You can have the budget, the ICP and the internal buy-in. If the agency you hand them to has never sold into your market, the quarter stops being a campaign and becomes tuition.
Outbound is one of the few services a company buys almost blind. There is no benchmark for normal, and no way to tell a twelve-person shop from a hundred-person one before the first call.
So we read 788 outbound agency websites end to end, against 26 dimensions. Nothing here was reported to us - every number is what an agency chose to publish. Here is the category, read all at once.
Everyone sells the same two things
Lead generation appears on 87.9% of sites, appointment setting on 72.3%, and 62% lead with one of those two as their headline offer.
The average site lists 4.98 services, so differentiation happens by addition rather than by choice: the menu grows, the position doesn't. GTM engineering is the clearest case in 18.4% of service lists, the lead offer for 5.6%. It is spreading as a bullet point far faster than as a business.
What separates one agency from another is the model underneath the menu: who does the work, what they own, and what you are left holding. That is the split we mapped in the three types of outbound agency.
Cold calling didn't die. 61.6% still dial
The average agency names 2.35 channels. Cold email leads at 64.6%, cold calling follows at 61.6% - statistically level. LinkedIn sits at 40.8% and everything after falls off a cliff.
Two details beat the ranking. When an agency sells exactly one channel,. 107 do, that channel is usually the phone: 60 phone-only firms against 24 email-only and 14 LinkedIn-only. And 66 agencies describe what they deliver, in leads, meetings or pipeline, without naming a single channel anywhere. Some have twenty-year track records.
Nobody in this category is asked to prove a channel works. Only to claim it. Which is why the thing that actually moves reply rates is never the channel, it is the copy running on top of it.
84.6% have no vertical
88 firms out of 571 have a target narrower than "B2B". The average site names 1.67 industries, another way of saying it names none.
When industries are named the list is predictable: SaaS 30.5%, financial services 17.5%, IT and MSP 16.1%. Listing eight industries is not specialisation. It is a statement that you will take anyone, and it leaves you unable to tell whether an agency has ever sold into your market. You find out in month two.
Priced, staffed and tooled in the dark
Three things a buyer needs before the first call: what runs the campaign, who does the work, what it costs. Almost nobody publishes any of them.
80% name no tool. 62.5% name nothing; 17.5% gesture at "a modern stack" or "our own AI". Only 3.5% name six or more.
More than 95% publish no price. Nine firms have a "Pricing" tab with no number behind it, and one of those promises transparent pricing on that page.
45.9% do not say who does the work or where. Only 2.3% acknowledge offshore delivery, so the honest ones are rarer than the offshore ones.
CRM implementers, analytics consultancies and RevOps firms publish their stacks and often their prices as routine. Same buyer, same budget, same page of search results. "You don't do that in services" is not an available defence, because next door they do.
Hire an SDR, or buy the capability?
An in-house SDR is a salary, a stack and three months of ramp. An agency is faster and, on this evidence, almost impossible to compare on paper: 95% publish no price, 80% name no tool, 84.6% claim no vertical. Both assume outbound suits your motion at all - price point, cycle length and market size decide that, and we ran the test in how to know if outbound will actually work for your company.
Hiring is right when outbound becomes a permanent core function you intend to own. Most companies are not there yet and need pipeline this quarter.
We have run 250+ campaigns and built 50+ revenue engines, with a 41.3% response rate on our best campaigns. We name the tools, we name the people and we publish the numbers - which, on this evidence, is most of the differentiation available in the category.
What else is in the report
Eleven pages. No vendor interviews, no directory, no agency named anywhere.
- The map - region and country, and the number that makes the category far smaller than it looks
- The size - employee bands for all 788 firms, and the one region that breaks the pattern
- Full channel and service rankings with counts, and the twelve genuine niches in the sample
- Eight anomalies found while reading 788 websites. Two are jokes
- Ten numbers, and the five questions to ask before you sign
FAQ: choosing a B2B lead generation agency
What is an outbound agency?
It contacts your buyers before they show interest, across cold email, phone and LinkedIn, and returns qualified meetings. Across 788 sites, 87.9% list lead generation and 72.3% appointment setting.
How much does a lead generation agency cost?
There is no public benchmark, which is itself the finding: more than 95% of the agencies scanned publish no price of any kind.
Is cold calling still used in B2B outbound?
Yes. 61.6% of agencies sell it, against 64.6% for cold email, and among single-channel firms the phone is the most common pick.
How do I check whether an agency knows my industry?
Usually you cannot, from the website: 84.6% claim no vertical. Test it on the call, with objections and cycle length rather than logos.
How big is a typical outbound agency?
82.7% have 50 people or fewer and 49.2% have fewer than twenty. Only 63 firms out of 788 are over 100 people.
How were these numbers produced?
788 agency websites read against 26 dimensions. 18% were not outbound agencies and were excluded, leaving 571 firms as the base. 8.6% of domains blocked access, so each figure carries roughly ±1.5 points.
Is the report free?
Yes. One form, no cost, no sales call attached.
What do I get after the form?
An 11-page PDF, sent to the address you enter.
.avif)
