As a founder, you know how important quality leads are.
Without them, your business might come to a grinding halt.
Ideally, you would want qualified leads that convert to sales without wasting too much time getting there.
The question is, though, there are so many outbound lead generation companies to choose from. Who do you choose?
We have decided to do a series of articles that compare Salesbread to various B2B lead generation companies out there. This should make your decision easier as you compare pricing, reviews, services, and results.
First under the spotlight is CIECE. Enjoy!
A little background on each company.
Salesbread |
Cience |
|
Salesbread builds “lead funnels” using Linkedin and cold email outreach that get your ideal customers excited about your offer. Salesbread uses in-depth prospect research to build a list of your ideal client and then reach out to them via personalized messaging campaigns. Due to the advanced amounts of research and personalized messages, we guarantee our clients 1 lead per day. Salesbread was founded by Jack Reamer in 2014 and has serviced many companies from all over the United States. |
Cience Technologies provide PAAS and machine-operated lead generation services. Cience offers market research, inbound lead qualification, and outbound appointment setting. They also use multi-channel outreach methods such as telemarketing, cold emails, Linkedin, and webchat. The company was founded by John Girard in 2015 and runs its offices internationally. |
Salesbread
Salesbread has a small team of highly professional and qualified lead generation experts.
Included in this team is a personalization expert who researches each prospect and writes highly personalized messages.
Jack, the founder of Salesbread, is an expert copywriter and has developed an expert strategy on list building for clients. This in-depth research and targeted prospecting bring us 1 lead per day.
Cience
Cience has over 1610 employees worldwide. This includes various SDR teams, account managers, as well as inbound and outbound teams.
What’s the difference?
When it comes to massive corporations with thousands of employees, getting lost as a client can become a reality.
Your account gets handed over to an accounts manager. The founder of the company can’t keep tabs on every single campaign that is being run.
Besides this, some sales teams might be better than others.
Your company might get handed over to a Cience team that lacks experience. (As you will see in some reviews below)
With a smaller high-quality sales development team (like at Salesbread), it’s easier for the founder to keep tabs on your campaign and make sure that each team member is doing their absolute best for your company.
When the company’s founder is involved with every single campaign, he knows exactly what each team member is doing daily and how they are doing it.
By having fewer employees, it’s easier to make sure that everyone is doing their job 100% correctly, therefore finding qualified leads daily.
What types of service and outreach channels does each company use?
When it comes to choosing an outbound marketing company to partner up with, it’s crucial to choose a company that offers multi-channel outreach methods.
Why?
Well, if you can’t find a targeted client on one channel, you could always contact them via a different platform.
Below you will be able to see a comparison of which channels Salesbread and Cience.
Outreach Channel/ Services |
Salesbread |
Cience |
|
Cold Email outreach |
✓ |
✓ |
|
Sms marketing / Web Chat |
✓ |
✓ |
| Linkedin Outreach |
✓ |
✓ |
| Telemarketing |
X |
✓ |
| Inbound Marketing – Social Media, Content |
X |
✓ |
| Appointment Setting |
✓ |
✓ |
| Email Deliverability |
✓ |
✓ |
| Targeted List Building |
✓ |
✓ |
Salesbread vs. Cience Sales Strategy – A Guaranteed 1 lead per day?
Salesbread
Salesbread uses an in-depth strategy to generate 1 lead per day for their clients.
It starts off with building a super targeted list of accounts which Jack, the founder of Salesbread, does himself. This list is reviewed a few times until it is perfect. Jack will go through the list with his clients until it is perfect.
Once this has been done, the list will be plugged into Linkedin Sales Navigator, and we will then find the best person to contact. This takes time and research as we look at each Linkedin profile.
We will then filter by the client’s second-degree network or by “recently posted.”
Even though the list might seem small when we do this, it ensures that it is super targeted, and people who are in your second-degree network are more likely to connect with you because you already share a common connection.
The next step is to write a customized intro for each and every prospect that includes personalization.
Why?
