Martal Group vs Belkins.io: Which Should You Hire for Lead Gen?

The Martal Group and Belkins.io are both big names in the world of B2B lead generation and sales development. Both companies are known across the industry and are typically the go-to agencies for businesses looking to hire for lead generation and sales enablement services. 

Selecting the right lead generation company between these two can be complex. Typically, people will look at their service range, team size, tech tools, etc. Well, that’s not always the best approach, especially if you care about getting sales-ready leads. 

The truth is that these elements or features don’t tell much about the way they actually approach the work and what result quality it’ll bring for your company. 

So, we take our analysis beyond surface-level features, focusing instead on the essential elements that set a truly effective lead generation service apart from the rest. 

To do this, we go from the principle that if you are hiring a lead generation company, it means that you want to fuel growth for your company by getting high-quality leads you and your sales team can sell to — to increase revenue without worrying about the lead generation. 

Based on that, there are clear specific features you need to care about in a lead generation company, and that’s how we will help you choose between Belkins.io and the Martal Group. 

Here we go:

1. Proactive engagement: The firm should take the initiative to connect with potential prospects instead of employing strategies that would require the leads to come to the company.
   
   So, outbound over inbound, with a focus on rapid and well-defined outcomes, you can’t afford the luxury of time or massive investment associated with drawn-out strategies.
   
2. Concentrated expertise: Avoid firms offering a plethora of services that have very little to do with your growth objectives. By “concentrated,” we imply that they don’t dabble in countless lead generation services.
   
   Instead, they concentrate their expertise on a single service (e.g., LinkedIn lead generation), mastering it to deliver exceptional results.
   
3. Prompt outcomes: Employing a lead generation agency implies a need for rapid growth and a promptly filled sales funnel. You need an agency that can deliver high-quality leads expeditiously, as long delays are not affordable or desirable.
   
   You need to be sure you’ll start getting results from Month 1 and that they won’t bury you into lead generation banalities. 
4. Dependable and respectable outreach platforms: Depending on your business’s nature and offers, you should be able to easily identify the appropriate outreach platform.
   
   These should be platforms that your clients are at ease with, professional mediums that uphold engagement and respect your prospects.
   
   You don’t want a company that relies on outdated outreach channels or those that will piss off your prospects.
   
5. Steady lead attraction and generation strategy: The primary reason you hire a professional lead gen agency is to compensate for the knowledge and skill gaps in capturing and converting leads.
   
   So, your target agency should demonstrate a proven, systematic lead generation method that consistently brings in high-quality leads and benefits your business.
   
6. Deep understanding of your ICP or excellent mechanisms to achieve it: The agency should have an in-depth understanding of your target market and their unique challenges or exhibit a clear process for achieving this.
   
   They should be skilled at crafting tailored outreach messages or cold emails that address your ideal customers’ needs, creating content that elicits their emotions and motivates them to purchase.
   
7. Meaningful, personalized, impactful outreach: You don’t want a firm that sends generic emails to random lists obtained from databases such as ZoomInfo or Apollo.io.
   
   The agency’s approach should be uniquely tailored to each prospective lead to maximize results.
   
   Their work should command respect, even from those who don’t make a purchase, to maintain your reputation and brand image — or at least avoid hurting them.
   
8. All-inclusive, done-for-you service: The ideal agency should handle all lead generation and outreach activities, freeing you up to focus on other aspects of your business, like personal meetings with leads and finalizing deals.
   
9. Service over technology: While lead generation tools can be beneficial for outreach campaigns, some companies include them in their package without adding real value.
   
   You should opt for a firm that’s more focused on doing the actual work and executing creative strategies rather than heavily relying on AI and other tools.
10. Affordable and scalable solutions: Finally, the agency’s services should be cost-effective and designed to grow with your business.
    
    Clear pricing structures detailing exactly what you’ll receive and transparency about potential lead numbers before you engage their services.

That’s essentially it. These are the pivotal factors to focus on when selecting a lead generation agency.

Here’s a revelation, upon evaluating these fundamental elements, very few of the supposedly remarkable lead generation companies meet the criteria of “what’s an excellent lead generation company for your needs”, and this includes Belkins.io and the Martal Group.

Thus, we will delve deeper into the specifics of Belkins.io and the Martal Group, revealing their methods, strategies, services, and how they integrate these critical elements into their operations.

Without any further delay, let’s get started.

Martal Group vs Belkins.io: which company should you hire for your lead generation and appointment setting needs?

So, here is how the two companies compare, starting with their different services. 

Scope of service: Comparing what they do and how your business can benefit from it.

Here, we’ll give you an overview of both companies’ service ranges and what these actually mean, pertaining to your need for generating leads and setting appointments. 

