Lead Generation Agency

Choosing a lead generation agency is one of the few marketing decisions where the sales process tells you almost nothing about the work you will actually get. I'm Raphael Presberg, Founder and CEO of Moriah, a LinkedIn marketing agency and a LinkedIn Certified Marketing Partner. We run executive personal branding, targeted outreach, and LinkedIn Ads together as one business engine for established B2B companies, so I sit on the other side of this evaluation fairly often. My starting position is that almost any business objective has an answer with the right LinkedIn strategy, which is why the provider you choose matters more than the tactic they open with. This page is not our service menu. It's what I'd want to know before signing with anyone in this category, us included.

Why Every Lead Generation Agency Proposal Reads the Same

The category has settled on a single vocabulary. Qualified pipeline. Ideal customer profile. Multi-touch sequences. Book meetings with decision-makers. Read four proposals and you find the same nouns in roughly the same order, and that's the problem. The words describe the outcome you want, not the work anyone is going to do.

Underneath the shared language sit businesses that have almost nothing in common. One provider is renting you a team of callers in another time zone. Another buys a contact list and sends email from domains it will abandon in six weeks. A third runs paid search and counts form fills. A fourth does careful work with a named person on your account. The proposals don't separate these, and the first meeting usually won't either, because the person presenting is frequently not the person delivering.

So the evaluation has to be built out of questions with verifiable answers. Not "do you generate qualified leads," which everyone says yes to, but questions a weak operator can't bluff without it showing.

How the Numbers in a Pitch Deck Get Flattered

Agency case studies are rarely false. They're selected, and they're framed. Four patterns account for most of it.

A percentage with no starting number. "We increased qualified leads by 340%" is a sentence about a ratio and nothing else. Five leads a month becoming twenty-two is 340%. So is a hundred becoming four hundred and forty. Ask for the absolute figures at both ends. The number either survives that or it doesn't.

A metric chosen because it moves easily. Impressions, reach, follower growth, form fills, cost per lead: all of them respond quickly to effort, and all of them can improve while your sales team's calendar stays empty. An account optimized for form fills reliably finds people who enjoy filling out forms. Students. Job seekers. Competitors. Your own existing customers. Volume climbs, cost per lead falls, every arrow on the report points up, and nothing closes.

A definition of "lead" that quietly widens. When the agency sets the qualification bar and also reports against it, the bar is a variable rather than a standard. Ask who wrote the definition in the case study sitting in front of you, and whether that client's sales team actually agreed with it.

One account out of many. A deck is a highlight reel. The honest question isn't "show me your best result," it's "show me the distribution." How many clients did you run this play for, and what did the median one get?

A good provider answers all four without getting defensive, because the data is already there. A weak one treats the question as a trust problem.

Five Questions to Ask Before You Sign

"Who, by name, will do the work, and can I meet them this week?"

You want a person, a role, and a calendar invite. The gap between the salesperson and the operator is where most of the disappointment in this category lives.

A bad answer sounds like: "You'll have a dedicated team and a shared inbox for anything you need." A dedicated team with no names is a rota. If nobody can produce the person who will write your messages and your posts before you sign, assume that person hasn't been hired yet.

"What counts as a lead, who decides, and what happens to the ones we reject?"

Write the definition down before any money moves, and get your head of sales to approve it. Then ask the harder half: when your team disqualifies a lead, does it come off the agency's number?

A bad answer sounds like: "We pass over everything that engages, and your team qualifies from there." That's a volume arrangement wearing qualification language. If rejections don't reduce the reported figure, the report is measuring effort rather than results.

"Show me a client that did not work out, and tell me why."

Any provider with real history has one. The useful part isn't the failure, it's whether they worked out why. A provider who says "their buyers weren't active on this channel and we should have caught that in discovery" is telling you they run a qualification step. A spotless record means very few clients, or careless counting.

A bad answer sounds like: "Honestly, our clients all see results if they commit to the process." That sentence has already handed you the blame for an outcome you haven't had yet.

"Which parts of this are subcontracted, and to whom?"

Strategy, list building, copywriting, posting, ad management, reporting: any of it can sit with separate vendors behind one logo. That's not automatically wrong, but you should know, because every handoff dilutes your positioning and stretches your response time.

A bad answer sounds like: "We have a network of specialists we draw on." Ask for the breakdown in writing, specifically what gets done in-house.

"What is the notice period, and what do I have on the first morning after I cancel?"

This tells you whether the relationship rests on results or on switching costs. Long minimum terms exist for the agency's revenue forecast, not for your business objective, and the six and twelve month lock-ins common in this category are negotiable far more often than buyers assume.

