Lead Cookie is a lead generation company that helps B2B companies generate high-quality leads through personalized outreach campaigns. They mainly specialize in using LinkedIn to identify potential leads and then engage with them in a personal and effective way.

The company has many features and unique values for lead generation and appointment-setting services. 

We’ve been through the top review sites, including Clutch and G2, read some of their success stories, and must say that the general sentiment about the agency's service is overwhelmingly positive. 

However, despite the many advantages of Lead Cookie's service, you may want to explore other alternatives for your lead generation needs. Chances are:

• You are simply comparing options and looking at the pricing or the service on the whole,

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

• You’ve been pissed by the services they offered you, 

• You were unhappy with it, 

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

Whatever it is, you’re at the right place. In this post, we will take a closer look at Lead Cookie’s services, value proposition, and what makes them different from other lead generation agencies. 

We will also discuss the top 7 Lead Cookie alternatives, including Nerd Joe, our B2B lead generation and appointment-setting service agency. 

As a competitor in the lead generation and appointment setting space, we offer a unique set of features and benefits that set us apart from Lead Cookie and other agencies.

So, we will also discuss why Nerdy Joe may be the best alternative to Lead Cookie to help your business achieve exceptional results.

Why Nerdy Joe is your best Lead Cookie Alternative for lead generation and appointment-setting services

Together with Lead Cookie, we share the primary goal of helping you connect with your prospects on LinkedIn and guaranteeing a steady stream of high-quality leads for your sales team — to keep them busy and productive.

Also, as lead gen companies focused on helping you increase your sales, we are committed to assisting you in developing a reliable approach for acquiring active leads for your sales team’s benefit and turning them into customers. 

According to statistics, salespeople spend a significant amount of time searching for potential customers. Having meetings and finalizing deals only accounts for 12% of their time.

This is not an efficient use of their time, so B2B lead generation companies like us take on the task, enabling them to concentrate on their core strengths of personal selling and sealing deals.

With that in mind, let's explore why Nerdy Joe is the best alternative to Lead Cookie. We will focus on key differences in how both teams generate leads. 

Outbound lead generation service overview — scope of work

Lead Cookie offers a laundry list of outbound lead generation and appointment setting services, with several outreach and lead generation channels, such as cold email, cold calls, LinkedIn, online chat, etc. 

Surprisingly, they don't list or advertise any of their services on their website, which is quite strange for a B2B lead generation company. They only have a few resources that mention LinkedIn outreach and LinkedIn lead generation, and that's it.

Based on everything we read, here's how Lead Cookie works:

1. First, they work with you to identify your ideal target audience and craft a messaging strategy that will resonate with them.

2. Next, they use LinkedIn or data intelligence platforms like Crunchbase to identify potential leads who fit your target audience criteria.

3. They then engage with those leads through personalized messaging (LinkedIn mainly but email as well), which can include everything from connection requests to follow-up emails.

4. Finally, they deliver warm, qualified leads to your sales team.

At Nerdy Joe, we do quite the same, actually. Except we only offer one specific service, lead generation via good old-fashioned cold email (sometimes in tandem with LinkedIn outreach, depending on your needs), and have a full website to help you understand every aspect of it. 

We offer our clients customized LinkedIn lead generation services to meet their distinct sales and lead generation goals — and that's for businesses of all sizes and industries. 

Moreover, we also offer expert guidance and counseling to businesses that are not experienced enough to outsource their sales and lead generation operations. We can help you understand the full dynamics of outbound services and help you devise strategies. The same is true for Lead Cookie. 

For example, at Nerdy Joe, we can help you understand the full dynamics of outbound services and help you devise strategies that’ll help you achieve incredible results.

Outreach volume — quality targeting over quantity 

Lead Cookie does an excellent job prioritizing quality over quantity for each outreach campaign. Like us, the company is also averse to the “spray and pray” technique, where it buys a huge list of prospects and sends them generic emails.

According to a resource on their website, once you sign up with them, they work on building lists of small subsets of individuals within your target market and reaching out to them with personalized messages, which is all great. 

Still, compared to our outreach strategy at Nerdy Joe, we believe Lead Cookie still reaches out to or includes way too many prospects in their campaign. 