Belkins.io’s service overview

Belkins.io has positioned itself as an international company for B2B lead generation and appointment setting, offering a service spectrum that helps them find, and reach out to generate leads for their clients. Let’s delve into the key services they provide.

• Lead research: Belkins.io conducts extensive lead research. Their primary goal is to pinpoint potential clients who exhibit a high probability of conversion. The process is comprehensive and entails identifying your ICP, curating target lists, analyzing demographics, evaluating industry trends, studying competitors, and understanding the business requirements of possible leads.
• Lead outreach: The team at Belkins.io assists in initiating contact with potential leads via bespoke email marketing campaigns, LinkedIn outreach, social media, and other channels. You can find more details about their strategies and methodologies on their website.
• Lead qualification: This involves evaluating the potential leads generated to determine their level of interest, relevance, and fit for your products or services. By assessing various criteria, such as the lead’s demographics, industry, pain points, and budget, Belkins.io prioritizes the most promising leads for their client’s sales team.
• LinkedIn marketing: Belkins.io helps businesses increase their LinkedIn visibility by increasing your connection requests and content distribution. Plus, they can manage outreach campaigns on your behalf, generating leads or setting appointments on LinkedIn.
• Lead management: Once leads are identified and qualified, effective lead management becomes crucial to handle and nurture these prospects throughout the buyer’s journey. Belkins.io uses a CRM tool to keep track of interactions, appointments, and other important details related to each lead. This helps ensure that no potential opportunity falls through the cracks, and your sales team can follow up with prospects at the right time.
• Appointment setting: Belkins.io reaches out to your potential leads and sets appointments on your behalf. This could mean employing cold calls, email outreach, or social media engagement. 
• Email marketing/deliverability services: They work diligently to boost your email deliverability rates by devising engaging email content, optimizing send times, ensuring full compliance with spam regulations to dodge spam filters, and more.

That’s pretty much it for Belkins.io. Now, let’s move to the Martal Group.

Martal Group’s range of services

The Martal Group is primarily a team of sales reps and lead generation experts who serve its wide clientele by generating leads, setting up appointments, and driving conversions. They focus on serving companies that offer tech, software, and innovative products or services. Here is a breakdown of their main services as per their website.

• Sales development: Martal Group offers sales development services. The service is designed to help businesses broaden their sales activities and get more clients. Their seasoned professionals help businesses run the entire sales enablement process, from spotting potential leads to reaching out to the leads and setting meetings.
• Outbound lead generation: Martal Group employs a blend of outbound marketing tactics and unique tools to generate premium leads for its clients. These tactics generally include targeted cold emailing campaigns, outreach via LinkedIn, and cold calling, among others. Interestingly, they offer three tiers for outbound lead generation.
• Outbound lead generation
• Outbound lead generation + sales and customer onboarding
• Outbound lead generation + customer onboarding + account management
• Inbound lead generation: This tactic involves attracting potential clients to your enterprise through strategies like content marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and branding. The objective here is to attract customer attention rather than the marketers reaching out to the prospects.
• Account-Based Marketing (ABM): Martal Group also offers ABM services, which concentrate on a more tailored approach to B2B marketing. They pinpoint high-potential accounts and create customized marketing tactics to convert these into customers.
• Outsourced sales team (People-as-a-Service): For businesses that may lack the necessary resources or expertise to establish and manage their own sales team, Martal Group can provide a full, outsourced sales force. This service lets businesses concentrate on their fundamental capabilities while Martal Group oversees their sales procedures.
• Consultation services: The company also offers sales consultation services that help businesses get counseled and improve sales and marketing endeavors. This could include sales process optimization, increasing lead conversion rates, or upgrading your overarching marketing strategy.

That’s about it for their services. Martal Group takes great pride in their skilled team of seasoned sales professionals, niche industry experts, and adept account managers, all of whom are well-versed in the B2B tech market.

Further, they possess three B2B databases, which combined with their know-how, facilitate their work. Essentially, they offer an exceptional, all-inclusive lead generation service. 

On the other hand, Belkins does not have any client database of their own. Their tech arsenal is limited to a few proprietary tools that help them run email campaigns. 

Here is our verdict on their services:

The many services both companies offer are structured into siloed marketing offerings to accommodate businesses that might already possess internal teams and only need specific offerings. 

However, when you hire them for “lead generation”, you can be sure that all these services (if not most of them) are bundled into the package they provide. 

Taking Belkins.io as an example, if you hire them for lead generation, lead research, lead outreach, lead qualification, etc, will all be part of the service you get. 

Bear in mind that services like LinkedIn marketing, inbound marketing, appointment setting, and email marketing are different forms of lead-gen services. You should choose based on the characteristics of your product, your target audience, and other considerations.

