How LeadSwell Works with Agencies

Read how LeadSwell partners with a Bay Area agency to deliver demand-generation solutions.

Owner Matt Payne began working with this agency long before LeadSwell was founded in 2007. In 1998, the Founder of a B2B direct marketing agency in the Bay Area invited Matt to a sales call at the office of Matt’s employer, a prominent B2B publishing company, Miller Freeman (formerly owned by UBM, now a part of Informa). As Matt soon learned, the goal of the meeting was for the owner of the agency to purchase all email newsletter sponsorships, Matt had available to sell. Matt quickly realized that B2B lead generation was top of mind for technology companies.

Matt and LeadSwell have remained a strategic partner of this agency for 25 years, providing lead generation services on a wholesale basis at price points determined by the agency. As with most agencies, LeadSwell is included in every pitch to fulfill content syndication and lead generation services for the agency’s clients. It usually works like this:

The agency provides LeadSwell with campaign requirements, often through an RFP.
LeadSwell provides a proposed volume of leads it can guarantee over a period of time, generally 30-90 days.

Since LeadSwell produces all of its leads in-house, it has tremendous flexibility in price. For this reason, LeadSwell prefers to let agencies and their clients drive CPL. Once media plans are approved, the agency requests an Insertion Order (IO) complete with essential campaign details. Materials such as asset(s) (generally .pdfs) are provided alongside a lead delivery template, formatting, and instructions.

Results of Typical Work with Agencies

Hundreds to thousands of leads or registrations per campaign
Registration goals are generally completed within 30-60 days from the campaign launch—providing ample time for nurturing
On-going relationships with vendors, agencies, and publishers to promote their content, such as whitepapers, eBooks, or events

How LeadSwell Works with Agencies

Audience Development

LeadSwell builds a custom list of warm prospects who fit clients’ ICP (Ideal Customer Profile), drawing from our database and supplementing with LinkedIn for accuracy and quality. Additional audience development sources include ABM lists/TALs. LeadSwell also leverages intent from LinkedIn, job boards, and other sources. Accounts with high intent scores are selected to maximize the propensity to be in-market for our clients’ services.

Email and/or Telemarketing Promotion

LeadSwell promotes clients’ content (e.g., whitepapers, webinars, ebooks) to the ABM list(s)/TAL(s) audience using email or a combination of email and telemarketing. The LeadSwell team writes, designs, and provides all programs and scripts to clients for approval before using them.

Email-only promotion

For clients who only want email outreach, LeadSwell promotes content via standalone email from domains we own (e.g., EnterpriseTechToday) to the ABM list(s)/TAL(s) based audience created. Since LeadSwell has complete contact information for everyone we deploy email campaigns to, everyone who clicks through is redirected to view the content, bypassing the need for forms that people rarely fill out. Then, each lead is tele-verified, getting through gatekeepers to ensure the individual is still employed and to provide clients with as many direct dials, extension numbers, and digits in the dial-by-name directory. As a final step, we usually upload leads to Integrate, Converter &/or email password-protected weekly reports of delivered leads.

Telemarketing and email promotion

LeadSwell has trained call center reps that call prospects in the client’s ICP from our brands (e.g., EnterpriseTechToday, EnterpriseTechBuyer) on behalf of clients to obtain permission to share <content type> called <content title>, confirming their email as <email>. In addition, clients can provide up to 3-4 custom profiling questions, asked survey style, to facilitate the qualification of leads (e.g., SQL, sales-ready). When a call is complete, LeadSwell sends the prospect an email with a link to the content, and we usually upload leads to Integrate, Converter &/or email password-protected weekly reports of delivered leads.

Quality Assurance

When promoting content such as whitepapers via email marketing, contacts are tele-verified as value add. To verify that phone numbers are accurate prior to delivery, LeadSwell call center reps call the operator to confirm that they can get through to each end user’s desk. In addition, when promoting content, such as whitepapers and eBooks, via telemarketing, the LeadSwell team always requests that end users provide their direct dial or extension number. They also SMTP check email addresses to validate them, using services like Informatica and Verifalia. Finally, if a link is shared via email and it bounces, the email is removed prior to delivery.

One of the most important parts of LeadSwell’s work is listening to call recordings to locate leads with engagement and intent as well as to scrub out tire kickers. LeadSwell scrubs for bad email domains and phone numbers (e.g., 555-555-5555, @dontreachme.com). And, all leads are verified with LinkedIn, and LeadSwell includes LinkedIn profiles for every lead.