What does outsourced lead generation cost in the UK?

This is for UK financial advisers, wealth managers and founders deciding whether to pay someone else to find new clients. The short version: agree what counts as a lead before you agree a price.

What is the price of B2B lead generation services?

Prices vary with the model and the scope. Agencies charge a monthly retainer, a fee per lead or booked meeting, or a smaller retainer plus a bonus per result. Check what the fee covers, because data, sending tools, domains and inboxes can be extra. As one data point, OwnDesk charges £550 a month per profile, tools included.

The three models put the risk in different places:

• A retainer is a fixed monthly fee for the work: the list, the messages, the sending and the replies. You carry the risk if results are poor, so you need to see the activity behind the fee.
• Paying per lead or per meeting means you pay for output, so the agency carries more of the risk. What you get depends on how “lead” or “meeting” is defined, and on what happens when someone doesn’t turn up.
• A hybrid is a lower base fee plus a payment for each result. The risk is shared.

Before you sign, check four things:

• The minimum term and notice period. OwnDesk’s is one month, then monthly.
• Who owns the sending domains, the inboxes and the list if you leave.
• Whose name goes on the messages. For LinkedIn outreach, ask whose profile does the sending.
• Whether the price is per sender. At £550 per profile, two profiles cost £1,100 a month.

What is the cost per lead, and is it worth it for B2B?

Work it out from your own numbers, not an average. Take what a new client is worth to you and multiply it by the share of interested leads that become clients. That’s your break-even cost per lead, before your own time. Then ask the agency, in writing, exactly what they count as a lead.

An illustration, with made-up numbers. Say a new client brings £2,000 in fees in the first year, and one in ten interested leads becomes a client. Break-even is £200 per interested lead. Pay less than that and the maths can work. Pay more and it doesn’t, however good the reports look.

On a retainer, your cost per interested lead is the monthly fee divided by that month’s interested leads. On a per-lead deal, the price is fixed, but it pays the agency for volume. Tie each lead to a written definition:

• the job titles and types of firm you want
• the locations you cover
• what the person has said, such as agreeing to a call

Also agree what happens to leads that don’t match: a refund, a replacement or nothing. Find out before the first invoice, not after it.

Is lead generation better to do internally or something to outsource?

Outsource when you need outreach running within weeks and can’t justify a full-time hire. Hire when there’s enough work to keep someone busy and you have time to manage them. Payscale puts the average UK base salary for a sales development representative at £29,462, before employer costs, bonus and tools.

Payscale’s figure comes from 98 salary profiles, last updated on 20 November 2025. Its total pay range for the role, with bonus and commission, is £24,000 to £49,000. On top of salary, for the 2026 to 2027 tax year:

• Employer National Insurance is 15% on earnings above £5,000 a year.
• Under automatic enrolment, you pay at least 3% of qualifying earnings (between £6,240 and £50,270) into their pension.

On Payscale’s average base, those two add about £4,370 a year. That takes the cost to roughly £33,800 before commission, recruitment, equipment, software, data and your time managing them.

For comparison, OwnDesk’s £550 a month per profile comes to £6,600 a year. The two aren’t the same thing. An in-house SDR can call, qualify and follow up full-time across every channel you choose. An agency does the outreach it’s hired for.

Outsourcing the work doesn’t outsource the legal risk. The ICO’s guidance on electronic and telephone marketing says that if you pay someone to send marketing for you, you are both responsible under PECR. You’re “instigating” the messages, and the ICO says it would usually take action against you. It advises a written contract that sets out the contractor’s responsibilities.

How long does it typically take to generate the first qualified B2B leads?

Expect the first month to go on set-up and early signals, not a full pipeline. The list has to be built and the messages agreed before anything goes out. New email inboxes then need warming up, and Instantly advises at least two weeks. LinkedIn outreach can start sooner, because it uses a profile that already exists.

The order of work is more predictable than the dates:

• Before anything is sent, you agree the target (titles, firm types, locations), the list is built and cleaned, and the messages are written and approved.
• New email inboxes warm up for at least 2 weeks, according to Instantly’s guidance. Google then advises starting at low volume and increasing slowly.
• LinkedIn connection requests go out at a steady pace. LinkedIn limits how many invitations you can send. Hit the limit and your account can be restricted, typically for a week.

LinkedIn’s restrictions page also says it may restrict or suspend accounts that send too many invitations and appear to use automation tools. Ask any agency how its LinkedIn messages are sent.

At the end of month one, judge the activity and the rates, and whether replies come from the right people. If your sales cycle runs longer than a month, closed business can’t be the first-month test.

How does a B2B lead generation agency measure its success?

With numbers you can check each week. Ask for activity (connection requests and emails sent), acceptance rate, reply rate, interested leads and cost per interested lead. Agree in writing what counts as an interested lead before the first message goes out, so the definition can’t drift later.

OwnDesk’s weekly report, sent every Friday, covers those five numbers. Whoever you hire, the numbers tell you where a campaign is stuck:

• Low acceptance on LinkedIn points to the targeting or the profile.
• Plenty of acceptances but few replies points to the message.
• Replies with little interest point to the offer, or to the wrong audience.

Three more checks are worth asking for:

• The replies themselves, not only the counts. You’ll see who is answering and what they say.
• Bounce and spam-complaint figures for email. Google’s sender FAQ asks senders to keep the spam rate below 0.1%.
• How opt-outs are handled. The ICO’s business-to-business marketing guidance says to add them to a suppression list and screen future lists against it.

Sources

• ICO: electronic and telephone marketing
• ICO: business-to-business marketing
• Payscale: Sales Development Representative (SDR) salary in the United Kingdom
• GOV.UK: rates and thresholds for employers 2026 to 2027
• GOV.UK: workplace pensions, what you, your employer and the government pay
• Instantly: how warm-up works
• Google: email sender guidelines and sender guidelines FAQ
• LinkedIn Help: invitation limit reached and types of restrictions for sending invitations

Want this done for you? See our lead generation service.