Moreover, we also note that Martal Group leans more towards being a sales outsourcing firm rather than purely a lead generation service provider. Conversely, Belkins resonates more as a lead generation company because they concentrate more on the service itself rather than providing people-as-a-service.

Last but not least, both firms offer a plethora of services, arguably too many. They lack a single area of specialized focus. This implies numerous teams and self-proclaimed expert individuals performing diverse tasks under the same banner — the company name.

While this may not be a critical issue, it could hint at a lack of unequivocal focus on the lead generation service you’re most interested in. As the old adage suggests, a jack of all trades is a master of none.

The process of lead generation: Comparing strategies for identifying your ideal client profile, building lists, and approaching prospects.

This is where things start to become very interesting. We will discuss how these companies go about the real business of lead generation and how their techniques and strategies shape the results you get. 

Also, you will get a good understanding of their different lead generation workflows and frameworks and see whether or not the way they do things aligns with your standards and how you want your brand to be perceived by your target audience. 

Spoiler alert, it does not. Well, we might be biased. You should see for yourself.

That cleared, we’ve found there are three (03) things you should care about when it comes to a company’s lead generation strategy. These are:

• how they research and find your ICP, 
• how they build lists and where they find the people they reach out to, and 
• how they reach out to them.

Now let’s look at how each of the companies approaches lead generation. 

Identifying and researching ICPs

Here is a truth you should know if you have to choose between lead generation companies. 

“When you have to choose between two lead generation companies, the one that has the best approach or system to nailing your ideal customer profile is the one that can bring you the best results, aka real leads who are ready to buy.”

We are sure most lead generation experts can confirm this.  

So, that means the effectiveness of the target company’s process here directly shapes the quality of leads they provide you with. Basically, securing high-quality leads requires a lead generation company with an accurate and comprehensive way to identify your ideal customers.

So, how does Belkins approach this?

We took a tour of their website. In a nutshell, the team starts by working with your existing sales team, and together they get to the bedrock of what constitutes an ideal client profile from your sales department. The image below details it a little more. 

This is a good approach. And the sample test they run allows them to get even more precise on who they should reach out to. We can say that their technique for finding and nailing your ICP before running the campaign is top-notch. But we can’t say the same about the Martal Group. 

The Martal Group relies on data intelligence databases and tools to find your ICP. 

So, unlike Belkins, the Martal Group relies more on their tools rather than real insights from you or your sales team to clearly understand your ICP. 

The reason we believe this is bad is because it’s always a guessing game for a lead generation company to identify the right targets without in-depth discussions about your ICP with you or your sales team.

The thing is that even the preliminary data or filters fed into their tools need to be aligned with your ICP, which they can’t merely guess. That’s the main reason most companies’ lead generation processes are broken. No ICP can even be found on a database or devised by a tool. 

It’s as if they’re bypassing the most crucial step in lead generation: understanding your ICP. This understanding involves discussions, posing queries, and running A/B tests to gather direct psychographic data relevant to your ICP (who they are, their pain points, what product features they value, and so on).

If your lead gen company can’t discuss and nail your ICP, your product can’t make sense to them. They cannot relate to its unique use cases or the problems it solves, and subsequently, they cannot sell your product better than a company that understands your ICP at a deeper level — the way Belkins does. 

Picking up leads and building lists

Following the identification of your ICP, the next step involves conducting research to locate potential customers who align with that profile and building a list for outreach campaigns. So, this section will delve into that specific procedure, beginning with Martal Group.

The company’s website mentions that they generate a curated list of pre-qualified prospects each week, which they use for their outreach campaigns.

Moreover, the website reads that they build a monthly list of up to 3000 – 5000 prospects. Considering that they build these lists and target prospects on a weekly basis, this translates into creating a list of approximately 750 – 1250 prospects every week.

It’s safe to assume that manually building outreach lists of this magnitude would be impossible. As a result, they probably employ a data intelligence tool (of which they possess three in-house) to rapidly compile prospect lists and then curate them.

With B2B contact information databases, it’s easy to rapidly build lists by applying several filters. Plus, building lists this way effectively accelerates the list-building process, thereby enabling them to seamlessly target thousands of prospects without breaking a sweat. 

We take issues with that.

Our first concern is that data intelligence tools, while convenient, only provide generic information that are useless for outreach campaigns. Sure, you can apply filters to narrow down the lists and focus on particular audiences. Still, the resulting data remains generic.

In most cases, you’ll only see data in the range of:

• IPO companies
• Companies that have 500-1000 employees
• Companies that use Salesforce
• Companies that are in the UK
• Companies that are Serie A funded
• Etc. 

As you can tell, this data provides no insights about your ICP, their problems, or any distinctive attributes they might possess. While it may form a decent groundwork for cold emailing, it doesn’t shed light on the specific needs and reasons to target a company.

