To Outsource Leads to AI or Not?

It seems that users of Linkedin are increasingly targeted by a deluge of unsolicited pitches that often reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of the marketing function and, more worryingly, employ ethically dubious or outright illegal tactics.

Given my stated title on Linkedin is Fractional CMO, I get a lot of people selling me ‘marketing’ related services. Many of these cold, inbound messages if not illegal, violate the terms and conditions of the platforms they are using.

Yesterday I was approached by a company allegedly based in the UK who offered to pay me $600 a day to subscribe to the YouTube channels of their ‘clients’. The approach came via an anonymous account on Telegram, so alarm bells were ringing from the get go. The number was Moroccan, the surname Spanish, but the correspondent said she was Ukrainian living in in Leeds, UK. This incident highlights a disturbing trend: blatant misrepresentation of engagement metrics through artificial inflation. As a Fractional CMO advising clients on sustainable growth, this raises serious questions about the validity of such tactics and the potential damage to long-term brand health. While admitting that the practice was against YouTube’s terms and conditions, they didn’t seem too fussed about it.

For someone with no moral compass looking for a side hustle, this might sound like a good deal, but as a CMO, it made me wonder - do their clients know they are paying for subscribers? Do they know that while the subscriber numbers are going up, the people who are subscribing will never interact with the content or the brand, or is it just a cynical way to manipulate the algorithms?

There have always been murky areas of digital marketing. Industries like online gambling use(d) affiliates at arm’s length employing ‘black hat’ SEO techniques and other means to deliver traffic. Websites could be spun up and then turned off once Google and others found them out.

Email spam seems to have changed. The anti-virus and spam algorithms are very good at filtering out the unwanted, but not so much for direct messages, especially on Linkedin.

You Only Get One Chance to Make a First Impression.

For a Fractional CMO focused on building a strong brand presence for their clients, witnessing these clumsy and impersonal outreach attempts underscores the critical importance of a thoughtful and strategic first impression.

Roughly 9 out of 10 of my cold inbound messages and Linkedin Connect requests are from ‘people’ who are offer to bring me thousands of leads using AI. Much of this spam is just thinly disguised ‘scraping’ or off-the-shelf AI tools cobbled together to create lists of partially qualified contacts.

The pitch is tempting. A relatively low monthly fee for a list of leads who have shown intent to buy your product, an opportunity to scale your revenue growth without overhead or an in-house team, but… what is the cost of the erosion of trust and the potential for lasting negative associations with your brand?

I would argue that the first approach to a new potential customer, who has probably never heard of you before - is marketing. This is the beginning of the customer’s brand experience with you. Do you really want to leave this up to an outsourced AI?

Who Owns Your Pipeline?

My responsibility as a Fractional CMO extends to safeguarding a clients' brand reputation and ensuring marketing investments yield genuine, sustainable growth, not inflated vanity metrics or damaged relationships.

Here are some questions to ask yourself before outsourcing your lead generation (or that you should be asking potential providers on behalf of your clients):

1. Are the data points from Linkedin, a ‘marketing cloud’ or aggregator truly relevant and insightful for your client's specific industry, product or geographical market?
2. Is a canned cold message on Linkedin to an important stakeholder going to do long-term damage to your brand? Investing in marketing to build a trusted brand should be backed up by building meaningful connections with key stakeholders. The the idea of a generic, potentially error-ridden cold message being the first brand interaction is deeply concerning and fundamentally counter to effective relationship building. What if the mail merge fields are wrong? Are errors acceptable? e.g. If you get the job title or even company wrong.
3. Do you have control over your brand tone of voice? Do you have visibility of objections? Does the outsourced team have enough knowledge to effectively handle objections or will they fall back to a playbook or script?
4. Do you own the database? What stops the lead-gen company selling the leads to your competitors?
5. If it is so cheap to use AI based tools to identify qualified leads, why can’t you do it in-house? Chances are that these companies are white-labelling something like Apollo.io which costs about $80 per month for a plan perfectly suited to most businesses.

It’s tempting to pursue quick sales and growth and CROs are under pressure to fill the funnel with leads to meet sales, but short term targets need to be weighed against long term brand damage.