The $5,000/month lead gen agency retainer is the most overpriced thing in outbound right now

I keep seeing companies spend $5K a month on lead gen agencies and it’s starting to piss me off.

The weird thing is that the work they are getting for the money is becoming incredibly cheap now. Think about how much time it used to take a person to build a list from scratch, or write a complete sequence, then give all of that to an outreach tool then remember to follow up too

A LOOOT of time right?

Now most of that can be done by an agent.

So where is the $5,000 really going? The answer is NOT execution.

What still has real value is the person behind the campaign who has done this enough times to know when the obvious approach is probably wrong. 

A good outbound operator has seen enough campaigns fail to recognize the warning signs early.

A lot of that knowledge never makes it into the agency's SOPs.

And that's why agencies have been able to charge what they charge. Because you're buying access to someone who has accumulated enough experience to make better decisions than you would if you were figuring it all out from scratch.

The problem is that this judgment usually comes packaged with everything else. You get the account manager + strategist + copywriter + person building lists + meetings.
And maybe that has made sense historically because there wasn't another way to deliver that expertise.

I've been figuring out whether there's a way to separate the judgment from the package. So i talked to people who have run outbound for years and i’m trying to capture the decisions they've learned to make through experience into the product i’m building right now.

Now whether it’s going to hold up is still a big question mark for me too, but i’m seeing good early signs.

Because if it works, the economics of outbound change pretty dramatically. 

You’ll be getting access to that judgment without paying for the entire agency structure around it