This implies that you can’t definitively tell whether a company listed on these platforms actually faces the challenges that your product or service seeks to solve. 

Consequently, it devolves into a game of speculative outreach, where you send cold emails to random individuals hoping to receive a response. This is far from ideal.

Plus, even when you achieve success and get a couple of interested people, leads generated in this way are the most challenging to convert. It’ll require considerable informational content and time to educate them and get them to be sales-ready. 

This is not ideal for your business, especially since you’re investing in lead generation services with the intent to promptly fill your sales pipeline with sales-qualified leads and accelerate growth. (You’ll see how we do it better at Nerdy Joe later)

Interestingly, Belkins operates pretty much in the same way as the Martal Group here. According to their website, they rely on openly available data from platforms such as Google, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Glassodor, and Xing, among others, to find potential leads for your business.

In other words, the company extracts a list of potential buyers from these platforms, after which their research team dedicates time to validate that the identified potential buyers are indeed accurate and align with your ICP. See? Same as Martal Group. 

Remember how you should build your ICP based on the needs and pain points that your product solves? Now, you’re targeting random people off the internet based on technographic and firmographic data — it’ll be hard to get leads that’ll actually buy. 

The thing is that there is no filter you can ever apply on a data intelligence platform to pinpoint people who match your ICP. These platforms only register companies based on technographic, firmographic, and demographic data. 

But you need to understand that even if you’re selling Nextiva, the mere fact that a company uses RingCentral and has a team of 100 doesn’t make them a suitable prospect. So here, both Belkins and Martal Group’s processes don’t guarantee the best outcome for you.

Reaching out and targeting leads

To ensure you get a comprehensive understanding, we’ll divide this section into two parts: campaign-level and copy-level approaches. 

This will help you understand how they conduct campaigns, create the content or copy they send to prospects, and how these factors influence the results you receive.

Campaign-level 

We’ll start with Belkins. 

Belkins offers varied targeting strategies. Essentially, you’ll have three options. Based on your chosen plan, you’ll have a distinctive campaign scale. 

For each package, they will curate a custom list of leads based on your chosen plan, set up sending domains and mailboxes to ensure email deliverability and send emails to book a certain number of meetings by the end of the month — ALL GOOD.

This strategy is akin to the modus operandi of most lead generation agencies. The issue here, however, lies in the scale of targeting, specifically, the volume of individuals contacted. 

For instance, consider the “Growth Plus” plan. It promises a lead list of up to 30,000 curated leads and guarantees over 220 meetings. This suggests that they’ll interact with as many as 30,000 individuals within the agreed-upon timeframe. 

That’s a staggering number of people to reach out to, even over a span of six months. It leads one to question whether this method guarantees high-quality meetings or a favorable conversion rate for these leads.

Admittedly, they’ll establish new sending domains and mailboxes, warm up the domains, and run a test sample to determine the optimal go-to-market approach before fully launching the campaign. But here is what it could mean if you are targeting huge lists: 

• Mass outreach: If you are sending emails to this many people, you can possibly have the time to properly research your prospects and tailor your email to each individual. So, it means you’re blasting people with generic cold emails and pushing for action. They might say you’re selfish and lazy. 
• Substandard lead quality: Since there is no super personalization, the quality of the leads you get will be subpar, and you can’t convert, at least not easily or in a short timeframe. 
• Pissed prospects: Some prospects can be mean to you, saying things like “Remove me from your list”, “Don’t ever email me again”, or worse, “Your cold email sucks”. 
• Bad rap on socials: Targeting people with generic emails can negatively impact your company’s reputation. This can be particularly damaging if you are in a competitive industry or rely heavily on word-of-mouth referrals. Also, we are sure that’s not how you want your business to be represented.

Hopefully, our perspective is clear. We’re not suggesting that our critique is indicative of the service you’ll receive from Belkins. Our argument is simply that quality outreach necessitates significant effort and time, and targeting gargantuan lists (30.000) does not necessarily support this.

Interestingly, the Martal Group does the very same thing. Well, slightly differently. Here it is.

Understand that we are only focusing on the 1st tier of the service, outbound lead generation, as it aligns with your current needs the most.

As part of their outbound lead generation campaign, Martal Group targets between 3,000 – 5,000 potential leads and sends a range of 9,000 – 12,000 emails EACH MONTH.

Within the same period, they also establish connections with prospects on LinkedIn, sending between 600 – 700 LinkedIn messages.

The package further includes call follow-ups with potential leads. You can expect to receive 20 – 30 qualified leads from the campaign at the end. They guarantee that you can convert between 5 to 15 of these leads into customers. 

Integrating these three outreach channels can efficiently reach prospects across various platforms and ensure actual engagement and responses from potential leads. However, it’s worth noting that people are generally averse to cold calls.

