Top 7 Belkins Alternatives for Lead Generation

Belkins.io is a B2B lead generation company that helps businesses connect with potential clients through outreach campaigns. 

They specialize in providing a comprehensive suite of lead generation services that include prospect research, sales development, sales outsourcing, establishing a sales process, email and social media outreach, appointment setting, and lead nurturing. 

They’ve earned a positive reputation for their approach to B2B lead generation and their ability to deliver results and increase revenue for their clients.

However, if you are here. We believe there’s a good reason for that. Our hypotheses are that:

• You’ve been pissed by the services Belkins.io offered you, 

• You were unhappy with it, 

• You’ve found it to be too expensive for your business, 

• They didn’t deliver on the guaranteed number of meetings and refused to give you a refund,

• Or, you are simply comparing options and looking at options from some comparison standpoint, be it the pricing or the service on the whole. 

If you’re here for one of the above reasons, you’re in for a treat. In this article, we will discuss the top 7 alternatives of Belkins, including Nerd Joe, our B2B lead generation and appointment setting service agency. 

In a nutshell, our service is focused on delivering tangible results to our clients at a better value for money. From our prospecting to running the campaigns, we keep everything unique and customized for your unique needs.

We will start the article by introducing you to Nerdy Joe in comparison to Belkins, and you will see why we are the best lead generation agency for your needs. Then you will discover 7 other lead generation agencies and how they compare and differ from Belkins.

Let's get started.

Why Nerdy Joe is your best Belkins.io Alternative for lead generation and appointment-setting services

Just like Belkins, our main service is to help you connect with your potential customers, generate sales-qualified leads for you and set up meetings or appointments with them. 

We see that small businesses starting and large businesses looking to scale their sales activities struggle to establish a proven process for active lead generation and customer acquisition. 

Also, salespeople spend a lot of time prospecting, researching, and reaching out to prospects. Having calls only accounts for 12% of their time. That’s not the best use of their time. 

So, we do the work for them, freeing up time for them to focus on what they do best: face-to-face selling and closing deals.

Here is why you might want to consider us over Belkins. Keep in mind that this is not about trashing their service. We’re only comparing the values you’ll get from each service. 

Accurate Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) targeting

When it comes to lead generation and appointment booking services, the provider who gets the most accurate and the most representative picture of your ICP is the one that can bring you and your sales team the most qualified leads.

According to their website, Belkins.io uses open data sources like Google, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Glassodor, Xing, and more to generate leads for your business. 

The problem we find here is related to whether the leads they get or the people they target will actually match your Ideal Customer Profile. Using these data sources, it’s easy to apply a few filters and scrap lists of thousands of companies in the blink of an eye. 

You can easily find the following:

• Tech companies

• Companies that raised series A funding

• Companies that had an IPO

• Companies that use HubSpot

• Companies that have a headcount between 50 and 500

First, we don’t trust such data, and the information they provide about every company is basic. 

Second, leads generated like this will be the hardest to convert and will need a lot of educational materials to get there, which is not ideal because if you are hiring lead gen services, it means you want to fill your sales pipeline with sales-qualified leads and grow fast.

As well, while these data can provide a solid base to send cold emails to generate leads, they tell you nothing about the company’s needs. 

The thing is that even if you’re selling Salesforce, the fact that someone uses HubSpot or not doesn't make them potential customers of your product. You should reach out to people who have needs and pain points that your product solves. That’s how you generate leads that buy.

So, at Nerdy Joe, we don’t rely on data farms to generate leads. Instead, we seek to learn about your ICP. And we don’t guess it; it’s all about understanding your product, what it does, and its use cases, and asking you questions to build a representative picture of your ideal customer. 

We ask you meaningful questions that tell us exactly who your customers should be. Here are some of the questions we ask:

• Why did you start your company? 

• What pain points were you trying to solve?

• What are the top 3 objections you hear from prospective clients during sales calls?

• Which type of clients has the highest lifetime value?

• Which type of clients is easiest to close?

• Which type of clients churns the fastest?

• Etc.

Your answers to the questions we ask to provide us with all the information we need to build a profile of who we should target and why. And this type of information makes all the difference between: 

“We’re targeting series A tech companies,” 

And 

“Our ICP is a VP of Sales at a b2b software company selling to HR professionals, and his main pain points are lack of organization, time management, and team collaboration. He often refers to XYZ podcasts to get insights as to how to manage his team efficiently.” 

Once we have a clear understanding of who the ICP is, we then unfold our unique targeting approach.

