Don’t use a lead gen agency
Yet…
Don’t use a lead gen agency yet.
Far too often agencies who hire a lead gen agency end up disappointed. The meetings don't materialise, or the ones that do go nowhere, the contract gets quietly wound down, and everyone files it under 'didn't work.' And the post-mortem often points the finger at the wrong place.
It's not necessarily the lead gen agency's fault.
The default move
You want new business. You know you need to be more proactive about it. A full-time new business director is hard to justify at your size, and frankly hard to find. So a lead gen agency feels like the logical answer. Someone else handles the outreach, you focus on doing the work, meetings appear in the diary. Simple.
The instinct isn't wrong. Outreach is a genuinely essential part of the new business process, it's what hard connects your marketing funnel to your opportunity pipeline, and without it you're relying entirely on unstructured referrals and inbound luck. But outreach is also a brutally tough gig on its own. It amplifies what's already there. And if what's already there is vague, you get vague results at scale, faster, and at cost.
The problem isn't the channel. It's the order of operations.
Why it doesn't work
You give them nothing to work with. Here's our deck, here are some case studies, here's a vague sense of who we'd like as clients. Off you go. A lead gen agency can only be as targeted, as compelling and as relevant as the material and direction you give them. Positioning that doesn't clearly articulate who you're for, what makes you different and how you create value, combined with a target list that's more wishlist than strategy, is not a brief, it's a prayer.
You give them no support. Requests for tailored credentials sit in someone's inbox for a week. The CRM doesn't get updated. Nobody owns the follow-up. The lead gen agency is doing their job; the internal infrastructure to make it land simply isn't there. New business isn't a tap you turn on requires consistent energy from inside the agency, not just outside it.
You use the wrong metric. Measuring a lead gen agency on meetings booked is a trap. It either incentivises quantity over quality — congratulations, you now have a full diary of pointless conversations where no-one quite knows why they’re there — or it gives you a stick to beat them with when the number feels low, regardless of whether the pipeline is actually moving. Meetings are a means, not an end. Qualified conversations with the right people are what matter.
You expect it to work straight away. The average B2B buying cycle is currently over ten months, and getting longer. Most deals require five or more meaningful touchpoints before they progress. And yet the average agency gives a new business programme about ninety days before declaring it broken. You're not giving the process enough time, enough touches, or enough patience to work.
The real problem
All these symptoms have the same root cause. The foundations aren't in place before the outreach starts.
Lead generation isn’t a substitute for strategy. It's what you do after the strategy. So when you hand a lead gen agency a vague positioning, an undefined ideal client profile and no internal ownership of new business, you're not giving them the tools to succeed, you're setting everyone up to fail, including yourself.
Outreach amplifies. That's its job. If what you're amplifying is unclear, generic or untargeted, you get unclear, generic and untargeted results. At volume. Which is arguably worse than doing nothing, because at least doing nothing doesn't cost you money and damage your reputation with the wrong prospects simultaneously.
And whilst cold lead gen done without context can deliver some leads (even if they’re not the quality you want) the minute you stop working with the agency, your pipeline will dry up faster than an overambitious new year’s resolution because it’s not supported by anything else.
What needs to be in place first
A clear ICP. Not 'ambitious brands who want great work.' An actual Ideal Client Profile. The sector, the size, the seniority of the decision maker, the kind of challenge they're sitting with that you're genuinely brilliant at solving. Add in their buying style, their appetite for risk, their level of expertise, internal capability, the internal stakeholder map, whether procurement are involved… The more specific, the more useful.
Credible, clear positioning. If your own team can't articulate what makes you different and who you're for in two sentences, a lead gen agency can't either. Sort this first.
Internal ownership. Someone in the agency has to own new business. Not as a side project, not as a vague collective responsibility, but as an actual priority with time attached to it. Without this, even the best outreach programme will stall on the follow-up.
Realistic expectations and a proper timeline. Build a programme you're prepared to give at least six months, ideally longer (ref: earlier point about client buying cycles). Define what success looks like before you start, not after it feels like it isn't working.
A partnership mindset. The best results come when the agency and the lead gen partner work together, sharing intel, refining targeting, learning from what's landing and what isn't. You’d never make a new hire without properly onboarding them and integrating them into your team, this should be no different. If you treat it as a vending machine (money in, meetings out), you'll be disappointed every time.
Before you reach for the gun
Before you reach for the gun ask yourself if you’ve done the safety checks, it’s fully loaded, and you know where you’re aiming it.
There are no silver bullets in new business. Outreach absolutely has its place - a critical one - but it works best as part of a joined-up approach that includes marketing, positioning and internal accountability. Used in the right conditions, with the right foundations, a good lead gen agency can be transformational. Used as a shortcut before those conditions exist, it's an expensive way to find out you weren't ready.
So before you sign the contract, ask yourself:
Have we defined our ICP? Properly, specifically?
Is our positioning clear enough that a stranger could understand it in thirty seconds?
Do we have a new business strategy, and does it include marketing as well as sales?
Have we decided what good looks like, and are we prepared to give it time?
Who in the agency owns this. Really owns it?
If the honest answer to any of those is no, or not really, or sort of, do that work first. Then hire the lead gen agency. You'll get a very different result.