Putting that aside, the actual concern is that Martal Group also reaches out to AN OVERWHELMING NUMBER OF PROSPECTS and SENDS AN EXCESSIVE NUMBER OF EMAILS. Therefore, the same issues we identified with Belkins are also prevalent here.

• Mass outreach: You’re selfish and lazy. 
• Substandard lead quality: You can’t convert the leads, at least not rapidly. 
• Pissed prospects: People will be mad because your campaigns suck. 
• Bad rap on socials: That’s not how you want your business to be represented. 

Copy-level

The companies also do the same thing at the copy-level as well. And the way both approach copy creation leaves much to desire. Let’s start with the Martal Group. 

Like we said before, mass outreach chips away the time and brain power you should normally invest into crafting compelling copies. So, here is what they do.

While creating templates might seem efficient on the surface, it essentially implies that they’re using one successful example as the foundation for all their content across the entire campaign.

Given the large volume of prospects they target, they can’t create or tailor their emails to each individual. So, they have to engage in wide-ranging, generic personalization, which, as you look closer, isn’t truly personalized at all.

Essentially, they’ll create email templates for every campaign and send them to the vast list of prospects they’ve compiled from a data intelligence tool, altering only some generic variables (like company name, job title, first name, etc.) within the email.

This sort of superficial personalization is far from ideal. Your engagement will be crickets. Fun fact, it explains why they must send thousands of emails before getting substantial results. Belkins also employs the very same approach.

As we’ve found before, the company engages in mass outreach, targeting huge lists of customers. Again, as we said before, this leaves little room to do excellent research and create individually-personalized messages that align with each prospect individually. 

So, confirming our theory, it reads on their website that the company develops and delivers personalized outreach messages using templates.  

Proper outreach requires excellent research and creating a personalized email for each of your prospects. No two prospects are the same and shall thus never receive the same outreach emails or messages. (More on that later as we detail how we do it). 

Lead outreach channels included

Belkins deploys a multi-channel outreach strategy that incorporates email, LinkedIn, phone, and more. They employ data intelligence tools, proprietary outreach tools, and their expertise to drive their operations.

Similarly, Martal Group also executes a multi-channel outreach approach, including email, LinkedIn, phone, and more. They make use of data intelligence tools, proprietary outreach tools, and their expertise to steer their operations.

However, at Nerdy Joe, we take a different stance. We believe reaching out to prospects on so many channels can be overwhelming and, sometimes, counterproductive. We’ll explain more about our unique approach later.

Lead generation and sales enablement tech stack included

Belkins is not particularly famous for having an extensive list of lead generation tools, but it does possess a notable selection of its own lead generation facilitation tools. 

These include an email delivery tool known as Folderly, a proprietary platform named Wordstir that assists in crafting emails and provides ready-made templates, and an appointment scheduling platform, among others.

It’s worth mentioning, however, that, unlike Martal Group, Belkins has to rely entirely on a few third-party tools for research and outreach. For instance, they lack a tool offering a comprehensive B2B database of companies like Apollo.io and ZoomInfo, as Martal Group does. 

Remember that these factors can influence their pricing model as they have to invest in these tools.

On the other hand, Martal Group presents a collection of lead generation tools, including databases for B2B contact information and dashboards for outreach analytics and reporting. Interestingly, despite this, Martal Group also uses several third-party tools.

This could imply that Martal Group’s clients might have to invest in additional tools to achieve their lead generation objectives. It’s crucial to remember this when comparing the services offered by these two companies.

Service pricing: Pricing model, refund policy, average deal size, minimum commitment period, and contracts. 

As you are probably aware that most lead generation companies do, none of the two companies leaves a clear pricing detail on its website. 

That means you’ll have to reach out to them to get custom pricing. That said, we’ve looked on Clutch to see the average deal size of the two companies. 

Pricing/average deal size

According to Clutch, Belkins.io and the Martal Group have an average deal size of between $10,000 and $50,000.

That’s a significant financial commitment, especially for small to medium-sized enterprises. They can both justify this pricing with the extensive reach of their campaigns, their ambitious prospect targeting, and the plethora of tools they use.

However, when we factor in all the possible issues related to lead quality and conversion efficiency, as mentioned previously, the return on investment won’t be the most advantageous for your business.

Minimum commitment period and contracts

When working with Belkins, the typical subscription period is 12 months. You must commit to working with them for 12 months before starting.

As for the Martal Group, the typical subscription period is 3 months.

This implies that you’re required to commit to paying them for a period of either a year or three months before initiating a working relationship. This arrangement might not be the best fit for your needs, particularly if you’re a small business or a startup, and here’s why.

This system makes you pay for several months while they experiment with different approaches, potentially leaving you with no tangible returns on your investments. 

