b2b-sales-leads

The Ultimate B2B Lead Generation Handbook for 2024

B2B lead generation is like carefully nurturing a sapling into a fruit-yielding plant. 

Much like how you need to nurture leads into loyal customers with your marketing and sales efforts. 

And while there may be many ways to steer your lead generation efforts in the right direction, there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy.

That’s right!

That said, the absence of a formula allows you to implement tried-and-tested methods and improvise according to your unique business needs.  

Modern business landscapes struggle to gather leads, follow up on them, and convert them into purchasing customers. What you need is a sound B2B lead generation handbook to guide your B2B lead generation efforts. 

That’s exactly what this blog post will cover 🙂

In this post, we will comprehensively cover the multifaceted aspects of B2B generation, including proven strategies to implement and areas to improvise. 

 

What is B2B Lead Generation?

Lead generation for a B2B business implies identifying the potential customers for your products or services and zeroing in on them with marketing and sales efforts. The goal is to convert the leads into paying customers. 

Usually, a user is deemed a potential customer or a lead when they show interest by checking out your product, filling out details, or requesting a demo.

Marketing and sales teams then target potential buyers and engage with them to nurture them and move them down the funnel (more on that later).

The data collected during lead generation can also help develop a robust campaign to appeal to your target audience. 

How B2B lead generation differs from B2C lead generation

Marketing strategies are developed with the target audience in mind. B2B businesses have different target audiences compared to B2C companies. 

B2B, or business-to-business, deals mainly with decision-makers and management where a product or service is aimed to contribute to business growth and convenience. 

However, B2C or business-to-customers deal with end-consumers of a product or service. These customers are driven by personal requirements and emotions when making a purchase. They also usually have shorter sales cycles than B2B. 

The difference lies in their deal sizes and sales cycles. This impacts the whole approach towards marketing and sales assistance. 

B2B deal sizes are usually huge, with more considerable finances and commitment involvement, and they carry a longer sales cycle due to the participation of multiple decision-makers.

However, B2C deal sizes are smaller, happen quicker, and are less complex due to personal decision-making by the customer. 

Understanding this can help you develop sound marketing strategies, such as developing detailed value propositions for your B2B leads and assisting them through various stages of the buying process. 

Meanwhile, B2C leads will require mass advertisement, emotion, relatability, and, of course, the best value among the competitors. 

B2B and B2C lead generation requires different approaches, communication channels, and sales strategies to convert a potential customer into a paying, loyal customer. Moving on, we’ll discuss B2B leads and their types in more depth.

Marketing vs Sales Qualified Leads

Essentially, there are two types of B2B leads: marketing qualified leads (or MQLs) and sales qualified leads (or SQLs). These leads are potential buyers in different decision-making stages when investing in your product or service. 

What are Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)?

Marketing qualified leads are the leads that have shown interest in your product by actively engaging with you. They are very high-quality leads and are likely to convert.

They visit your website or platform often, fill out our forms, leave contact information, and follow you on your socials.

In short, you can say that they are interested in your product/service; however, they’re still in the decision-making phase and are not ready for direct sales contact. 

What are Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs)?

Sales-qualified leads have shown further interest in your products by signals like adding products to carts, requesting a demo or free trial, responding to email or any other social media, or engaging in telephonic inquiries with your company.

Here, the B2B lead is ready for the direct sales contact. 

How do MQLs transition to SQLs?

The transition from marketing-qualified leads to sales-qualified leads is a short journey, but not without challenges.

The process is complex, involves many individuals, and requires a sound marketing strategy based on data insights and buyer behavior analyses

This is where the marketing and sales teams work together to determine whether a particular prospect is ready to purchase and turn from a lead into a customer. 

The marketing teams recognize the potential customers and study their engagement patterns with the company. 

If they meet certain criteria, such as visiting your site multiple times, filling out query forms, attending the company’s events, or working in a company with more than 500 employees, they can qualify as marketing-qualified leads. 

Note that these instances are only for example and that the criteria can be unique to your business needs. 

After that, the sales team comes into play and nurtures the MQLs into paying B2B customers. Once the customers have shown inclinations towards a purchase, your sales team engages with them through telephonic conversations, emails, messages, or other communication methods. 

With proper customer data on needs, budget, and decision-making patterns, the sales rep can guide the interested buyer toward the purchase. 

The need for effective B2B lead management

B2B lead management can save valuable leads from being lost in the sea of data. You can save dollars and hours on marketing and ensure your efforts reach the right leads. 

