Even the most established companies can struggle when it comes to finding new customers. A lead generation specialist can facilitate this process by identifying quality leads and engaging them until they are ready for sales.
Hiring a lead gen expert for your team or finding a trustworthy partner to outsource this task can be the strategic step that will boost your business and take it to the next level.
What is a Lead Generation Specialist?
The main role of a lead generation specialist is to improve lead quality for your company. Through a unique skill set, they are able to identify and nurture prospects that fit your business requirements to ultimately close more deals.
Lead gen specialists often work as in-house team members but can also be independent freelancers or part of an outsourced lead generation agency.
What is the Average Salary of a Lead Gen Specialist?
According to Glassdoor, the estimated total pay for a lead generation specialist is $66,848 per year in the United States, with an average salary of $50,758 per year. Additional compensation includes bonuses, commissions, paid time off, and health insurance and is estimated at $16,089 yearly.
Base salaries for this role usually range from $42,211 to 53,254, according to Salary.com. Here’s a comparison of recent data provided by Glassdoor, PayScale, Indeed, and Salary.com.
4 Essential Factors for Determining Compensation
Salaries and compensations for lead generation specialists can widely range depending on four essential factors: education, years of experience in the field, certifications, and additional skills.
When looking for a lead gen expert to hire or partner with, sales leaders can analyze these factors to determine fair compensation and find the perfect candidate for the position.
Education
A diploma is not mandatory to start a career in lead generation, but outstanding professionals often have high educational levels in their CVs. A degree in business, marketing, or a related field is an excellent sign that your candidate has strong sales knowledge and will be a valuable addition to your team.
Experience
The best lead generation specialists have years of experience in sales and business development positions and have mastered skills such as prospecting, social selling, and objection handling. They might have worked as SDRs or in other related roles and have a deep understanding of sales processes.
Candidates with professional experience can request higher salaries when applying for a job. Although searching for low-cost applicants might be tempting, underinvesting in this process can slow closing ratios and affect your team’s productivity.
An experienced lead generation specialist will add value to your business by offering specialized knowledge and actionable insights into your sales process.
Certifications
There’s a wide range of workshops and courses offering resources for professionals who want to develop a career in lead generation. The best programs include training in sales, marketing, and technology; and are effective in preparing students to deal with challenging scenarios.
Hiring a lead generation specialist with multiple certifications might require a bigger budget, but the benefits of doing so are many. You won’t need to spend a large amount of time on training and onboarding, and your new employee will be qualified enough to guide the sales process with autonomy.
If you already have a lead generation team in your company, investing in professional certifications is a great way to refine your personnel’s abilities and improve your business outcomes. To choose the best fit for your team, analyze which aspects of your process need improvement and look for a lead generation course that offers strategies to solve them.
Additional skills
Certain skills are essential for succeeding as a lead generator. Professionals who choose this career must be excellent communicators, effective problem solvers, and natural researchers. But for those who want to stand out, the list doesn’t stop there.
The more specialized skills a candidate has, the better the chances of negotiating higher salaries and compensations during a recruitment process. A lead generation specialist with a deep understanding of sales concepts like targeting and segmentation is a valuable addition to any company and, therefore, might get a better income.
Relevant additional skills for lead generation include cold calling and emailing, tech savviness, lead nurturing, social selling, and many others.
Lead Generation Specialist: Roles and Responsibilities
The roles and responsibilities of a lead gen specialist can vary from one company to another, as they heavily depend on factors such as industry, company size, and business goals.
In general, these are the tasks that specialists are expected to perform on a daily basis:
Develop a lead generation strategy (or improve your existing one)
Even companies that succeed in identifying and attracting new prospects can have glitches in their lead generation processes. Warming up potential customers for your business is a challenging operation that depends on the good execution of many different tasks.
A lead generation specialist is responsible for developing strategies to generate better-qualified leads and nurture them until they are ready for purchasing. They achieve this by understanding their buyer personas and tailoring their campaigns to communicate with the right audience.
Effective lead generation strategies allow your team to create valuable offers for all different stages of the buying cycle. When looking for a specialist to hire, ask about their experience in improving existing business strategies and developing tactics from scratch.
Contact prospective customers
Lead generation specialists are responsible for establishing contact with prospects that have been qualified as sales opportunities. They use cold calling and emailing techniques to reach out to these prospects and offer viable solutions to their problems.
A deep understanding of the company’s products and services is essential to come up with attractive offerings and persuade prospects to move forward in the sales pipeline.
Evaluate leads
Conducting lead qualification is one of the key responsibilities of a lead generation specialist. They use research and critical thinking to identify prospects with better chances of converting into paying customers.
A functional qualification process can help your sales team by redirecting their efforts to opportunities that matter.
Analyze data
Your lead gen specialist will be responsible for keeping track of data and relevant metrics around your lead generation campaigns. Top professionals for this role understand the importance of data analysis and are not afraid of digging into numbers.
By constantly monitoring KPIs, your sales team will be able to anticipate problems and detect areas for improvement.
Create targeted content
The best lead generation specialists are able to create and publish content relevant to your target audience and establish your company as an authority in your niche. They know your prospects’ needs and pain points and have insights on how to offer exceptional solutions.
Great candidates for this role are skilled in developing SEO-friendly content and know how to use different platforms to reach different audiences.
Benefits of Hiring a Lead Gen Specialist
Hiring a lead gen specialist might be the perfect move to support your sales and marketing teams in their daily activities. Here’s what these professionals can do to benefit your business:
Save your time and energy
By assigning your lead generation process to an expert, you get to focus on vital elements of your organization.
Your sales and marketing teams will be able to get their work done without having to worry about running out of opportunities to pursue, and you’ll have more time and energy to chase your business goals.
Offer a unique set of abilities
The right lead gen specialist will boost your business strategy by offering a highly-specialized set of skills in sales and marketing. Top professionals have experience navigating through complex sales scenarios and are masters in the art of dealing with difficult prospects.
An expert’s capability to look beyond and come up with great insights can be a powerful addition to your company.
Set goals
Setting clear goals is the first step to developing a functional lead generation process. Specialists understand this and know how to use their knowledge to determine achievable goals for the short and long run.
They will conduct deep research into your market, competitors, and customers and use data to set up growth targets based on your business conditions.
Freelancers x In-house Specialists x Lead Generation Agencies
There are different options when it comes to finding a lead generation specialist to conduct your company’s strategies. Hiring in-house has advantages such as operational control and full-time availability, but it’s not always affordable to small and medium businesses.
The high costs of hiring are associated with salaries and compensations, onboarding, training, and equipment. Companies that choose this model often blow their budgets and end up taking a long time to have their lead generation teams functioning.
Hiring a freelancer for the job is an alternative that also comes with a fair share of disadvantages, as independent contractors frequently work on many projects at the same time and end up generating fewer outputs.
A trustworthy lead generation agency is able to mitigate these issues by offering a quality workforce for a fair price. They have teams of lead generation experts ready to take over your project and can launch your campaign in only a few weeks.
The best model will always depend on each business’s needs, and it’s crucial to dive deep into the pros and cons of each alternative before deciding which one better suits your company.
Bottom Line
Lead generation specialists are highly-demanded professionals with the knowledge and skills to grow different types of businesses. When looking for a candidate to fill this role, it’s important to consider factors such as education, work experience, and certifications to set fair compensation and close a deal beneficial to both sides.