Targeting approach 

Belkins’ targeting approaches vary based on the plan you choose. But essentially, you’ll have three options. Here is what they look like. 

So, basically, based on the plan you choose, they will build a list of hand-curated leads, use new sending domains and mailboxes to guarantee deliverability and send them emails to get you a specific number of meetings booked at the end of the month — which is dope.

We do quite the same, actually. The difference is the number of people or the lists we target. Let’s take Belkins’ “Growth Plus” plan, for example. With it, you get a lead list of up to 30,000 hand-curated leads and 220+ meetings. 

That means that they’ll reach out to up to 30,000 people within the agreed-upon timeframe to book you 220 appointments. That’s just too many people to reach out to — even in 6 months — and it begs the question of whether it guarantees anything positive pertaining to the quality of the meetings or if the leads will convert.  

Granted, they’ll create new sending domains, and new mailboxes, warm up the domains, and try on a sample to find the go-to-market approach before completely unfolding the campaign. 

But from our experience, here is what it could mean if you are targeting huge lists: 

• Lead blasting: If you are sending emails to this many people, it means that you are not taking the time to properly research your prospects to tailor your email to each individual. You’re blasting people with generic cold emails and pushing for action. They might say you’re selfish and lazy. 

• Poor leads quality: Since there is no super personalization, the quality of the leads you get the meetings with 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”. 

• Your brand reputation is on the hook: 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.

You probably understand our position by now. We are not claiming that this is indicative of the service you get from Belkins. We only mean that quality outreach requires a lot of work and time, and targeting huge lists doesn’t help with that. 

Also, personally, we don’t want to send 30,000 cold emails to book you 220 meetings with prospects. Also, we don’t need 500 leads to book you 5-10 appointments.

Our ideal scenario is that we send 20 emails to your ideal customers or key decision makers, get 15 replies, 10 positives, and get you 4 sales-qualified leads, meetings or sign-ups.

We achieve this by being super-specific in who we target and creating personalized messages, to very short prospect lists, and guess what? It works. 

We spend time learning and researching your ideal customer profile (ICP) in and out before we send a single email. 

We want each recipient to feel like you know them personally — and take you seriously. Even if they don’t sign up for our offer, we still want them to give you a pleasant response. 

It requires researching each prospect individually and collecting data points to create cold emails that stand out and make them love you. That’s why most of the responses we get are:

• “Wow, such a nice email.”

• “Thank you for the nice words and compliment.”

• “Let’s catch up next Thursday.”

• “Love your email. Can you follow up on the 25th?” 

You might wonder where we get information about each prospect or member of your target audience we use for personalization.

• We listen to podcasts your potential customers have been on.

• We read blog posts they wrote. 

• We read their LinkedIn, Twitter, and Mastodon posts.

• We read discussions on forums they’re in.

• We call their mom. 😂

To provide some background on our process, let me give you an illustration of a response we got when we contacted a Vice President of Marketing who had previously marked as spam or prohibited cold emails from senders.

Manually building lists

Belkins does a great job building quality leads. Although they build huge lists, their lists are hand-curated ("curated" means 'carefully selected'; "hand-curated" implies that someone made the choices personally) to guarantee. 

What it also means is that their lead lists are either purchased, scrapped from data farms or built using data intelligence tools like ZoomInfo, Lusha, etc. Then people from their teams work on those lists to manually curate them. 

At Nerdy Joe, our campaigns are always targeted to very short lists of 20 to 30 people at most. Our list-building process is to thoroughly understand your ideal customer profile and then manually build the lists. 

The hardest part is to really get a hold of your ideal customer profile; from there, it’s easy to build the lists manually. And here are the advantages you get from this:

• Greater accuracy: Manually building lists allows for greater accuracy in targeting. This is because we can carefully select each potential prospect based on their characteristics, interests, behaviors, and demographics.

• More personalization: Our manually built prospect list enables us to personalize every email and tailor the message to each prospect’s needs and preferences. This approach can increase the impact of our message and the likelihood of converting the leads into a customer.

• More control: It gives us more control over the quality and quantity of the prospects. We can target specific niches, industries, and geographies, and ensure that the list only includes relevant and high-quality prospects.

• Cost-effective: It can be more cost-effective than purchasing one from a third-party provider. While it may require more time and effort upfront, it saves you (our client) money in the long run.

• Improved data security: We have full control over the data and can ensure that it is secure and confidential. 

