Should I do lead gen in-house or outsource it?

This is a question I get asked a lot, usually by a leader of a B2B business weighing up whether to hand lead gen to someone on their existing team or bring in outside help.

The honest answer comes down to two questions. Get them right and the decision makes itself.

Do you have someone in-house who is genuinely good at generating leads? And are they tied in enough to stay?

Yes to both, do it in-house. No to either, outsource.

It’s that simple.

When to do lead gen in-house

Two tests. You need to pass both.

The first is competence. Lead generation is a skill. It might look easy from the outside (”that person’s just writing blogs and managing social media posts”) but it is a hard skill to master. This is an empirical fact: if it were easy, lead gen would stop being the biggest challenge for most B2B businesses. A lead generator should be judged on one thing. Leads. If the person running it is bringing them in, they're a competent lead generator. If they're not, they're not. There's no third category. Job titles, years of experience, numbers of blog posts published, traffic to the website - none of it makes you a good lead generator. Generating leads does.

The second is stickiness. If you have managed to find yourself a good lead generator, they need to be tied in. Equity, a genuine stake, something that binds them beyond a monthly salary. Because the moment someone becomes good at generating leads, they become the most poachable person in your business. When they leave, you have to start again from scratch.

Pass both tests and the decision makes itself. Keep lead gen in-house. You've got a competent lead generator who isn't going anywhere. That's a strong position. And a rare one.

Most businesses don't have that. So let's be honest about what happens when you try to build it.

Why in-house lead gen usually fails

The first problem is hiring. If you're not a brilliant lead generator yourself, you can't reliably spot one. You don't know the right questions. You can't tell the difference between someone who talks a good game about generating lots of leads and someone who generates lots of leads. So you're hiring for a skill you can't assess, which is how businesses end up paying a salary for eighteen months and wondering why the pipeline is still empty (and they’ve lost eighteen months).

Say you beat the odds and find a good one. Now the real work starts. They need to get up to speed on your market, your product, your buyers. You need to train them. That takes months before you get a single qualified lead. And that’s the best-case scenario.

Because it's entirely feasible (I have seen this happen many times) that you would invest in training them, only to find that they were never up to the task of lead gen in the first place (but they write a good blog). In which case, you have lost time, spent money, and now you have an HR situation on your hands (which is not worth the good blogs).

But let's say you can train them and they do become competent generators, and then they start producing. The moment that person is bringing in leads, they become powerful. They control a valuable and scarce resource. They want more money and they become a flight risk. Everybody wants to hire the person who brings in leads (even in a tough jobs market). So now you're thinking about retention, counter-offers and succession planning for a role you only just filled.

There's one more problem, and it's getting worse. The rules of lead generation are changing fast. Search, social, AI visibility, buyer behaviour - all of it is shifting monthly. Your in-house person is busy running campaigns for you and only you. They don't have the time or the exposure to stay current. Give it a year and the person you hired to be your lead gen expert is suddenly out of date.

Why outsourcing lead gen wins for most businesses

Bring in a B2B lead generation consultant and the maths changes.

You'll pay less than you would to hire someone in-house. No recruitment fees. No employer taxes. No training. No pensions. No benefits. No new laptop and office chair. And you're not buying a person you then have to train. So you’ll save on training as well. You're buying experience, a proven method for generating leads and a much higher likelihood you’ll get it right first time. A consultant won’t be wowed by shiny new AI lead gen tools - they’ll try them on their own business first and only use them on yours if they work. They’ll expect to be judged on the number of leads (even if they also write good blog posts).

The risk profile is different too. Ending a contract with a supplier is straightforward. Ending an employment contract is not. Employment law makes sure of that. If it isn't working, you're far freer to change course.

And the currency problem solves itself. A good consultant has to stay current, because staying current is the job. They're working across a range of clients, watching what's happening in the market from multiple angles at once. Every lesson learned on one account feeds the next. You're not paying for one person's limited view. You're benefiting from everything they're seeing everywhere else.

So which is it?

Come back to the two tests.

If you've got someone in-house who is genuinely generating leads, and they're tied in enough to stay, keep it in-house. That's the right call and you don't need anyone's help to make it.

If you don't, stop trying to build something you can't hire for. Outsource it, and buy the expertise instead. Or try a hybrid approach.

Heather Baker is the founder of the AI Edit and the Humans in the Loop. She loves leads.