Because by adding in something about the prospect it creates a pattern interrupt, and they think:
“Oh, this is interesting. This message is for me. They are complimenting me on XYZ.”
By using this method, we can generate 1 lead per day. And if someone doesn’t connect with us on Linkedin, we will then send them a cold email.
See our exact strategy below:
Have a look at some of our metrics below for a campaign we ran for MDxBlocks using the above strategy:
Prospects
Connected
Qualified Leads
%
Connection Rate
%
Lead Rate
We had a connection acceptance rate of over 50% that helped us secure over 136 unique, qualified leads within 3 months.
To break it down:
- We had 1125 total prospects in the campaign
- We sent out 1063 connection requests sent on Linkedin
- Out of 1063 prospects, 540 connected with us with translates to a connection request acceptance rate of 50.8%
- Out of these accepted invites, we had more than 136 prospects reply to our messages and turned into qualified leads that secured meetings. This is a lead rate of 24%
CIENCE
When I researched Cience’s exact strategy, it was challenging to find a straightforward answer.
But what they do in a nutshell is start with highly accurate research about your target audience and ideal customer profile.
Once they have this, they will “then provide lead generation and outbound sales processes to produce qualified appointments with our client’s ideal customers–with predictable results.”
This isn’t a guaranteed one lead a day, but rather 12 booked appointments in a month, which is still great, but wouldn’t 20 booked appointments be better?
See the screenshot below from their website on metrics that you can expect:
What’s the difference?
If you look at Cinece’s 30-day overview, they managed to book 12 appointments. If you look at Salesbread’s stats for the one specific campaign, we were able to generate 1.5 leads per day for 12 weeks, with a lead rate of 24%.
We generated 88 leads (AKA booked appointments in 7 weeks. )
Why the vast difference?
Once again, Jack, as the founder of Salesbread, works along with his clients and his sales team. He also builds lists obsessively and checks every piece of copy before it is sent out.
This kind of attention to detail can sometimes get lost in massive corporations, whereas with a smaller company, you can be sure of getting 100% attention.
Custom Intro Sentences + Personalization for EVERY prospect.
Salesbread |
Cience |
✓ |
✓ |
Salesbread
Did you know that Salesbread customizes and personalizes every single message that gets sent out to EVERY prospect?
How do we do this?
Well, it all starts with in-depth research about each prospect.
For example:
- Have they been on a recent podcast?
- Perhaps they were awarded recently for something that they did for their company?
- Do they enjoy hiking or take part in any charity drives?
- Have they written an interesting blog post that was informative?
We look for things that we can complement the prospect on. By adding this into our custom intros, it breaks the pattern of the prospect just deleting the messages.
Many times they are curious and connect with us via Linkedin and reply to our messages.
See some examples below:
Hey (Name), Came across your profile and saw you work in real estate. I’m reaching out to connect with other like-minded people. Would be happy to make your acquaintance.
Have a good day!
#####
Hi (Name) LinkedIn showed me your profile multiple times now, so I checked what you do. I really like your work, and as we are both in the creative industry – I thought I’ll reach out. It’s always great to be connected with like-minded individuals, isn’t it?
(Your Name)
#####
Hey (Name), I hope your week is off to a great start; I noticed we both work in the HR/Employee Experience field together. I would love to connect with you.
#####
Listening to you now & subscribed! Just stumbled upon your podcast and wanted to say thank you for sharing your insights using them to help land a lead gen job. Thank you!
Have a look at this campaign that we ran for a company called Lower Street Media:
This was the connector message that we used :
“ (First Name), found you on Clarity. Looks like you know a thing or two about (topic). Let’s connect? – Harry.”
And this is an example of the message we sent once they replied:
“(first name) hoping I don’t have to pay your $(rate)/min to talk about podcasting with you. :)”
Because these messages were so specific, and the prospects knew that we had a look at their Clarity profiles, we ended up getting a great response.
These were some of the replies that we got:
- Hey Harry, thanks for thinking of me. What is the podcast about?
- Hi- would you like to tell me more about the podcast? Thx.
