Every customer’s sales journey begins with awareness. You can increase customer awareness through inbound or outbound marketing.
For outbound marketing campaigns, you may benefit from having a lead generation specialist act as your company’s frontline representative.
But is recruitment necessary?
In this article, we’ll shed some light on:
- What a lead generation specialist does
- Cost of hiring lead gen specialists
- Pros and cons of recruitment
- An alternative way to generate leads
Let’s take a look.
What is a Lead Generation Specialist?
Leads are individuals who have previously interacted with your company or have the potential to become paying customers. They are the prospects who successfully passed the initial stage of the sales funnel. Prospects are people in the market for your product but aren’t ready to purchase quite yet.
A lead generation specialist is a sales professional responsible for identifying and qualifying these leads. They identify and select valuable leads from a cluster of prospects. Once the specialist has qualified their leads, they hand this list to the sales team.
Functions
Lead generation specialists are a vital contributor to the sales team, funneling leads into the sales pipeline.
Here are some of their primary functions in more detail:
- Prospect Identification: This role identifies potential prospects using different channels like social media sites, lead databases, and marketing events.
- Lead Qualification: Lead gen specialists assess a lead’s worth to the overall sales pipeline using in-house criteria.
- Outreach and Engagement: This role initiates contact with leads using various methodologies, such as telephone calls, emails, or social media outreach.
- Lead Management: Lead gen specialists continuously manage the integrity and accuracy of the company’s internal lead database.
- Lead Campaign: This role creates and manages a territory management plan to continuously enhance lead acquisition.
Ideal Qualities
Here’s what to look for when you’re in the market for a lead gen specialist:
- Excellent communication skills: Lead gen specialists should be able to articulate the company’s offering and build business relationships easily, using both verbal and written forms.
- Analytical: They should be primed to be logical and critical thinkers to find the best approach to capturing leads.
- Sales skills: Ideally, they should be familiar with the complex sales engagement process.
- Tech-savvy: They should know how to use spreadsheet software, CRM tools, digital marketing platforms, and lead generation tools to enhance productivity.
- Persistence and patience: Lead gen specialists often contact hundreds of people and can find zero qualified leads. Perseverance is key to succeeding in this role.
Pros and Cons of Hiring A Lead Gen Specialist
Before jumping into the hiring process, evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of hiring a lead generation specialist. While maintaining a more holistic sales process with dedicated representatives in each step of the funnel sounds nice, it’s much more nuanced than that.
Here are the pros and cons to consider:
Pros
- Augments workforce skills: Lead generation specialists can bring their skills to the table and potentially introduce new clients along the way.
- Consistent lead flow: A competent lead gen specialist can bring in a steady stream of leads, which can be more than enough to pay for their role and then some.
- Helps improve customer service: Hiring a dedicated specialist to bring in and entertain new customers can improve the customer experience.
- Targeted sales approach: Your sales team can have more focused goals, which can increase the likelihood of everyone succeeding in their respective role.
Cons
- Costs money: Hiring a new person in a new role can be costly (we’ll break it down momentarily).
- Sales team dependency: Your entire sales funnel can be compromised if your lead generation specialist fails to deliver results.
- Limited scalability: Leaving all prospecting, sending, and database cleaning to one person can be time-consuming.
The Cost of Hiring and Onboarding a Lead Gen Specialist
A lead generation specialist’s wages constitute the majority of their expense. That said, there are additional costs that must also be taken into account.
Here’s the average salary of a lead generation specialist per country per annum, according to several salary aggregate websites:
- United States: $47,483
- Canada: $45,300
- Australia: $49,200
- United Kingdom: $34,811
- New Zealand: $30,087
- Singapore: $30,965
- Philippines: $12,697
- India: $5,597
- South Africa: $3,214
In addition to their yearly wages, companies will also have to pay additional expenses for benefits, training courses, equipment, software subscriptions, office space, and performance incentives. This can increase the total hiring cost by thousands of dollars.
Say Hello to Your New AI-Powered, Lead Generating Friend, Instantly.ai
Don’t have the resources to hire someone yet? No problem.
Why not get lead generation software to lend a hand?
- Use Instantly’s CRM tool to contact and manage leads using email, calls and SMS, all powered through automation.
- Trying to build a lead database? Instantly’s B2B lead finder tool brings you 160+ million verified leads to contact, all vetted in-house.
- Want to send personalized emails? Or track campaign performance? Instantly’s merge tag features and feature-rich analytics dashboard make it easy.
Instantly has four pricing plans: Growth at $30/mo, Hypergrowth at $77.6/mo, Light Speed at $286.3/mo, or Enterprise pricing. All these prices are part of the annual plan.
And, let’s face it, you don’t have to be a math wizard to know that these figures are significantly cheaper than hiring a dedicated lead gen specialist.
Better plans will grant you higher contact and sending limits. Assess what's best for your company and stick with it, you can change your plan anytime as needed.
Key Takeaways
Lead generation specialists are vital in filling the sales pipeline by vetting and contacting prospects and managing lead databases. However, they are not the only solution for generating leads, as they can be costly. An alternative is using tools like Instantly.ai, which can perform the tasks of a lead gen specialist at scale.