No contract, no retainer

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

That means that you will have to pay or agree to pay them for a year before you can start working together. This might not be ideal for you, especially if you are a small business or a startup and here is why.

First of all, retainer contracts and long-term subscription plans typically come with a higher cost upfront. You will have to pay them a good deal of money before the get-go. This can be a significant investment, especially for small businesses or startups on a low budget.

Even more importantly, committing to a long-term contract or subscription can limit your flexibility to adjust your lead generation strategy or switch to a different provider. This can be problematic if your business needs change, or you are not satisfied with the results. 

Whether or not you’re satisfied with the service, you’ll still have to pay them and honor the contract. 

At Nerdy Joe, we understand that all this may not be the best offer to your business. If you are a small business or a startup, what you need the most from a lead generation company is to get more leads or book meetings. So, we don’t work with any contracts. 

You’ll know exactly what you get and only pay for that. Also, working with us means you’ll get results from the first month. We won’t lock you into a contract while we try stuff and oblige you to pay whether you’re satisfied or not. You can cancel anytime. 

So, working with us gives you more flexibility and control over your spending. Plus, you’ll only renew your subscription if you’re happy. 

Communication (Basecamp or Slack?)

When it comes to working together, Belkins keeps you in the loop for everything they do and uses Slack for all communications with customers. Once you sign up, they send you Slack Connect, and you can get things going from there. 

For this, our team uses Basecamp. We onboard you, explain how the platform works and everything you need to know, then move on to working together. 

Here is how we work together on Basecamp. 

We will discuss and get your opinion on every idea we try out and everything we do. We want to make sure that everything aligns with your brand as you fit. 

Here is what it is like working together on Basecamp.

1. Centralized communication: We organize and track all communication, including to-do lists, files, and messages. 

2. Customizable project views: We customize the view of the project to suit your needs. For example, we can choose to view tasks as a list or a calendar, and you can customize the information displayed for each task.

3. Comprehensive project management: Basecamp offers us a wide range of project management features. These include task lists, scheduling, file sharing, message boards, and more. This helps us manage all aspects of the project together with you, and you’ll have a first-row seat for it all.

Pay-per-performance, flat fee: you know what you get

The first thing you’ll notice when working with Belkins.io is that they don’t have a clear pricing structure. 

I mean, the pricing model is clear they offer a pay-per-appointment lead generation service. 

The problem is that they don’t display any figures on their website at all, which might not be helpful in your quest to compare options. 

Instead, they’d rather discuss with their customer to devise customized pricing to suit their needs and budget, which is all nice.

But we dug a little deeper on the net, and according to The Cost Guys, they charge anywhere between $400 to $600 per appointment. Now, put your accounting cape on and get this. 

That’s literally between $4000 and $6000 for every ten appointments they book for you. Keep in mind that it can happen that the leads they get for you don’t convert. 

We believe that pricing is way too expensive and not sustainable for the average business on a budget. 

So unlike 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. 

• Silver: It costs $499/month and only gives you 2 warm LEADS.

• Gold: This is the plan we recommend, as it gives you the biggest bang for your buck. It costs $999/month and gives you 6 hot and sales-qualified appointments or LEADS.

• Platinum: This plan is for mid-level to enterprise companies willing to fuel their sales team with up to 15 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. 

6 other Belkins competitors to consider for lead generation and appointment setting services

Cleverly

Cleverly is also a lead generation and appointment setting company that caters to small businesses and startups. Overlapping with Belkins.io and unlike us, Nerdy Joe, the company specializes in LinkedIn lead generation alone. 

They offer their clients a fully managed service that includes profile optimization, targeted messaging, LinkedIn content creation, lead generation, and more. They focus exclusively on LinkedIn as their outreach channel. Plus, their service stretches over the mere lead gen. 

Also, unlike Belkins, Cleverly offers a flat-rate pricing model based on the number of leads generated. So, basically, you get a flat fee for everything they do for you and the prices are relatively low, making it affordable for small businesses and startups. 

They offer three pricing plans based on the number of leads per month. Here they are: 

Lead Cookie

Just like Cleverly, Lead Cookie also primarily targets B2B prospects on LinkedIn. In fact, all their services circle around LinkedIn. Lead Cookie relies on LinkedIn search to build lists of prospects. 

They offer almost the same service as Cleverly. But it’s also fair to mention that they also offer email copywriting and cold email outreach as part of their service — which is where they mainly overlap with Belkins and us, Nerdy Joe. 