To put it into perspective, the minimum outlay for the Martal Group is $30,000, while for Belkins, it could skyrocket to a staggering $120,000.

What’s even more critical to understand is that being locked into a long-term contract or subscription can considerably hamper your ability to modify your lead generation tactics or transition to another provider. 

This could pose significant challenges if your business requirements evolve or the outcomes do not meet your expectations. But regardless of your level of satisfaction with the services provided, you’re still obligated to pay them and abide by the contractual terms.

Refund policy

Belkins offers no refund, and they are not shy about it. 

On the other hand, the Martal Group doesn’t mention any refund policy anywhere on their website. 

What this implies is that if you invest in their services and they fail to deliver the desired results, you’ll be left with no option but to accept the situation and move forward. 

Nerdy Joe vs. Martal Group and Belkins: Why we are a better option for lead generation than the Martal Group and Belkins.io

Our expertise here at Nerdy Joe lies in B2B lead generation, with a specialized focus on email marketing and outbound lead generation strategies, including cold emailing and LinkedIn outreach.

Our dedicated service guarantees a steady flow of leads for your enterprise, eliminating the burden of lead gen for you and your sales team. Outsourcing your lead gen to us allows your sales team to focus on what they do best – having sales meetings and closing deals.

We position ourselves as a much better alternative to Belkins and the Martal Group on the grounds that these organizations, in our view, neglect the most crucial elements of lead generation.

To give you a clearer picture, let’s talk about the key components of lead generation that, in our opinion, Belkins.io and the Martal Group seem to lack.

Here we go:

• Both Belkins and the Martal Group fall short in personalizing outreach messages to their maximum potential. They lean heavily on templates, tweaking only for industry specifics, resulting in a one-size-fits-all messaging strategy.
• Martal Group’s process for ICP identification is rather ambiguous and leaves many questions unanswered. They lean more on technological tools than discussing to get direct insights from your sales team. The campaign is doomed from the start.
• Both organizations rely on sales and data intelligence tools for lead sourcing. This implies a lack of precise targeting. Their outreach campaigns essentially boil down to a numbers game — broadcasting mass emails to a random audience and passively waiting for responses. 
• Neither of these companies prioritizes researching and addressing individuals in your target audience based on their unique needs and challenges. Instead, they scrape huge lists from data intelligence tools and start to blast them with poor emails. 
• Both companies are “jack-of-all-trades”. They offer a broad spectrum of services across multiple channels. You’re better off working with a team that excels at mastering a few channels. 
• The outreach campaigns from both firms won’t bring you the highest quality leads. This is primarily due to their mass-targeting strategy, leading to subpar campaign performance. As well, it’ll take time and more educational materials to convert leads.
• Neither Belkins nor Martal Group offers refunds; even more concerning, they fail to provide a results guarantee. This uncertainty, coupled with their commitment periods of three or twelve months, forces you to allocate budgets for these durations with no promise of successful outcomes.
• Lastly, their pricing is on the higher end and appears to be based on the tools they employ and the effort they put in rather than the actual results delivered. This pricing structure might not be the most beneficial for your business.

Both Belkins and the Martal Group fall short in several critical areas for a lead generation company. They fail to align with the key elements we initially discussed, which you would ideally want from a service to ensure they can really fuel your business growth. 

From personalization to targeting, campaign strategy to pricing structure, both companies show significant limitations in delivering an optimal lead generation service.

Now here is why you really should work with us at Nerdy Joe. 

Outreach services: Belkins and Martal Group are jacks of all trades; our team is dedicated to only cold email outreach and LinkedIn outreach.

A significant issue with both the Martal Group and Belkins is their tendency to overextend themselves. Their team is spread too thin trying to offer a range of services, from LinkedIn marketing and sales enablement to inbound marketing and even technology services.

They market themselves as all-in-one solutions in the lead generation sector, which can make them less effective because it becomes a team of self-acclaimed experts trying different things at the same time instead of professionals who are sure of their work and can promise you clear outcomes.

Instead of attempting to be a universal fix, we at Nerdy Joe take immense pride in specializing in only two core lead generation areas — cold email and LinkedIn outreach. Our strategy focuses on reaching out to leads via these two channels to deliver unparalleled results.

Our concentrated approach provides significant advantages to our clients. We maintain a straightforward yet powerful strategy: focusing on developing compelling cold email and LinkedIn outreach campaigns that captivate and draw in potential leads.

For us, lead generation is only a segment of the broader picture. The true indicator of success is converting leads into long-term customers. Therefore, our goal is not simply to bring you leads but to generate high-quality ones with a substantial probability of conversion.

Service value: The Martal Group and Belkins charge you for the work they do and their vast (not-so-useful) tech stack; We charge only for the results we bring you.

