Martal Group for lead generation? What high volume really means
Author
Jeffrey Lupo
Jeffrey is a digital content marketer for B2B technology startups and marketing agencies.
Reviewed by
Michael Maximoff
Co-founder of Belkins, serial entrepreneur, and investor with a decade of experience in B2B Sales and Marketing.
Published:2024-02-14
Reading time:10 m
Imagine you hire Martal Group to handle lead generation for your business. Their services cover a lot of different marketing tasks, allowing you to focus on core business operations.
You feel confident about your new cost-effective marketing vehicle. Leads start coming in, some convert, and Martal once again proves their model.
After all your research and initial discussion, you feel you made the right choice for an outsourced B2B lead generation provider.
Then lead quality drops off. Conversions decrease. Overall, traffic slows down. Algorithms, legislation, and geopolitical events continue to shake up the digital landscape.
Why? Because that’s par for the course in marketing. Inevitably, the moment comes when you need to hit pause. You need a specialist to look under the hood of your marketing vehicle.
Martal has provided you with a dedicated professional at the helm of everything but, unfortunately, one who happens to lack the training, time, and resources for specialized assistance.
You can’t really complain because they’ve already delivered their end of the bargain: an agreed-upon number of leads.
You review your options:
Abandon Martal as a service provider and start over
Bring on an additional, more specialized, marketing services provider
Take efforts in-house
At this point, you might find yourself pondering one question: Why hire Martal Group in the first place?
To help you choose a services provider that will result in a fruitful and lasting partnership, there are a few tenants we’d invite you to consider.
Specifically, we encourage you to value seasoned professionals over systems, a human touch over automation, and a problem-focused approach over predefined service models.
While we have great respect for the comprehensive, streamlined suite of services that Martal has built for lead generation, therein lies where we also disagree.
To better illustrate our point, we’ll go into depth on how Martal’s services fall short, along with alternatives to consider.
The problem with Martal’s approach to lead generation
Martal can be a good option for startups and small businesses that are new to lead generation. They’ll get you off to the races but, for more of a sprint than a marathon.
The problem with Martal’s service offering is that it isn’t designed to play the long game. A heavy reliance on external tools and finely-tuned strategies makes them too rigid for the realities and nuances of something like landing a meeting with a Fortune 500 enterprise client.
No system is perfect and effective marketing requires a fluid approach. Martal’s machine does a lot of the upfront work for you. But what happens when you need to rethink tactics and strategy altogether?
Is Martal Group going to reinvent their own wheel for your business, or are you going to have to figure things out for yourself?
Let’s dive into answering those questions along with the “why” behind them.
The true cost of full-cycle marketing with multiple clients
Full-cycle marketing means everything from choosing a tech stack and user research to content creation, promotion, outreach, nurturing, analysis, and optimization. Each of these efforts has its own set of running tasks and specialists.
That’s a lot of moving parts.
As your service provider acquires more clients, the cost of tools, content production, and operations increases. This is where Martal does a good job at keeping initial costs low because of how streamlined their operation is.
However, your needs will evolve to things like improving attribution or increasing retention rates. At that stage, you’ll find that Martal offers little outside their initial offerings.
The result is that high-value leads slip through the cracks. This is because Martal is not set up for in-depth analysis and creative problem-solving. Their model was designed to handle a high volume of leads for their clients, as well as a high volume of clients for Martal themselves.
Their big machine might help you launch fast and easily, but it also helps them distribute a kind of productive service to multiple clients with minimal hands-on commitment.
Prioritizing volume overspecialization leads to burnout
Volume means quantity, not quality.
Does a high volume of leads then mean reduced quality?
Not necessarily, however, one of the most common complaints we hear from clients is about receiving too many low-quality leads.
Martal’s model is designed to get as much traction per salesperson as possible. That means delivering a deluge of leads to fill your sales team’s calendars. Eventually, your sales department is going to show signs of strain.
Closing leads is difficult and, the added chaos of juggling qualified with unqualified leads doesn’t make it easier. Additionally, there’s no specialization being built up on Martal’s part. Leads don’t become more qualified over time, they just keep coming in, continuously overwhelming your team.
Realistically, this means burnout. Both Martal’s team members and your own will experience increased turnover.
With turnover comes new faces, onboarding costs, learning curves, and a lack of the personalized care needed to nurture retention.
Generating a high volume of leads is great but, without the ability to build knowledge and adjust tactics, relationships don’t deepen and, instead, result in churn.
Having a single person at the helm of the entire funnel
To successfully run a marketing funnel means successfully executing multiple stages with a variety of tactics.
Occasionally, one stage will falter, which can cause the entire process to break down. If you don’t have adequate involvement to analyze and fine-tune each stage, you won’t know why something is not working.
Martal dedicates a single professional to oversee the entire lead generation funnel for your business. Without the necessary expertise, no matter how good the intentions, your Martal professional will be severely limited in their ability to adapt to challenges and optimize efforts.
To play the long game, you need multiple specialists dedicated to each and every stage of the funnel.
Over-reliance on external third-party tools
Choosing the software that your campaigns will rely on is a mission in itself. You also need to dedicate time and resources to coming up with a strategy for deployment and, eventually, one to automate various processes.
Martal’s services come as a prepackaged suite of tools that offer quick campaign setup and heavy automation. This is especially appealing to small companies eager to get up and running fast.
Beyond the initial setup and launch, regardless of whatever results you achieve, over-reliance on external tools begins to work against you.