Lead Cookie offers an hourly-rate pricing model, meaning that they charge you by the hour. And like Belkins, they don’t display any pricing on their site. But according to data retrieved from Cience’s blog, the average hourly rate for Lead Cookie's services is between $25 and $49. 

This may seem low, but it could mean that they spend hours working for and even though you’re not satisfied with the service or the results, you’ll still have to pay them. The prices can also go high pretty quickly. 

Imagine a month-wide service at that rate. You're looking at $6,000 a month for an 8-hour day, and that's for the lowest hourly rate of $25, which isn't ideal if your business isn't financially strong. 

Also, we’ve already established that LinkedIn is not always a dependable service. You could see your account blocked. You’ll also be required to pay for many other third-party tools, and you can even get clear metrics to reflect on the performance of your campaign. 

WebFx

WebFx is a full-scale digital marketing agency, and they empower businesses to close deals through (both) outbound and inbound marketing services, meaning that they offer all of the digital marketing services you can think of. 

They use SEO, PPC, content marketing (turning website visitors into customers for sales teams), Email Marketing, and ABM marketing to generate leads for businesses of all sizes — from small to enterprise level. Note that while they do offer lead generation and appointment setting as part of their services, it is not their primary focus.

They have a team of experts who work with you to develop a customized, state-of-the-art lead generation strategy based on your unique needs. Compared to Belkins and Nerdy Joe, WebFx also has custom lead generation and outreach tools that can give your lead generation campaign a boost. 

When it comes to pricing for email marketing services (whether it’s lead generation or contact management) from WebFX, you’ll pay between $300-$5000 per month or $0.1-$0.05 per recipient, which is high for the average business. 

Also, you will have to make an initial investment of $900, and they also offer custom pricing for larger projects.

Cience

Cience specializes in lead generation and appointment setting, with a focus on outbound email and phone outreach. They also offer you the sales intelligence tools and team you need for your lead generation service.

Some of their sales intelligence tools include programmatic ad tools, chatbot software, appointment setting tools, real-time chat, marketing platforms, CRMs, and project management tools.

As well, they offer a database of key B2B decision makers where you can collect their phone numbers, their validated email addresses, and basically your next customer.

Unlike Nerdy Joe’s subscription plan, Cience requires a minimum of a 6-months contract before you start working together. That’s a three-month investment whether you get results or not. 

This type of contract gives them time to try and test things, but it doesn’t really guarantee an ROI for you. It also means that you won’t be able to scale down, should you need to.  

Also, there are no pricing details on their website, but you can request a quote from their SDR. But you can expect a fixed monthly fee for their services, with pricing based on the people and tools you require from them.

CallBox

CallBox also fits right in the lead generation and appointment setting service shoes. Although they offer other services that stretch outside of lead gen, their primary focus is to help you generate more leads and sales without suffering through the process or the customer journey involved. 

Their main outreach channels consist of cold emailing and cold calling. They use a combination of manual research and technology to build targeted prospect lists they use for campaigns. They also offer database profiling services to help businesses improve their targeting.

Callbox leaves no pricing information to be found on their website. You can only reach out to them and get customized pricing. 

They do offer both pay-per-lead and monthly subscription pricing models, with pricing based on the number of leads generated. 

But a review article on the Martal Group' website indicates that a few Callbox clients paid anywhere from $4,300 - $5,300 a month, with some larger projects costing as much as $15,000 monthly.

That still leaves open the question of how many leads people get. But clearly, this pricing represents a high price for most businesses on a tight budget. Plus, there's no guarantee that all the appointments they get for you will turn into sales.

Let Nerdy Joe do appointment setting and lead generation for your business

In conclusion, every company on this list will provide you with lead generation and appointment-setting services to help businesses connect with potential customers and grow their sales pipeline. 

However, you need to go for a company that takes a more personalized approach, doesn’t buy or scrap lists, asks you meaningful questions to build a representative picture of the ideal customer profile, and uses a unique targeting approach — and that’s us. 

We don’t need huge lists or blast people with up to 30000 emails to get you a few meetings booked or leads generated. As aforementioned, we believe heavily in research prospects and creating email copies that make an impact. 

We take the time to understand your business's ideal customer and tailor our approach to each individual. And we are able to generate high-quality leads that are more likely to convert into sales. 

So, if you're looking for a personalized and effective lead generation and appointment-setting service, Nerdy Joe is the best alternative to Belkins.io. 

Our approach to targeting is more accurate, and our focus on quality over quantity ensures that you get the most out of your investment.