Taking this specific case as an example, we believe reaching out to a contact list of 373 people is too much. As you can see, it does yield some interesting results. 

However, the real issue is that it begs whether it guarantees anything positive about the quality of the meetings or if the leads will convert at all. 

More specifically,

• How did they build the list? 

• How personalized were the messages?

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

• Lead blasting: When targeting a high volume of prospects, there is little room for thorough research and personalization, resulting in generic and impersonal messages that may come across as self-serving.

• LinkedIn Restrictions: Excessive activity on LinkedIn may lead to your account being banned or restricted.

• Poor lead quality: Due to the lack of personalization, the quality of leads generated from such mass outreach may be subpar, making it difficult to convert them within a short timeframe.

• Negative prospect responses: Some prospects may respond unfavorably, requesting removal from your list or expressing dissatisfaction with your messages.

• Brand reputation at risk: This can be particularly damaging if you operate in a competitive industry or rely on word-of-mouth referrals. It may negatively impact how your business is perceived.

You probably understand our position by now. We are not claiming that these consequences are indicative of the service you get from Lead Cookie. We only mean that quality outreach requires much work and time, and targeting huge lists doesn’t help. 

Also, we don’t want to reach out to 400 people to only close a small number of them. We don’t need 400 leads to book you 5-10 appointments. Our ideal scenario is that we send 20 messages, get 15 replies, 10 positives, and get you 6 sales-qualified leads, meetings, or sign-ups.

The most significant part of our job is actually learning and researching about 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 manually — and collecting data points to create personalized messages that stand out and make them love you. 

So, the first step mainly has to do with how we build our lists (more on that later) for the outreach. Also, 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 the blog posts they wrote. 

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

• We read posts they like and comment under. 

• We read LinkedIn discussions on forums they’re in.

• Etc.

From there, we get a full picture of the individual we are targeting and can create excellent LinkedIn messages that align with them on a personal level — not single-persona-based message templates. 

List outsourcing — LinkedIn Sales Navigator and data intelligence tools

When it comes to list building, Lead Cookie’s go-to strategy is to use LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator tool or data intelligence tools like Crunchbase, ZoomInfo, Apollo.io, or even Lusha. 

Basically, they call on these tools, apply a couple of filters pertaining to your industry or target market to rapidly build lists of 1000s of people, and then curate them before outreach campaigns. 

This could work. We understand that these tools offer a great shortcut when it comes to building lists and can save outreach specialists a lot of time, and they won’t have to suffer through list building. 

Admittedly, list building is the hardest part of lead generation. But it’s also the most crucial to your success, and here is why we don’t use any tool to build our lists. 

First, using Sales Navigator has inherent limitations, and data accuracy issues are the primary reason we don’t trust it. Let’s elaborate.

• Many LinkedIn users don’t update their profiles regularly, resulting in outdated job details and company affiliations. 

• It’s crazy times (especially in tech), and the LinkedIn sales navigator may not accurately differentiate between laid-off employees and those still employed. That will lead to unreliable data for prospecting campaigns.

• Most importantly, this approach lacks insights into the pain points and motivations of the prospects. This makes it challenging to create personalized and effective messages.

Also, when it comes to tools like Crunchbase or ZoomInfo, you’ll only get generic technographic and demographic data about the company. With these tools, it’s easy to find generic information like: 

• 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

Again, the data can help you build a list of 1000 companies to reach out to within seconds, but it tells you nothing about their pain points, goals, and why they need your service. 

Also, from our experience, leads generated like this are the hardest to convert. You’ll need a lot of time and content to educate them, which is not ideal because hiring lead gen services means you want to fill your sales pipeline with sales-qualified leads and grow fast.

That’s why at Nerdy, we prioritize quality data to build prospect lists and craft messages that resonate with them on a deeper level.

Upon signing up with us, we thoroughly assess your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) through targeted questions. This is the most important part of our work. We inquire about the following: 

• the types of clients with the highest lifetime value, 

• the easiest clients to close, 

• the clients with the fastest churn rate, 

• common objections heard during sales calls, 

• the reasons behind starting your company, 

• the pain points you were trying to address, among other details.

By gathering these comprehensive insights from you, we pinpoint precisely which accounts to target and why, and we manually build our list accordingly. 