A bad answer sounds like: "Twelve months, because the methodology needs time to compound." Some approaches genuinely do need time. None of them need you to be contractually unable to leave while you wait.

Who Owns the Target List and the Written Assets

This is the item most often skipped in agency diligence, and the one that costs the most later. Over a year, an agency builds assets with standalone value to you: a researched list of named decision-makers, the message sequences that got replies and the ones that died, every post published under your executive's name, the ad creative and audience setups behind the paid work.

Three questions settle ownership. All three belong in the contract rather than in an email thread.

1. Does the target list leave with me in a usable format, including who replied and who didn't? A list you can't export is a list you're renting.
2. Who owns the published content? Posts written for your CEO's profile carry your CEO's name in public. The copyright shouldn't sit with a vendor.
3. Whose account is the advertising running in? If the ad account belongs to the agency, so do your audience data and your campaign history. Paid media should run inside an account you own, with the agency granted access.

A provider who agrees to all three in writing has told you something real about how they expect to keep you.

What Happens in Month Three

Nearly every engagement in this category produces something in the first six to eight weeks, and the methodology isn't the reason. At the start, the obvious targets are untouched: warm connections, people who already engaged with your executives, inbound nobody followed up, accounts your sales team has been meaning to call for a year. Any competent operator converts some of that. It's the easiest cohort you will ever have.

Month three is when that cohort runs out and the real capability of the provider becomes visible. Which gives you a question to ask in the sales process, before you have any of this evidence: what changes in your approach once the easy wins are used up?

A weak answer is more of the same, louder. More volume, a wider list, extra channels bolted on. You can spot it in the pitch because it's phrased as doing more of the same, not as doing something different.

A credible answer describes a shift from reaching people to being recognized by them. By month three you're contacting the part of your market with no existing reason to reply, so the work has to create that reason. This is where the three pillars we run stop being line items and start behaving like one engine. Executive personal branding makes your leadership familiar before any message arrives, and content from a personal profile performs roughly 5 to 10 times better than the same content from a company page. Targeted outreach then lands as a note from someone the recipient has already watched thinking in public. LinkedIn Ads, when the objective calls for them, hold visibility with the same defined audience in between. Run alone, each one stalls. We've watched both halves of that failure: clients who published consistently but activated nothing around it got no business, and clients who sent outreach with nothing published behind it got no business either.

Channel choice is measurable here too. Cold email typically gets about 1 to 3% replies. LinkedIn gets about 10 to 15%. When you're working the part of the market that doesn't already know you, that gap is most of the outcome.

Pricing Models and What Each One Rewards

Price is the second question most buyers ask. The structure matters more than the number, because the structure decides what the provider optimizes for when nobody is looking.

Monthly retainer. You're paying for capacity and judgment. It rewards the provider for keeping you satisfied over time, which aligns well if, and only if, the notice period is short. A long lock-in reverses that: the revenue is secured regardless of the work.

Pay per lead. It feels like the safest option and it's the least aligned of the four. You've paid the provider to produce whatever counts as a lead, and the rest follows predictably: looser qualification, broader targeting, steady pressure on the definition you agreed to.

Pay per appointment. Better, with the same flaw one level up. The unit is a booked meeting, so the model rewards getting the meeting accepted rather than getting the right person into it. Expect attendees who are curious and unable to buy, and check who absorbs a no-show.

Commission or revenue share. The best alignment on paper, and workable mainly where the sales cycle is short and attribution isn't contested. In considered B2B purchases with several people involved, it mostly produces an argument about which touch earned the deal.

What to look for is a flat monthly fee, a short notice period, and a lead definition your own sales leadership wrote. That keeps the provider's incentive on the quality of the work rather than the count. Our retainer is $4,000 per month in the United States, £3,000 in the United Kingdom, and €3,000 in France, covering all three pillars run together and executed in-house, with no minimum term and no lock-in. You can stop at the end of any month, which is the point: if the engagement has to hold itself together on results, we have to keep producing them.

Running the Same Diligence on Moriah

It would be strange to publish a list of questions and then duck them, so here are our answers, including the ones that disqualify us.