- Hi Harry. That sounds great, happy to help. I look forward to hearing from you, and in the meantime, I’ll check out your podcast.
- Ooh – that’s an interesting topic! I’ll have to think about which case I’d like to discuss, so I’ll schedule for a week or two out, so I have time to mull over my choices! Also, is it an audio-only interview? I haven’t used Riverside before, so I’m just wondering what to expect. Thanks!
- I would love that!
Check out the stats that we were able to get for this small business below:
Prospects
Connected
Qualified Leads
%
Connection Rate
%
Lead Rate
To break it down :
We sent our 299 connection request invites, and 135 people connected. This gives us a connection rate of 45.2%.
Out of all who connected, 52 prospects replied to our messages, giving us a lead rate of 38.5%.
CIENCE
Cience offers personalization, which is excellent but it is not necessarily used for every single prospect.
This was taken from their website “At CIENCE, we use a magical personalization engine that we created to take essential data from different buckets, which our research team will find.
It’s significant for the prospect to understand that you know more than just their name, company, and job title.
Great ways to connect with prospects is by bringing up an interesting article they wrote, congratulating them on something their company recently achieved, or bringing up something you have in common.”
They also use a machine to mind data to use for personalization. This might sound like a great idea, but machines can often make mistakes, and make the messaging impersonal.
Copywriter with 10 Years of experience writing outbound copy?
Salesbread |
CIENCE |
|
Salesbread’s founder, Jack, is a copywriter with 10 years of experience writing outbound copy. Each message or email that gets sent out is checked first by Jack. This ensures that each prospect receives an expertly written message just for them that is sure to capture their attention. Mistakes rarely happen, as we only onboard a few clients at a time to ensure that expert attention to detail is given daily— one of the perks of working with a smaller B2B lead generation service. |
Cience mentions on their website that most of their employees do have a degree of some kind. They also have expert copywriters, but remember that your campaign gets handed over to different sales teams. Therefore some might be more experienced than others, and this includes copywriting. In some reviews, clients mentioned that they had to double-check the copy because there were some mistakes. (Will include review below). Unfortunately, mistakes can happen in bigger corporations because of the massive workload, but to put your mind at ease, they do have copywriters if you decide to choose CIENCE. |
Specialized in the Finance & Enterprise Technology space
Salesbread
If your business is looking for a lead gen company that specializes in finance and enterprise technology, then let’s get on a call.
CIENCE
Cience has worked with various industries. From computer software, entertainment, health and fitness, and event production.
Do you need to sign up for a monthly contract?
Salesbread |
Cience |
|
Salesbread does not lock their clients into a month-to-month contract, but rather, our clients choose to stay because of our high performance. Leads are usually seen within the first 48 -72 hours. |
With Cience, you will need to sign a contract of a minimum of 3 months. |
How much does each company charge?
Salebread |
Cience |
|
With Salesbread, you can expect to pay between $2000 and $5000 per month for the entire campaign, including cold emailing and Linkedin lead generation. |
According to Clutch, Cience’s minimal project size at a company is $1000 +. Potential customers can find an ROI calculator on their website, which can give you a rough estimate of what you can expect to pay. They mention a monthly total of $5400 for 1 SDR team. |
4 Cience Technology Reviews – 2 great, 2 not so great…
Cience averages a rating between 4.4 and 4.7-stars on various review websites.
These reviews were collected by and hosted on G2.com.
1.“Great for growing companies.”
Describe the project or task the provider helped with:
The Cience team has been an incredible addition to our company. When we first started working with Cience, it was because we were just getting started with major outbound sales efforts.
We certainly didn’t have the expertise, scale, or know-how to hire full-time callers, emailers, marketing copy editors, and managers to run everything.
But with Cience we got the whole package and were up and running in a matter of weeks. And as we have grown, they have grown with us, helping us along every step of the way. I couldn’t recommend them strongly enough.
Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you like best?
Cience has an experienced expert for every outbound sales generation niche that we needed. From research, to copy drafting, to calling, it was all top-notch.
What do you dislike?