Lead management means collecting and assorting lead information and concise categorization. This ensures you know when and where to differentiate, such as MQLs from SQLs. High-quality leads from low-quality leads. 

B2B lead management tools contribute extensively to staying on top of these aspects and providing valuable insights into lead behavior and purchasing patterns. 

Inbound Lead Generation vs Outbound Lead Generation

Inbound vs outbound lead generation
Source

Inbound and outbound lead generation differ in their approach to marketing and attracting leads. Here’s how they differ: 

What is inbound lead generation?

Inbound lead generation attracts leads to your company through an indirect approach so that the lead inflow is organic. This happens by providing valuable content that fits potential customers’ needs and desires. 

Content marketing, such as SEO blogs, articles and other helpful digital content, social media, and long-format videos are various channels that make inbound lead generation possible. This helps your brand build a credible authority. 

Things that work here: 

  • A striking, concise, and problem-solving landing page
  • Consistent social media and SEO content marketing efforts
  • Clear and concise Call-to-Actions
  • Lead capture forms such as Newsletter signups, query forms, etc. 

What is outbound lead generation?

Outbound lead generation is directly contacting potential buyers, educating them about your product or service, and attempting to capture their interest.

There are various channels to do this: cold calls, direct emails, messages, WhatsApp marketing messages, and more. 

While being intrusive, the outbound lead generation method ensures that more time is spent on capturing leads.

Here, the interested prospects are immediately identified and guided to the sales funnel, unlike inbound lead generation, where you wait for the prospects to interact. 

Things that work here: 

  • A clear list of target audiences, categorized based on industry, role, or demography
  • A targeted approach to cold calls and cold emails
  • A brief pitch to pique interest
  • Targeted advertising through Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, YouTube, and push or pop-up ads

B2B Lead Generation Strategies to Guarantee Success

Successful B2B lead generation strategies are crucial for many reasons. They help target your approach, improve customer understanding and consistency across various teams, and enhance efficiency.

These strategies also help develop crucial KPIs to track your campaign performance and recognize areas for improvement. 

Let’s have a look at some of the most widely accepted and proven lead-generation strategies that work.

ABM (Account-based marketing)

Account-based marketing is where marketing and sales teams collaborate to identify a relevant big account (client/business) and tailor a campaign targeting just that account.

This is personalization on steroids, and caters to decision-makers to expedite the conversion process. 

The B2B lead generation here enables key executives and management within an account to interact with your marketing channel or sales rep. You can achieve this through tailored content, outreach, and compelling pitch. 

Moreover, 2025 comes with a rising trend of AI into ABM strategy by identifying high-value accounts through predictive analysis, personalized AI content, account segmentation, and automated customer service. 

An example of ABM is a tech company that identifies a list of Fortune 500 companies, tailors content for them, and prepares presentations and case studies for those companies. Or a tech solution provider runs a targeted email marketing campaign to the CIOs of companies addressing their pain points. 

Content marketing

Content marketing is a lead generation strategy where establishing oneself as the industry’s thought leader is the goal. It is done by tailoring content to appeal to a targeted audience segment on large channels like search engines, email marketing, social media marketing, guest blogging, podcasting, partnering with influencers, and more. 

The approach is to deliver valuable content through blogs, white papers, feature articles, ebooks, case studies, and webinars.

To establish oneself as an authority figure, discuss industry trends, best practices, real-life case studies, and past experiences. 

For example, a B2B SaaS company posts search engine-optimized blogs and email newsletters with industry trends and helpful content to IT managers looking for solutions. 

Referral programs

In a referral program, an existing customer refers your business to another prospect in exchange for some incentive, like discounts, cashback, or additional points.

These are some of the most trusted lead-generation strategies since they come from trusted sources and are most likely to convert. 

Another method that guarantees conversion is ensuring that the referred prospect makes a purchase or signs up for the referring customer to be eligible for the incentive.

The main challenge is to convince as many of your existing customers to respond to your program as possible to make the best of this strategy. 

For example, a FinTech company offering investment in gold asks a customer to refer the app to a friend in exchange for credit points to purchase more gold. Or a fashion brand offering free deliveries for each referred sign-up and order made.

Social media outreach

Social media outreach targets your B2B lead base on social media channels like LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and Instagram to market your product. This goes beyond just pushing ad content on their feed. 

Social media outreach involves sharing valuable and engaging content, addressing pain points more casually (fitting the social media tone), and directly communicating with prospects through comments, messages, or posts. SMO is an ideal strategy to target and engage your B2B leads organically. 

