Hidden Costs of Lead Aggregators for B2B Marketers

Learn how quick lead generation can result in missed opportunities, wasted resources, and impact your brand’s success and budget. 

Those who seek a quick scale in lead generation irrespective of the relevancy of leads, opt for lead aggregators, and find themselves tangled in web of missed opportunities and wasted resources.  

Initially, these sites offer an influx of potential customers and, therefore, allow marketers to concentrate on converting these leads into sales instead of looking for them. However, the very convenience of these options conceals a litany of costs that could threaten any B2B marketer’s budget, brand image and overall success. While such hidden costs remain downcast, it is inevitable to analyze them when constructing high-quality lead generating architectures. 

1. Questionable Lead Quality 

Lead quality is arguably the most serious hidden cost that often comes into play regardless of the lead aggregator benefits. Aggregate lead generation accounts, assure quality leads but business lead to be sampled is often dilute to the extent of compromising business objective. Leads from syndicates are usually bulk generated and are generally unqualified lead prospects. 

The implication of this problem is that sales forces would be compelled to use extra efforts and time to enlist non-starts leads, which lowers productivity and wastes time that could be well spent on productive work. 

2. Diluted Brand Authority 

Lead aggregators mainly operate by providing leads to many companies simultaneously meaning the same prospect may receive offers from competing firms Subsidiary companies may sell any given lead or potential client more than twice to competing concerns. This situation damages your brand’s positioning and differentiation against competitors because the prospect gets exposed to many similar offerings and gets bored. 

Worse, they will begin to think of you like billions of other companies, itching for your attention whereas you ought to be perceived as an expert in the field. 

3. Compliance and Data Privacy Risks

Customers of lead generation services will also face unforeseen expenses related to compliance and monitoring of data privacy issues. Since such marketing service providers gather core business intelligence from many places, this sometimes results to jumble of reputable sources and not so reputable sources.

This is risky, especially when there is no clarity on the source of the leads, it may expose the company to allegations of breaching laws like the GDPR or CCPA.  

4. Hidden Fees and Contracts 

Even the average lead costs in b2b industry are around $25 – $300 ranging across multiple marketing channels. Lead aggregators usually market themselves at a lower price than their competition however, most of them have other undisclosed costs.

Apart from the cost of purchasing the leads, the marketers might be faced by other costs like additional lead cleansing, access to better lists, or even minimum commitment to a certain nemesis for a certain period of time. 

These conditions along with the additional allowances that plague these contracts as well as unforeseen expenses can overpower your marketing budget leading to a higher than expected cost per lead. Furthermore, some useful aggregators may tie businesses unnecessarily long contracts making it very difficult to change tactics without incurring losses. 

5. Reduced Sales Productivity 

When businesses buy leads from aggregators, it also creates a gap between the marketing and sales functions in the business.

For example, sales teams will tend to handle aggregator-bought leads differently from the traditionally generated leads or leads generated from targeted marketing campaigns. This is mainly because the nature and trustworthiness of aggregator leads is relatively less and hence lower interest from the sales representatives when trying to close the leads. 

6. Narrow Targeting and Personalization

In-house acquisition coverage comes with the benefit of focusing the composition of the campaigns on the specific needs and pain points of the target audience. On the other hand, lead generation companies do not fully offer the same benefit as in-house acquisition.

They can be quite broad, such as taking leads according to the size of the business or industry and, as such, do not permit application of too much personalization and other such like qualities in terms of outreach.  

7. Impact on Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) 

While you get instant leads with lead aggregators their long-term impact on Customer Lifetime Value is often overlooked. The attraction of aggressor-oriented lead generation activities, especially in regions and countries where the target industry development is within its nascent treatment, is as good as easy money.  

Unfortunately, the equity of such clients’ returns is anticipated to be low over the longer horizon therefore overall revenue turnover through valuating averaged case will be grossly underestimated based on the reasons of depleted structuralist theory. Most of this concealed expense may be amortized over time even if a haircut is no longer carried out. However, investing in these types of clients when most of them are insured usually means expanding the business burden later.