In our time working with Cience, they did have a bit of staff turnover. Thankfully, they managed it in a way that was fairly seamless to us the client. It would be nice to have the exact same team over time but at least they made the process fairly easy.
Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
2. “Cience becomes an integral part of your digital marketing–lead generation team!”
Describe the project or task the provider helped with:
We hired Cience to help us with qualified lead generation helping us find and convert leads into new customers
Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you like best?
Their team, their process, their communication, their daily and ongoing trackable tasks and lead generation activities, and their detailed reporting allowing for immediate changes and improvements when needed and insight into performance and ROI
Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike?
The sales team was a little overly optimistic on how quickly they would provide ROI. As we all know campaigns take time to build and grow.
3. “Oversold their services and massively under delivered. Please avoid this company if you want quality”
Describe the project or task the provider helped with:
We’re using CIENCE for an outbound SDR/appointment setting program. They do outbound calls and emails. They do not do any social media outreach.
That was supposed to be part of the scope but they just nixed it without even giving us a good reason. Said they would make up for it with phone/email. That’s really ridiculous b/c everyone knows you can’t just replace a channel by increasing volume in another channel.
Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you like best?
I think they write pretty good outbound sales emails and the people are very nice.
Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike?
Worst project management I’ve ever seen. There were multiple examples of them not responding to our requests and violating SLAs on response time.
They caused a 3-week delay in our project because of poor project management and unresponsiveness. They promised our CRM would be integrated with their tool and then blatantly never did it.
I’ve never been so disappointed in a partnership before. The Sales person completely oversold their offering just to close a deal, it’s terrible that some companies do business like this.
Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Recommendations to others considering the provider:
Please avoid this company if you have even mediocre expectations on communication, project management, and value.
Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What problems are you solving with the provider? What benefits have you realized?
Outbound calling and appointments. We have not seen any benefits as of now except a really big headache working with them.
4. “Promised a lot, delivered nothing”
Describe the project or task the provider helped with:
Tried an outreach campaign with them to research companies and contacts and run a campaign to deliver leads/appointments for us.
Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you like best?
I think the setup of the process where the research is executed and email campaigns are handled and the playbook is created was meaningful. They were able to do most of the work from their Ukraine office and playbook creation included a US resource which was helpful and made the effort to create what might work.
Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike?
The caller that was assigned to us was not introduced early on. After almost 1.5 months, we met the caller and asked her about our company and what we sell; she couldn’t pronounce the company, didn’t know what product we were selling, and couldn’t put together two sentences related to our business.
She was supposed to be trained by that time. She got more training, but she was essentially useless. They brought in another person, and I tried to get their attention by contacting the CEO, and they assigned a VP-level person to step in and help. They never said that they could add more time due to wasted time with the previous caller.
They instead started adding more and more contacts to our lists to try to hit more people. We ended up moving away from our target market as they couldn’t produce enough contacts in our target segment (I couldn’t understand why they can’t find more than a couple of hundred companies in the whole US in the manufacturing space).
Anyways, no leads got produced in 3 months, and after thousands of dollars and they essentially sent a zip file for all our data and didn’t even say goodbye or tried to make things better.
For a small business like ours, investing all we have to produce more business, you feel like you have been robbed when you don’t see the effort and sincere work, and all you hear is the “trust me it will work, it always works”. No trust here anymore.
Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What problems are you solving with the provider? What benefits have you realized?
We wanted to generate leads for our business by running outreach campaigns.
Benefits we realized are that you can only be successful in your outreach campaign if you have qualified people doing the work for you, and it is better to hire full-time employees to produce tangible results.
4 Salesbread Reviews
Read them all here.
In conclusion
There are quite a few vast differences between Salesbread and Cience. Both are great companies to work with, depending on your needs.
But if you would like to work with the founder of a company that takes a personal interest in each client, you won’t go wrong with Salesbread.
Instead of being handed over to an accounts manager (who might lack knowledge in the industry,)
Jack, who has 10 years of experience, will work directly with you to get you 1 qualified lead per day.
Book a free 15 min consultation below, and let us help your business grow to new heights.