For us at Nerdy Joe, when you hire a lead generation company, the only important outcome for you is the number of sales leads generated by the end of the month. That should be the only thing they promise and the only performance you get billed for.

Both Belkins and the Martal Group charge hefty fees for their services, with costs tied to the outreach volume, the number of contacts they add to your list, and their fancy tech tools. 

This pricing model is not beneficial to you since it does not take into account the number of leads to your sales team. It’s more about what they do rather than the results they bring you. 

At Nerdy Joe, we clarify from the get-go that clients need not fret about the list of prospects we build or the email volume we send — don’t worry, we don’t do mass outreach.

This is because we understand the core struggle for companies seeking lead generation help revolves around their need for LEADS. It’s that simple.

So, our lead generation specialists concentrate only on metrics that truly reflect your outreach performance and ROI. We focus on metrics like:

• Number of positive responses
• Number of meetings scheduled
• Count of new sign-ups
• Number of demo requests
• Lead to close rate

Our reports are customized to align with your company’s product or service and your broader objectives. This enables us to discern the results that hold the most importance for you, and those become our primary targets for achievement.

For instance, if you task us with getting more guest posting opportunities for you, we’ll report on the following:

• The count of positive replies from editors
• The volume of affirmative responses we receive from webmasters

Outreach strategy: The Martal Group and Belkins approach lead generation as a number game; We at Nerdy Joe adopt a careful and systematic approach to lead generation. We manually build our lists and prioritize strategic targeting.

Many firms in the lead generation sector, including Belkins and the Martal Group, commonly approach lead generation as a numbers game. Truth be told, it’s a widespread industry practice.

These companies build vast lists off of data intelligence tools like Apollo.io and ZoomInfo. Next, they launch cold email campaigns, blasting them with generic emails, hoping to get a few replies and handing over anyone that replies to you as a lead. 

While this approach can generate some leads, it lacks the meticulous groundwork that truly drives success in lead generation.

Targeting extensive lead lists brings about numerous issues:

• Poor research and subpar lead data enrichment
• Lack of room or time for personalization
• Generic, ineffective emails or messages
• Low-quality leads, resulting in little to no return on investment
• Risk to company reputation
• Email deliverability and spam issues

We are not suggesting that the service quality of Belkins and the Martal Group is any less than stellar. What we’re telling you is that it takes considerable effort and time to build efficient outreach campaigns. Mere mass emailing of individuals found on databases like ZoomInfo is not ideal for this.

Furthermore, as dedicated marketers, we believe it’s hardly impressive to connect with 30,000 individuals only to generate engagement from 200 leads, many of whom may not even convert — and charge you thousands of dollars for it. 

That’s why we at Nerdy Joe prioritize personalized messages. We like the idea of doing extensive research and analysis it takes to find the right people to reach out and create effective messages that engage them. That’s one key difference between us and most agencies.

In a typical scenario, we build a concise list of 20 prospects, study them in-depth, understand their pain points, and craft personalized cold emails or LinkedIn messages. This approach can often result in 15 responses, 10 of which are positive, leading to 6 sales-qualified leads or meetings for our clients.

Our personalization is about ensuring each email is genuinely relevant, timely, and uniquely tailored to every recipient. It goes beyond merely inserting [[First name]] or similar variables into the subject line and considering the job done.

We aim to make each recipient feel understood and pique their interest. Our goal is to create emails that foster a sense of personal connection, compelling the recipients to take your proposal seriously, whether they decide to sign up for your offer or not.

Achieving this involves investing substantial time in understanding and researching your ICP before launching any email campaign. This is a feat you cannot achieve with mass list targeting.

We work closely with you to formulate the ICP, analyze each prospect individually, and gather data points to create impactful cold emails. Contrary to the Martal Group, we don’t depend on any tool to shape your ICP or conduct research. 

As soon as we onboard a new client, our initial step is to inquire about their ICP through a set of probing questions.

We might ask:

• Who are your highest-value clients? 
• Which client category is the easiest to convert? 
• Which type of clients shows the fastest turnover? 
• What are the main objections that come up during sales calls? 
• What was your motivation for starting the company? 
• What issues were you aiming to address? 
• And so forth.

Your responses to these inquiries equip us with precise target demographics and their associated reasons. This granularity of information helps distinguish between:

“We’re reaching out to series A tech companies OR companies that use ClickUp”

And

“Our ICP is a VP of Sales at a B2B software company, catering to HR professionals, who is struggling with organization, time management, and team collaboration. They frequently resort to XYZ podcasts for insights on efficient team management.”

After gaining a clear comprehension of the ICP, we move forward to manually compile our list, which becomes the foundation for our lead generation campaigns.

Research and copywriting: CIENCE and the Martal Group provide basic, generically personalized emails; we research each prospect individually and create truly personalized cold emails and LinkedIn messages.

