Everyone’s Selling Leads

Not trying to come for anyone who does this – but we need to chat about it. Lead gen is starting to feel a little…off.

I don’t think that I’m alone in saying that the massive amounts of emails, messages, and connections claiming to sell everyone leads, seems like a bit of a circus?

Every week, a new agency pops up promising:

• 30 booked meetings
• 50 SQLs, or 100 “decision-makers” ready to talk
• Guaranteed 10 meetings with a decision maker

They send you messages. They email you. They send you connection requests – all claiming – unicorn leads.

Somehow, they have been around 3 months and already have captured how to do this when no one else has. Agencies scraping every morsel of data from the interwebs claiming that it resonates with your buyer as “relevant, timely and human-like”.

And when you dig in, it turns out they’re selling leads… to people who sell leads… to other people trying to figure out how to get leads.

Who is actually getting these leads?

Make it make sense.

It’s like everyone opened the same playbook, slapped a logo on it, and started pitching the same thing in different colors en masse the last few months.

And what’s even more concerning, is the number of people in sales leadership who are jumping into the comment sections commenting “leads” thinking that they have just struck gold.

There is no easy button (enter the slow clap).

Let’s talk about the “AI magic” behind these lists.

The relevant, timely and personalized emails your TAM gets from these agencies:

A lot of it comes down to what was scraped:

• Your ICP liked a LinkedIn post? EMAIL THEM FOR A DEMO!

• Your ICP commented “so true” under a thought leader’s content? Message to book a meeting.

• Your ICP deals with inefficiencies – pepper them with jargon only AI uses because that will likely result in a response

It’s shallow.
It’s surface-level.
And we all can see through it.

Where are the people using these lead gen services touting how many opportunities were created in their pipe from these efforts?

Where are the companies using these agencies shouting about how personalized and human the messages are and how happy they are with the performance and metrics?

I don’t see them, do you?

But we’ve created this environment where everyone’s selling the shortcut. And that trumps the hard button – about what it actually takes to build real pipeline.

So if it’s starting to feel like you’re being pitched the same thing over and over, you are.

Because most of what’s out there right now? Is just a volume game pretending to be strategy. And the loudest lead gen tactics get all the attention, but do they actually produce results?

So do yourself a favor, if someone sends you a connection request and they have any form of “lead gen” in their headline and it seems suspect – go ahead and delete it – as a pitch is incoming.

Tried-and-true, time-tested stuff that still works:

Focus on what does drive actual lead generation:

• Clarity on the problems you solve
• Relevance based on deep research
• Personalization that actual means something
• A narrow /targeted focus
• Being real and human
• Content that teaches
• Credibility that travels