Without dedicated specialists manning the individual tasks and accompanying tools, you’re limited in your ability to execute functions like lead research and qualification.
Your dedicated Martal professional is well aware of these limitations and, therefore, operates within a much narrower scope of capabilities.
Your tech stack is an invaluable part of streamlining your operations, but these tools should remain simply as tools. They should be used to empower skilled professionals and augment lead generation efforts, not box users in and limit angles of approach.
Tailoring a fine-tuned process is like turning a battleship
Martal has an impressively fine-tuned process for B2B SaaS that grants a high degree of efficiency.
However, its Achilles’ heel is its inability to stay responsive to specific needs and changing market conditions.
Martal’s playbook is well-scripted with best practices, but if you need solutions to problems, testing, and multiple iterations to improve processes, Martal’s approach is severely limited.
Instead of committing to sailing with the battleship that is Martal, we ask you to consider the lead generation process as one requiring a fleet of specialized, individual units.
For the remainder of this article, we’ll cover some companies worth considering along with some different approaches to lead generation.
Martal alternatives
Outbound marketing agencies
Belkins — B2B lead generation & appointment setting
In contrast to Martal, Belkins is an outbound marketing agency specialized at every stage of the lead generation and appointment setting process.
Clear communication and transparency. We believe effective communication starts with transparency. Additionally, we work with you throughout every campaign to maintain this level of communication that keeps you and your team in the know. In this commitment to open communication, we’ve found that clients prefer to stay better informed and engaged.
ROI-driven acquisition. We don’t over-promise on results. Belkins’ reputation has been built on setting realistic expectations. Once we’re confident about what’s possible, we make sure our service is aligned to producing a projected minimum ROI. While this doesn’t always start off with stellar results, we’ve found that it’s the key to building lasting partnerships with our clients.
Sales optimization. By simplifying the sales process, we streamline the journey prospects take to become leads, and eventually paying customers. We do this by first understanding your goals and ICP. We apply personalization to all outreach along, lead qualification, and appointment setting. The entire process is followed up with and optimized by regular reporting and progress tracking.
Channel-focused expertise and heavy research. Data-driven insights and lead research allow us to not only generate qualified leads, but also acquire difficult-to-reach high-value clients. This level of research is common for businesses with sophisticated products that leverage ABM. By thoroughly understanding the ins and outs of the channels we market through, both tactics and strategy can remain fluid.
Lead generation software and platforms
Leedfeeder — lead generation & website visitor analytics
Leedfeeder is a prominent player in the field of lead generation. Not entirely unlike Martal, the company is known for its innovative lead generation platform.
It’s specifically designed to assist businesses in the identification and conversion of website visitors into potential leads. Additionally, their stated focus is to empower businesses with the necessary tools to elevate their lead generation strategies and drive growth.
While reviews and feedback from users are generally positive regarding the potential effectiveness of their approach, at present, we do not have empirical data or more insightful information to share.
Nonetheless, Leedfeeder’s commitment to providing tools and solutions for enhancing lead generation are noteworthy. They serve as a more direct competitor (in terms of having a similar approach) to Martal’s current offerings.
Cognism has carved a distinct reputation in the realm of B2B data solutions and sales intelligence services. Their specialization lies in delivering B2B data, empowering businesses to efficiently reach their target audiences and drive optimal marketing performance.
Moreover, Cognism’s comprehensive sales intelligence solutions equip your sales teams with essential information and tools.
While Cognism poses as a prominent player, we admit that we lack detailed knowledge of their data solution performance, its overall impact, and the extent of their sales intelligence offerings.
For in-depth insights into the performance and results of their services, we advise you to conduct your own comprehensive assessment.
Most of our clients work with companies like Martal or CIENCE before starting a conversation with us. At that stage, they’ve built up some knowledge and conditioned expectations to better suit their needs, like ongoing open communication.
Honestly, this kind of works for us because we find clients then have a more realistic view of lead generation and what it takes to drive performance.
At Belkins, we stand out because we don’t promise you the moon on the first call. We ask the questions we need to know to discern what kind of results are within reach. This mindset is responsible for the growth of both our clients and our own organization.
While this level of transparency doesn’t always attract the highest volume of leads, it ensures we deliver what’s promised to those who choose to work with us.
Here are several options and free resources that will help you get started on your outbound sales journey:
Hire Belkins: If you want to discuss your current business goals and how we can potentially help you achieve them, contact us.
Belkins case studies: Gain insights on how we’ve generated 4,760,850 leads and millions of dollars for businesses of all sizes. Read their stories.
Belkins Growth Podcast: Get to know our VP of sales, Brian Hicks, and Belkins’ co-founder Michael Maximoff as they interview professionals on market challenges, effective sales practices, and business perspectives in various industries. Listen to the Belkins Growth Podcast.
Jeffrey is a digital content marketer for B2B technology startups and marketing agencies. His background is in hard-close sales, teaching English, and creative writing. He's worked with B2B marketing agencies, SaaS, DevOps, Martech, and cybersecurity companies. Jeffrey was raised in and is currently based out of Houston, Texas.
Expert
Michael Maximoff
Co-founder and Managing Partner at Belkins
Michael is the Co-founder of Belkins, serial entrepreneur, and investor. With a decade of experience in B2B Sales and Marketing, he has a passion for building world-class teams and implementing efficient processes to drive the success of his ventures and clients.