• What we do. LinkedIn only: executive personal branding, targeted outreach, and LinkedIn Ads, run in parallel against one business objective you define. Strategy, content, and execution all sit in-house. Nothing is subcontracted.
• What we do not do. No search, no email marketing, no paid social off LinkedIn, no PR, no events, no content marketing elsewhere. If your objective needs those, you'll need someone else for that part, and we'll say so on the first call rather than after it.
• You cannot buy one pillar. The three run together, because it's the only configuration we've seen produce outcomes beyond pure awareness. A single pillar is the failure pattern described above, not a cheaper version of the engine.
• Commitment. None. No minimum term, no lock-in, cancel at the end of any month.
• Who you work with. A named in-house team. The deep discovery up front is run with the people who will do the work.
• Qualification runs both ways. We check that your buyers are genuinely active on LinkedIn before taking the work, and we decline it when they're not. We work with established B2B companies that have a settled value proposition, across roughly 12 industries, mostly business services, manufacturing, transport, and logistics. Very young companies aren't a fit.
• Proof. Figures from real accounts, per case study and per sector, including ESME, Adviso Partners, Foghorn Therapeutics, Vinci Technologies, and AWI. We'll walk through them with the denominators attached.

Who This Is For

• CEOs and CMOs of established B2B companies who have been pitched by several providers and can't tell them apart.
• Companies that tried a lead generation agency, saw a promising first two months, then watched it flatten by month four.
• Leadership teams selling into business services, manufacturing, transport, logistics, and similar sectors, where the market is a known and finite set of named people.
• Organizations where one or two executives carry real standing in the industry and that standing is currently doing nothing commercially.
• Buyers who would rather be told "this is not for you" during diligence than find out in month three.

Frequently Asked Questions

What should I ask a lead generation agency before signing? Ask who by name will do the work, and meet them first. Ask who wrote the definition of a qualified lead, and whether rejections reduce the reported number. Ask which parts are subcontracted, what the notice period is, and what you keep on the morning after you cancel. Then ask for a client engagement that didn't work, and why.

How do I tell a real qualified lead from a form fill? A qualified lead is a named person at a company in your defined market, with the authority to buy, who has agreed to a sales conversation. A form fill is an action on a web page. Get the definition written down before the engagement starts, approved by your head of sales rather than the agency, and make sure disqualified leads come off the monthly number.

Who owns the target list and the content when the contract ends? In a well-written contract, you do. Put three terms in writing: the target list is exportable with its reply history, the copyright in content published under your executives' names sits with you, and paid media runs inside an ad account you own with the agency granted access. A provider who declines these terms is building switching costs.

Is a monthly retainer better than pay per lead? For considered B2B purchases, usually yes, provided the notice period is short. Pay per lead pays the provider to produce whatever qualifies as a lead, which pushes qualification looser over time. A flat retainer with a short notice period and a sales-approved lead definition keeps the incentive on quality. A twelve month lock-in loses that advantage.

How long should it take a lead generation agency to produce results? Expect some activity within six to eight weeks, and treat it with a little caution: early results usually come from warm connections and neglected inbound, the easiest cohort in your market. The engagement proves itself from month three on, when the provider has to generate interest from people with no prior reason to reply.

What does a lead generation agency cost? Pricing varies widely by model and market. Our retainer is $4,000 per month in the United States, £3,000 in the United Kingdom, and €3,000 in France, covering executive personal branding, targeted outreach, and LinkedIn Ads run together and executed in-house, with no minimum term.

What is a red flag in an agency case study? A percentage with no starting number. A headline metric that moves easily, like impressions or cost per lead. A lead definition written by the agency. One account shown with no indication of how a median client performed. None of these prove dishonesty on their own. All of them mean you haven't yet seen the evidence you need.

Are lead generation agencies worth it? They're worth it when the provider's incentive is attached to quality rather than count, when your buyers are reachable on the channel being used, and when you keep the assets at the end. They're poor value when you're paying per unit for leads your own sales team would never have accepted.

Does Moriah do SEO, Google Ads, or email marketing? No. We run LinkedIn only: executive personal branding, targeted outreach, and LinkedIn Ads. If your objective requires search, email, or other channels, you'll need a separate provider for those, and we'll say so in the first conversation rather than stretch our scope to fit a proposal.

Can I buy just the targeted outreach, or just the personal branding? No, and that's deliberate rather than a packaging preference. Publishing content with nothing activated around it produces no business, and sending outreach with nothing published behind it produces no business. The three pillars run together against one business objective: almost any business objective has an answer with the right LinkedIn strategy, and that strategy needs all three parts working. The mix does adapt: when a client's buyers aren't yet publishing content themselves, we lean harder on targeted outreach.

Get Started

If you're comparing providers right now, take the five questions into those conversations. The answers will separate the proposals faster than any of the decks will.

Then book a call and put the same questions to me directly. We'll tell you whether your buyers are active enough on LinkedIn for this to work, and what we'd aim the engine at first. If we're not the right fit, you'll hear that on the call.