B2B Leads kaufen

Buying B2B Leads: Advantages & Disadvantages, Vendors, Best Practices

Is buying B2B leads the quickest way to increased sales, or are you cutting your own throat? There is not always a convincing answer to this question. Buying B2B leads is just one of the many ways of how you can quickly acquire new potential clients. There is, however, a consensus on one thing on the Internet and among the B2B scene: You must build your very own database of contacts and prospects. These datasets can cut research time in half and catapult you directly into the pitching and selling stages if done correctly.

The following article deals with:

Buying B2B Leads Best Practices

Buying B2B leads: A brief profile of the best providers

If you are considering buying leads, this is your section. LeadRebel has researched it for you.

Disclaimer: We assume no responsibility or liability for the providers’ products and data. The following links are non-affiliate links; the mentioned companies also do not have affiliate relationships with LeadRebel.

An excellent reference to avoid falling into dubious address traders’ hands is this list by the German Dialog Marketing Association (DDV), which LeadRebel has reviewed for you:

Company Price* Datasets DDV affiliation
beDirect GmbH & Co. KG Single-use: starting from €0.43/address 
Annual: starting from €0.77/address		 Over 3M Member with seal
Acxiom Deutschland GmbH Single-use: starting from €0.15 upwards 
Annual: starting from €0.30/address
Unlimited: starting from €0.45/address		 Over 4.2M Member with seal
Business Data Solutions GmbH & Co. KG Single-use: starting from €0.16/address
Annual: starting from €0.32/address		 4M Member with seal
REXAGO Information GmbH Annual: starting from €0.25/address Over 5.3M Member
Bisnode Germany GmbH  Single-use: starting from €0.38/address 
Annual: starting from €0.63/address 
Unlimited: starting from €0.88/address		 5.1M Member

*All prices quoted refer to company addresses without further details, such as the decision-makers’ names.

Expert recommendation: Alternative option to buying leads

Buying leads is not the only way to collect addresses. One of the best lead generation strategies is to retrieve marketing lists from a paid database that is regularly updated and integrated into your CRM solution.

These marketing lists help you find new customers and prospects and integrate customer information into the sales intelligence software. This way, you spend less time researching and more time contacting decision-makers.

Based on their many years of experience in consulting 400+ B2B companies, our experts recommend generating leads yourself. In the long run, the more efficient, bespoke way of generating leads is by using one software: LeadRebel.

The software analyzes your website traffic, identifies companies, and suppresses traffic from other sources. Based on the businesses determined, the company data, as well as a list of employees or potential contact persons (including their email addresses), are displayed.

What benefits does LeadRebel provide for your lead generation strategy?

98% of website visitors will leave your site without any interaction (purchase, request, subscription, etc.), meaning that out of 100 visitors, only 2% will provide their contact details. What about the rest? It usually goes down the drain.

This is where lead generation with LeadRebel comes into play.

Our software takes care of the remaining 98%. This means that if the potential customer does not contact you, you can contact the customer immediately. And to do so, you will be given all the prerequisites: 

  • The phone number of the company
  • The email address of the employees, including their responsibilities
  •  And even more important: a “presumed consent” (depending on the visitor’s behavior on your website).

The functions of LeadRebel at a glance

The program also shows you which companies have visited which pages of your website. 

These advanced features enable you to address the “hot leads” right after their web visit, whether by email or phone. This way, you harvest more traffic, more leads, and enjoy more sales success. More information about how LeadRebel works can be found here.

Useful further literature:

The cost of buying B2B leads 

Let’s go back to buying leads. The table above gives you an idea of how much a lead purchase will set you back. 

These rates may vary depending on the industry and the sales funnel “maturity” of the respective leads. 

In general: 

Whenever a prospect contacts a company, but the company is not yet ready to buy, the company can apply the CPL model and calculate the cost per lead. 

In the article “Cost per Lead,” you will find formulas and industry information about calculating the cost per lead. 