For example, a B2B digital marketing firm encourages its marketing team to promote valuable content on LinkedIn, discussing the latest insights, case studies, and industry trends.  

Email marketing

Email marketing is direct communication with your prospects, allowing you to engage meaningfully through quality content and CTAs. It’s a highly valuable marketing tool for quality lead engagement, with its ROI being $36 on every dollar spent. 

Email marketing involves various formats, where you can either bug your user with spammy ads in their inbox and get blocked.

Or, you can deliver frequent, valuable content regularly and form a relationship with your leads. 

For instance, a B2B software company sends personalized emails with successful customer stories, new features, demos, and discounts. 

Paid advertising

Paid advertising is one step ahead of organic lead generation strategies—here, you pay platforms like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, or X Ads to place your advertisement post on relevant spaces. 

This enables B2B companies to drive high-intent traffic quickly, allowing them to capture value leads and work towards the sales funnel.

For example, an HR process automation software company pays Google to run its ads on targeted keywords to bring traffic to its landing page detailing a free trial of the product. 

Cold outreach

Cold outreach is often the most effective, though the most frowned upon by the customers, where sales reps approach prospects who have yet to show any prior interest in the product or service. 

It’s effective because the filtration is quick from interested leads to non-interested ones. Through cold calls, cold emails, or direct messages, it is also possible to guide the interested lead swiftly further into the sales funnel. 

When choosing between the mediums, cold emails work better than cold calls, with average email open rates being 24%, while cold calls have a success rate of only 2 to 4%. However, if you keep the right combination of both and adjust your KPIs accordingly, you may even find higher success rates. 

Some sales reps from a B2B hardware supply company cold call businesses that may require hardware and identify requirement gaps to fill with their products. 

Free trials and demonstrations

Free trials and demonstrations are the ultimate B2B lead generation strategy for sales-qualified leads. Those subscribing to it have their mind made up about the solution you’re offering to their problem. 

Now, the user only wants to try out the product to see if it is worth their money. Research shows that 66% of those who subscribed to a free trial convert to paying customers after the trial period ends. 

For example, many B2B SaaS companies offer a 14-day or 30-day free trial for their products.

10 Top B2B Lead Generation Tools

The market has ample tools intended to help you scale your lead generation and achieve desired results.

However, it’s easy to feel lost with that many options. Let’s look at some of the top ones and how they might be an ideal choice for you: 

B2B lead generation tools  Starting price Features
EngageBay $11.04/month
  • Email and marketing automation
  • B2B lead generation
  • Sales funnels
  • Free CRM
  • Contact management
  • Lead capture forms and lead scoring
  • Segmentation and personalization
HubSpot $15/month
  • Email marketing
  • Lead management
  • Sales funnels
Leadpages $37/month
  • Lead generation tools
  • PPC ads
  • Email marketing
Pipedrive $12/month
  • Sales CRM with lead management 
  • Pipeline management 
  • Funnels
Agile CRM $8.99/month
  • Sales CRM with lead scoring
  • Landing page builder
  • Email marketing
Leadfeeder $99/month
  • Lead generation
  • Website visitor tracking
  • Sales prospecting
OptinMonster $7/month
  • Subscriber management
  • List segmentation 
  • Advanced marketing integration 
Keap $249/month
  • Small business automation 
  • Lead management 
  • Pipelines
Zoho $14/month
  • Marketing and sales CRM 
  • Lead management 
  • Integration with other Zoho products
LinkedIn Sales Navigator $99/month
  • Sales Navigator
  • Relationship explorer
  • Key decision-maker alerts

1. EngageBay: All-in-one lead management 

EngageBay can help you enhance your lead management game with its comprehensive marketing, sales, and customer support software suites.

EngageBay is ideal for SMBs and have scalable features and cross-platform integration capabilities. 

Lead generation funnel in EngageBay

Key features

  • Email marketing automation
  • Lead scoring
  • Segmentation
  • Lead capture forms
  • 360-degree customer view
  • Customer journey timelines
  • Email templates and landing pages
  • Email sequences
  • CRM (contact management & deal tracking)
  • Landing page builder 
  • Form creation
  • Company management 
  • Milestone tracking
  • Segmentation 

Pros

  • Affordable pricing
  • Easy-to-use interface 
  • A comprehensive suite of tools

Cons

  • Limited advanced customization
  • Fewer third-party integrations 

Pricing

  • Free to use (250 Contacts); Free demo also available
  • Basic: $12.74/user/month (500 Contacts)
  • Growth: $55.24/user/month (5,000 Contacts)
  • Pro: $101.99/user/month (Unlimited Contacts)

2. HubSpot: Enterprise-grade lead management & CRM

HubSpot offers scalable marketing, sales, and customer support tools that work best with companies of all sizes. This business solution software giant offers tools for each domain: marketing, sales, commerce, operations, and service. 