Unlike the Martal Group and Belkins, we don’t rely on email templates to run our cold outreach campaigns. 

For us, using template-based messages is mass customization which strips away the unique personal touch that connects with each recipient’s distinctive characteristics. 

So, what do we do?

Our process begins with individualized research of each prospect to gather useful information. That’s how we enrich our data.

We don’t rely on software to just feed us with basic information like job titles, geographical location, the technology they use, or the size of their company.

Instead, we seek psychographic data — insights into their personalities, values, opinions, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles. 

We deploy all our resources to acquire this data, and it makes a remarkable difference. To give you an idea, here are some things we do:

• We listen to podcasts featuring your potential customers. 
• We read their blog posts. 
• We examine their posts on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Mastodon. 
• We analyze discussions in forums they participate in. 
• Etc.

Leveraging this compiled data, we identify unique angles that enable us to formulate personalized introductions or icebreakers.

Here’s what it looks like in real life. We pitched CoSchedule’s Head of Content, Ben Sailer, and asked him if we could write for them.

Here’s what he replied 1 hour later.

Here is another successful example from a similar strategy.

As you can see from both screenshots, the cold emails sent to the prospects were so compelling that they couldn’t help but acknowledge it before offering to hire us.

Contracts and signup implications: Belkins and the Martal Group both require you to sign longer-term contracts; We don’t — you’re free to renew or stop your subscription based on satisfaction.

Unlike the Martal Group and Belkins, who require long-term commitments ranging from 3 to 12 months, potentially leading to significant investments for your business without assured results, we at Nerdy Joe operate on a subscription-based model.

If you sign up with us, you can be sure you’ll see tangible outcomes from the very first month of our collaboration. The decision to maintain your subscription hinges entirely on your satisfaction with our services and your financial considerations.

Our pricing structure is transparent and straightforward, potentially making us one of the top contenders in the lead generation industry. You choose a plan that suits your budget and requirements, and you’re fully aware of what you’ll receive by the end of the month.

You won’t be faced with vague responses like 

• “The results depend on various factors.” 
• “Your account manager was unable to work because he inadvertently swallowed the office key.”

As long as your product fits the market well and addresses a common problem, that’s essentially all we need to generate results for you. However, if you’re still in the process of finding your product market fit, we might not be able to offer effective support.

Nerdy Joe Pricing: Unlike Martal Group and Belkins, we offer affordability and scalability without burning a hole in your wallet.

Belkins and the Martal Group are notably pricey, excessively so for most reasonable measures. Moreover, they do not offer refunds, and their pricing models are convoluted, often charging for services that you might not require.

We believe that their pricing structure is overly expensive and unsustainable for the average business operating within a budget.

So unlike the Martal Group and Belkins, we offer a flat fee for a specific number of leads or appointments booked for you and keep it all transparent on our site. 

• DeLorean: It costs $1799/month and gives you 10 leads or meetings with high-quality leads.
• Batmobile: This is the plan we recommend, as it gives you the biggest bang for your buck. It costs $2199/month and gives you 15 hot and sales-qualified appointments or LEADS.
• Millennium Falcon: It costs $3099. This plan is good for mid-level to enterprise companies willing to fuel their sales team with up to 25 sales-ready leads on a monthly basis.
• Starship Enterprise: This is the enterprise-level plan, and it comes at $5099. We added it for large organizations and enterprise-level businesses willing to fuel their sales team with a huge flow (50+) of meetings with sales-ready leads on a monthly basis.

What’s interesting with us is that you know what you’re getting upfront and know exactly how much you’ll have to pay for it. We don’t play hide and seek or get you on long sales calls to discuss pricing with you. 

Hire Nerdy Joe and start generating sales-ready leads today

The Martal Group and Belkins are both highly respected in the field of lead generation, backed by robust portfolios and a strong industry presence. This post could potentially guide you to the lead generation company that best fits your business needs.

Our verdict is that the Martal Group is mainly fit to be a sales outsourcing company, while Belkins and knee-deep into lead generation for their customers. 

However, if you’re in search of a superior lead generation partner, we encourage you to engage with us. We are an agency that prides itself on delivering high-quality service.

As an agency, we:

• Execute tailored and effective outreach campaigns rather than mass-blasting lists.
• Undertake meticulous research to ensure efficiency.
• Charge for results, not individual tasks.
• Don’t burden you with unnecessary tools or costs.
• Don’t compel you to sign a binding contract.
• Value your time, delivering our services affordably and efficiently.
• Care deeply about your company’s reputation and the relationships with your prospects.

Nerdy Joe is the lead generation agency you need. We conduct market research, identify leads, manage these leads, and deliver you qualified prospects. Consider us an extension of your team.