B2B companies in 2023, leading many to consider free lead generation tools and services.
Unfortunately, most of these expected results are rooted in false promises. There are inherent problems with free lead generation that actually lead to more time and money being spent in return for lower results and even the risk of sending prospects in the other direction.
5 Reasons Why Free Lead-Gen Doesn’t Get the Job Done
Bare Bones Software
If you Google “free lead generation,” you’ll find results pages full of free tools, or at least free versions of premium tools. But in this case, you’re going to get what you pay for. Most (if not all) free software tools come with limited features and support.
When you realize what you really need from your lead gen software tool, you’ll be prompted to pay for the premium version — in which case you may as well have looked for paid options from the start.
Low-Quality Leads
Free lead gen tools are notorious for delivering high-volume but low-quality leads. Their highly standardized processes aren’t focused on your unique business, industry, operating model, or target audience. Instead, they take surface level information and plug it into a generic lead gen method.
Given that marketers rated improving lead quality as their top lead generation priority — and that free lead generation often directly undermines it — you can imagine why free options often lead to frustration all around.
Data Privacy Concerns
For the most part, B2B buyers are willing to share their information in exchange for high-value content and worthwhile interactions with the right solution providers. If free lead generation were a commonly-used approach, we’d quickly see this willingness fade out. Why? Because lead data would no longer be respected or used responsibly.
Rather than individual companies and/or paid, expert lead-gen specialists matching buyers with the vendors most aligned with their needs, buyers would be hearing from anyone and everyone looking to fill their pipelines and meet lead-gen quotas.
The entire premise around which B2B buyers and sellers operate — that contact information is used to communicate with relevant parties — would be eliminated.
Saturation
The hyper accessibility created by the internet and digital marketing has already brought on concern about saturated markets. If every business were using free lead-gen tools, saturation would reach a completely new level.
Right now, digital lead gen works because companies focus on the audiences most in need of what they have to offer. If everyone were instead casting the widest net possible, buyers would be inundated — and they’d likely start ignoring incoming marketing and sales communications as a result.
Wasted Time and Money
As we mentioned, the allure of free lead generation tools is that they save time and money, but in reality, the opposite is true. Because free tools deliver more generic and less qualified leads, businesses end up paying more in the form of marketing and sales team time spent finding the leads actually worth pursuing.
What a Focused Outbound Strategy Can Do Instead
Now that we’ve covered the downsides of free lead generation, it’s worth exploring the benefits of the alternative: paid tools and services.
In short, paying for a professional lead generation service means you get a more focused and customized strategy, all while having access to experts in the field who know how to continually improve and refine your efforts as you go.
Let’s explore what that looks like in practice.
Automation, Targeting, and Execution at Scale
Professional lead-gen service providers use the most up-to-date software tools to automate the process, while also taking a targeted approach that finds the right leads for your unique business. The combination allows you to execute a scaled lead-gen strategy that meets quantity goals without sacrificing quality standards.
Teams of Lead Gen Experts
When you outsource to a lead-gen agency or use a paid software solution, your support system will be more comprehensive and typically made up of industry experts. Having access to this type of expertise allows you to make more informed decisions, pivot smartly as needed, and use guided best practices to improve performance.
Reliable Networks and Higher Lead Quality
Lead-gen service providers build professional networks specifically geared toward finding leads for their clients. You can operate with confidence that the lead data you receive was responsibly collected, is compliant with data privacy requirements, and meets the lead quality standards you expect.
Data-Driven Performance Reporting
Lead-gen software and service providers lean on data to demonstrate their value to clients. That means you can expect frequent and data-driven reporting that highlights lead-gen performance as well as opportunities to improve.
The Bottom Line: You Get What You Put into Lead Gen
Free lead generation is an attractive idea, especially for small and/or growing businesses that need to fill their pipelines in order to scale.
But the truth is that the results delivered by free lead-gen options are poor, and the ROI of paid lead-gen tools and services make them worth the investment in the long run. You’ll earn higher-quality leads, your marketing and sales teams will be more productive, and you’ll convert more best-fit sales for your company.
At RevBoss, our outbound email software and lead generation services are custom-built for startups, consultancies, marketing agencies, and other B2B organizations. Schedule a call with us and find out how we can help you win more clients.