Here's an example of how specific we can get:

"Our ICP is a CTO at a software company selling to DevOps, and his main pain points are lack of organization, time management, and team collaboration. He often refers to John Doe's LinkedIn posts to get insights on how to efficiently manage his team."

With this level of specificity, we create highly targeted and personalized lead generation campaigns tailored to resonate with the individual personally of each prospect we want to reach. 

Pricing model and rates; Money-back policy

Lead Cookie's website does not provide any information about their pricing, making it challenging for businesses to determine if their services fit their budget and requirements. 

However, according to a Lead Cookie review on Cience and the reputable client review website Clutch, the average hourly rate for their services is typically between $25 and $49. Also, they do offer a 30-day money-back guarantee if their services fail to meet your target goals. 

While the pricing may seem low initially, it may not be sustainable for most businesses, considering that lead generation is a time-consuming process that requires significant effort from the agency.

Also, the pricing model seems to prioritize the amount paid to the agency over the actual results obtained, making the service less focused on achieving results for the client.

In conclusion, we believe that pricing is way too expensive, not sustainable for the average business on a budget, and does not tell you what you’ll be getting. 

So unlike Lead Cookie, 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 two hot 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 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. 

Top 6 Lead Cookie alternatives and competitors for lead generation and appointment setting services

1. Cleverly

Cleverly is one of the best Lead Cookie alternatives as well its fiercest competitor on the market. Both companies cater to small and mid-sized businesses and startups. Here is how they compare:

• Scope of work: Cleverly provides a fully managed service that includes profile optimization, targeted messaging, LinkedIn content creation, and lead generation. They also provide support with sales pipeline management and offer LinkedIn Ads as an add-on service. They also offer additional services like email marketing, CRM integrations, etc.
  Lead Cookie focuses on generating leads through LinkedIn outreach. We are not sure their tentacles stretch over to the other services Cleverly offers.

• Target market: Both Cleverly and Lead Cookie target small businesses and startups. Though, Cleverly's services are suitable for those who want a comprehensive lead generation service that covers all aspects of LinkedIn outreach. 

Lead Cookie is ideal for those who want a more targeted approach to LinkedIn outreach, with a focus on generating a specific number of leads per month.

• Pricing plans: Cleverly has a flat-rate pricing model based on contact volume. They offer three pricing plans based on the number of people they reach out to. Here they are: 

2. Cience

Cience is a lead generation and appointment setting company that specializes in outbound email and phone outreach. 

They also offer sales intelligence tools such as programmatic ads, chatbot software, and appointment-setting tools. 

On the other hand, Lead Cookie is a lead generation agency that focuses on generating leads through personalized outreach on LinkedIn.

• Scope of work and features: Cience's scope of work includes outbound email and phone outreach and providing sales intelligence tools and a team to support lead generation efforts. They leverage various tools and technologies to optimize lead generation campaigns.
  On the other hand, Lead Cookie's scope of work primarily focuses on leveraging LinkedIn to connect with potential leads, optimizing LinkedIn profiles, conducting targeted outreach campaigns, and providing lead research.

• Target market: Both Cience and Lead Cookie target businesses looking to generate leads and increase their sales revenue. However, Cience’s services suit businesses across different industry verticals, while Lead Cookie's approach is more tailored toward B2B companies.

• Pricing plans: Cience requires a minimum 6-month contract before starting work, and pricing is based on your specific requirements (i.e., the number of people and tools needed for the campaign). Pricing details are unavailable on their website, and businesses must request a quote from their sales development representative (SDR).

On the other hand, Lead Cookie offers hourly rates.

3. The Martal Group

The Martal Group is a B2B lead generation company that focuses on generating leads for tech companies in the IT, SaaS, and telecom industries. They also have a data intelligence platform with a curated database of 100 million contacts. Here are the main ways it stands out from Lead Cookie:

• Scope of work: Both services combine LinkedIn, Email, and Phone for outreach. The Martal Group provides their clients with weekly customized lists of pre-qualified leads and marketing campaigns.
  At the same time, Lead Cookie focuses on leveraging LinkedIn to reach out to a non-specified number of leads per month.