The average B2B lead costs vary depending on the industry, the target customer, and the competition. In B2B marketing, these costs refer to:

  • Online marketing strategy development and optimization
  • Concept creation
  • Landing pages, sales funnels (web development) 
  • Content strategy (YouTube, social media, blogs, videos, graphics)
  • Promotion (Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Instagram In-Story advertising)
  • Campaign creation
  • Fixed costs
  • Variable costs

This is why it is essential to be aware of the cost-benefit calculation before deciding on a provider. 

Buying leads: Why buying B2B datasets?

Purchasing leads is one of the effortless ways to extend your prospect list. However, before you decide which provider to trust, you should think of: 

  • What do you expect from the purchased lead?
  • How many leads do you need?
  • How detailed and up to date must the dataset be?

Once you have answered these questions, you should check whether the dataset you intend to buy and the provider meet all your requirements.

Advantages:  Possible disadvantages: 
Time-saving Lists will be costly
The right provider can be a trusted source of comprehensive, in-depth information  The cost per lead might not be worthwhile if you need to conduct additional research yourself
Calculable fixed lead rates  No exclusivity

Just because a provider offered you an exciting lead does not necessarily mean it is an exclusive lead. Often, companies sell their databases multiple times, meaning that you must expect competition if you contact these leads.

But: Even an exclusive lead is no guarantee for closing a deal. Success depends on what information is available to you and what you do with it. 

 

Demand is what determines supply when buying leads

Not only do B2B marketers have more and better lead generation capabilities available, but database vendors themselves use sophisticated methods to deliver qualified leads.

The process of collecting leads from databases has become much more complex in recent years. These providers do not sell you a random list of data any more unless you buy it on one of the many dubious websites—so, be careful.

A reliable B2B data provider sells a quality product. For example, you can choose from various assorted lists or based on criteria such as:

  • Industry
  • Company size
  • Geographical location, etc.

Such curated content is the reason why data shopping is still popular.

Why you should be careful buying records

You should know the applicable law and assess the legal risks involved in lead purchasing. In the EU, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), introduced on May 25, 2018, standardized the handling and processing of personal data.

Therefore, the crunch question is, “Can I still buy company addresses under the GDPR?”

Yes, it is permitted to buy business addresses and use them for advertising.

BUT: There are some laws that you should be aware of. In this article, you will find more GDPR-related information about lead purchasing and lead generation.

Spam, old records and exploding costs: the problems of lead buying

What can go wrong with contacting purchased leads? In our experience, there are some issues and potential pitfalls that buyers can fall into when buying business records.

Issue 1 – The spam folder:

  • A company buys an email list and immediately conducts a mass-mailing campaign to push their product. Not only stay the recipients silent, but they also mark the emails as spam. This, in turn, results in email filters identifying the operator’s email address as a source of spam. Eventually, most emails did not reach their destination. Beside of this problem, you also have to consider if and when you can send email advertising (read more about it here).

Expert advice: do your homework 

Take your time to research the individual contacts and create a customer profile. If you prove to your prospects that you know something about them, they will be more likely to respond positively to your email.

Work out a suitable strategy to reach the potential customer best: Include demographics, technographics, customer base, and pain points. A well-managed dataset contains most of this information.

Issue 2 – Data is outdated or unusable

  • Your company buys B2B datasets. The goal is to enhance and dynamize the current contact list. This time, your marketers have the right approach: they research their targets, try identifying the needs of each potential customer, and write personal emails.
  • Your company buys contact datasets that perfectly fit your industry and the buyer persona. Yet, your marketers quickly notice that your competitors already reached out to these contacts. As a result, the leads are not prospects because their needs have already been met. 

Despite all efforts, half of the emails remain undeliverable and another 30% unanswered.

What went wrong?

Dubious providers sell outdated and inaccurate data—it’s a fact. Plus, when buying the data, keep in mind that decision-makers (your contacts) in large companies are continually being promoted or take on new challenges.

These frequent changes mean that even the most useful and up-to-date databases do not provide correct information for long.

Expert advice: reliable data providers track changes and ensure that you always receive up-to-date information. 

Conclusion

If you intend to buy leads, you should only consider reputable suppliers. Even then, however, the datasets are no guarantee for success. Eventually, the sustainable and more efficient approach is to generate leads utilizing software—LeadRebel.

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