Buying B2B Lead Lists Won’t Help Your Business—Here’s How to Build a Better List Yourself

There are some situations that can make buying a B2B lead list seem like a good solution.

Maybe your marketing team isn’t fully developed and isn’t generating enough leads. Maybe you don’t have enough budget to expand other lead generation strategies. Maybe your message just isn’t resonating and you need to close deals.

You need more leads so you can grow sales, and there are plenty of providers out there willing to sell you a whole big list of them. So why not, right?

Here’s the thing: When you buy a B2B lead list, you’re very often buying low quality (unengaged, unqualified, and often uninterested) sales leads with outdated (or just plain inaccurate) information and company details. That means you’re spending money and time prospecting business leads that aren’t likely to yield a whole lot of sales and may not even fall into your target market.

That’s not a good use of your budget or your sales people (and we explain why in this post).

Instead, you could pull more leads right out of your website—and they’d be more qualified and more likely to convert.

Below, we share:

• More about the problems purchased B2B lead lists present to lead generation.

• How visitor identification can give you a better way to do B2B lead generation and list building.

• How to use to build yourself a better lead list.

Note: Ready to build a better lead list for your B2B sales team? Sign up and try Leadfeeder free for 14 days to see the companies that visit your website, plus behavioral details like which pages they looked at.

The Many Problems with Buying Lead Lists

Let’s talk a little more about why buying B2B lead or email lists isn’t the ideal way to get more leads. We’ll outline 4 main reasons:

• The leads are low quality.

• The company and contact information is outdated and/or inaccurate.

• Your competitors may be pursuing the same leads already.

• Bought leads can yield privacy complications and more spam reports.

As we mentioned briefly above, purchased leads are almost exclusively low quality leads. That’s because they haven’t actually shown any interest in your business or what you offer—they don’t meet any behavioral or intent-based lead qualifications. In other words, they’re not all that likely to be interested in or ready to buy what you’re selling.

We also touched on something else above: Purchased contact lists often come with contact and other company information that’s outdated or just plain inaccurate. They may have a decision maker listed who isn’t even with the company anymore. They might tell you the company has 1,000 employees when they actually laid off a third of their workforce and have closer to 700. They may include email addresses and formulas that don’t exist anymore.

Not to mention, when you buy a marketing list of B2B leads, you have no guarantee of exclusivity. There’s nothing preventing the list provider from selling the exact same list to your competitors.

Finally, when you get a list of random companies and start emailing them, it brings up a whole host of other issues related to privacy and your brand’s reputation. For one, people who receive random, unsolicited emails from companies are far more likely to relegate you to the spam folder—hurting your brand’s reputation. Plus, sending unsolicited emails can get you in trouble with data privacy regulations like GDPR in Europe.

These reasons, plus our experience working with tens of thousands of B2B marketing and sales teams, tell us purchased lead lists often yield a lower conversion rate, higher CPA, and a longer sales process.

Fortunately, there are better ways to get high quality leads, with accurate and current details, without breaking your budget.

Visitor Identification Offers a Better Way to Build Your B2B Lead List

Visitor identification allows you to pull more leads out of the companies that are already visiting your website. Since the average B2B company sees around 2% conversion rates on their website, there are a lot of potential customers (the other 98%) that most sales teams never see.

By tapping into those potential leads via visitor identification software, you can get access to:

• Higher quality leads who look like your ideal customer and have shown a baseline level of interest by visiting your website.

• More accurate, complete, and up-to-date information about lead companies — including company name, contact information (phone numbers, social media) company size, decision maker job titles, and more.

• Custom, filtered feeds that make it seamless to find the best potential leads.

• Behavioral data that enables you to learn more about potential interests and buying intent signals.

That means you’re building a B2B lead list that’s more likely to convert (in less time and at a lower cost) and gaining better, more complete information to help your sales reps get to a sale.

Note: Ready to build a better lead list for your B2B sales team? Sign up and try Leadfeeder free for 14 days to see the companies that visit your website, plus behavioral details like which pages they looked at.

How to Use Leadfeeder to Build Your B2B Lead List

It’s clear that using a website visitor identification tool to identify potential leads is a much better option than buying a B2B lead list. So let’s talk about how to use Leadfeeder to build your list of qualified leads.

Once you’ve signed up for Leadfeeder and are logged into your account, there are 3 main steps to get your lead list ready to work for you and your team.

Step 1: Set Up a Custom Feed for Your Baseline Lead Qualifications

When you log in, your main Leadfeeder feed will show you the companies that have visited your website. But to build a B2B lead list, you probably want to get a little more targeted. To do that, you’ll build a Custom Feed.

From your dashboard, click the blue ”+ Create a custom feed” button and give the new feed a name. Then, all you have to do is add any filters or qualifiers you need and then click “Save feed”.

The filters can be any lead qualification criteria your team has set—industry, for example, or the number of employees (our tool has more than 30 filters to choose from).

Once your Custom Feed is running, you’ll have an up-to-date list of all the companies that visit your website and satisfy your lead criteria.

Click on any company in your B2B lead list to view more details.

Step 2: Set Up Automations and Notifications to Put Your B2B Lead List on Autopilot

In addition to viewing new leads from the Leadfeeder dashboard, you can also set up notifications and automations to put the whole thing on autopilot.

When creating or editing your feed, you can add sales reps to be notified via email or Slack and choose how often they should receive notifications (daily, weekly, or as soon as new leads come in).

Step 3: Integrate Your CRM Tool with Leadfeeder to Send New Leads to Your CRM

Finally, you can connect Leadfeeder to the CRM tool your team uses. Once you’ve set up the integration, you can set automations for your custom B2B lead list to automatically send new leads through to your CRM, tag leads, and/or assign new leads to a rep.

A Better B2B Lead List

When you’re in a pinch, buying a list of B2B leads can seem like a quick and easy solution. But at the end of the day, you’ll always find more success (and more sales) when you start with a B2B list that’s qualified and offers complete, accurate data. That’s how you give sales reps the best chance at turning leads into new customers.

Note: With Leadfeeder and our Custom Feeds, building that better lead list can still be quick and easy—and a whole lot more effective. Try Leadfeeder free for 14 days.