• Customer onboarding flow: The Martal Group provides a customer onboarding flow for new customers. This helps ensure a smooth transition and setup process for their clients. Lead Cookie has an internal client dashboard.

• Target market: The Martal Group's target market is B2B technology companies in the IT, SaaS, and telecom industries, while Lead Cookie's target market is broader, encompassing businesses across various industries.

• Pricing plans: The Martal Group has a flat monthly fee after the 3-month Pilot Campaign, and businesses need to speak to the sales team to get a quote.
  On the other hand, Lead Cookie offers an hourly rate plan with non-specified features. It's important to note that the pricing structures of these companies may vary depending on their clients' specific needs and requirements.

4. Belkins.io

Lead Cookie and Belkins.io are both B2B lead generation agencies that focus on helping businesses connect with potential clients. However, they differ in the scope of services, channels used, and target markets.

• Scope of work: Lead Cookie specializes in building small business niche lists and reaching out to them on LinkedIn with personalized messages and offers. In contrast, Belkins.io offers a wider range of services, including lead research with prospecting tools, email nurturing campaigns, B2B appointment setting, and copywriting services.

• Target market: Belkins.io specifically targets SMBs and startups struggling with consistent client connections, while Lead Cookie is open to working with B2B companies across industries. 

• Pricing plans: Unlike Lead Cookie, Belkins.io offers a flat-rate pricing model based on the number of leads they reach out to, making it easier to budget and plan for the cost of their services. 

5. WebFx

WebFx is a full-service digital marketing agency that offers various services, including web design, SEO, PPC, and social media marketing. They also offer lead generation services for B2B companies. 

• Scope of work: WebFx offers several outbound and inbound marketing services, while Lead Cookie focuses mainly on outbound outreach for lead generation.

• Target market: No specific business industry is mentioned for both Lead Cookie and WebFx in terms of the target market. But contrary to Lead Cookie, WebFx does not have a specific focus on SMBs or startups.

• Pricing plans: WebFx does not mention a specific pricing plan for their lead generation services on their website, so businesses need to contact them to discuss their requirements and get a quote. In contrast, Lead Cookie offers an hourly rate.

6. Pearl Lemon Leads

If your business primarily cares about establishing and growing its online presence, Pearl Lemon's range of digital marketing services may be a better fit. On the other hand, if you are specifically looking for LinkedIn lead generation services, Lead Cookie is more appropriate. 

Here is how both services compare.

• Scope of work: Pearl Lemon offers various digital marketing services, including SEO, PPC advertising, social media marketing, content marketing, web design, and development. Lead Cookie, on the other hand, specializes only in LinkedIn lead generation services. 

• Target market: Pearl Lemon Leads targets small and medium-sized businesses, startups, and entrepreneurs, helping them establish and grow their online presence through effective digital marketing strategies.
  Lead Cookie, on the other hand, is open to working with any B2B companies across any industry.

• Pricing plans: Pearl Lemon Leads doesn’t even have a pricing page on its website. But we could pull data from a review post on the Cience website. The minimum project size is $1,000, and an approximate hourly rate for Pearl Lemon Leads' services is between $50 and $99, which is higher than that of Lead Cookie.

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

All the companies mentioned in the list have the potential to compete with Lead Cookie or provide an alternative to their services. 

While each of these companies offers services in a unique way, their ultimate objective is to help you build a connection with your customers and increase your sales pipeline.

If your goal is to work with a company that fosters beneficial industry conversations, broadened brand awareness, content-driven audience growth, and delivers high quality results and valuable insights, we recommend Pearl Lemon Leads, WebFx, and Lead Cookie.

But if you want to get specific and work with an engaged partner who provide valuable insights to your sales teams and that:

• takes a more personalized approach, 

• doesn’t buy or scrap lists, 

• asks you meaningful questions to collect user data and build a representative picture of the ideal customer profile,

• uses a unique targeting approach,

• creates super-personalized cold emails, 

— that’s us. 

At Nerdy Joe, we do not rely on extensive email lists or mass email campaigns to secure a few meetings or generate leads. Rather, we prioritize thorough research of prospects and craft email copies that leave a lasting impression. 

We take the time to comprehend your ideal customer and modify our approach accordingly, ultimately generating high-quality leads with a higher chance of converting into sales.