Moreover, it has a special bundle of products called ‘Small Business Bundle’ aimed at making business process automation accessible for small and medium enterprises. 

Key features 

  • Meeting scheduler
  • Email template builder
  • Live chat software
  • AI email writer
  • Dashboard and reporting software
  • Deal pipelines
  • Company insights
  • Pipeline management
  • Automate marketing 
  • Generate and manage leads
  • Marketing content hub
  • Omnichannel help-desk
  • Scalable CMS
  • Invoices & subscriptions

Pros

  • Seamless integration across marketing, sales, & customer service
  • Free CRM
  • Strong customer support 
  • Extensive learning resources

Cons

  • Expensive premium plans
  • Advanced features gated behind higher tiers

Pricing

  • Free plan available; Free trial of 14-day available 
  • Marketing Hub Starter: $15/month/seat
  • Starter Customer Platform: $15/month/seat
  • Marketing Hub Professional: $800/month/3 seats
  • Marketing Hub Enterprise: $3,600/month/5 seats

3. Leadpages: stress-free Landing pages & conversion tools

Leadpages does precisely what it says: landing pages, pop-ups, CTAs, and other tools to increase the likelihood of your campaign’s success.

Key features

  • Drag-and-drop page builder
  • Conversion-optimized templates
  • Integrations with CRM and email tools
  • A/B testing for landing pages
  • Lead capture
  • Offers and promotions 
  • PPC Ads
  • Search engine marketing 
  • Lead management 
  • Demand capture 

Pros

  • User-friendly interface with quick setup
  • Templates designed for high conversions
  • Real-time analytics for performance tracking

Cons

  • Limited design flexibility for advanced users
  • Primarily focused on landing pages with fewer marketing tools

Pricing

  • A 14-day free trial available
  • Standard: $37/Month
  • Pro: $74/Month
  • Conversion: $697/Month

4. Pipedrive: Sales-first CRM and automation 

Pipedrive makes tracking your sales pipeline easier with its all-encompassing CRM tools. It’s one of the most effective lead-generation tools that facilitates optimizing leads and managing deals. 

Key features

  • Sales automation
  • Lead management
  • Insights and reports
  • Email and communications
  • CRM
  • Email builder
  • Email segmentation
  • Email analytics
  • Marketing automation
  • Attract new leads
  • Communicate with leads
  • Manage contracts
  • AI email writer
  • AI sales assistant

Pros

  • User-friendly interface tailored for sales teams
  • Detailed reporting and analytics for sales forecasting
  • Highly customizable pipelines

Cons

  • Limited features for marketing and customer support
  • Automation features are basic compared to other CRMs

Pricing

  • A 14-day free trial available
  • Essential: $12/seat/month
  • Advanced: $24/seat/month
  • Enterprise (now with AI): $79/seat/month

5. Agile CRM: Basic lead management 

Agile CRM makes it easy to execute your marketing, sales, and customer service strategies, all of which are crucial for lead conversion.

Not only do they offer an all-in-one suite for lead management, but they are also quite affordable.

Key features

  • Contact management 
  • Telephony
  • Gamification 
  • Appointment scheduling 
  • Project management 
  • Marketing automation 
  • Landing page building
  • Lead generation, tracking, & management 
  • Email marketing 
  • Service automation
  • Live chat

Pros

  • All-in-one solution at an affordable price
  • Easy to set up and use
  • A large repository of free plan features

Cons

  • Outdated interface
  • Limited scalability for larger businesses

Pricing

  • Free to use for ten users (limited features).
  • Starter: $9.99/month/user
  • Regular: $39.99/month/user
  • Enterprise: $64.99/month/user

6. Leadfeeder: Lead nurture and sales pipelines

Leadfeeder tracks website visitors and recognizes the potential leads and tools to help you build an actionable pipeline.

Leadfeeder also helps you find ready-to-buy leads, build better sales pitches, and more.

Key features

  • Lead generation
  • Account-based marketing 
  • Website visitor tracking
  • Sales prospecting 
  • Filters for lead qualification
  • Custom segmentation

Pros

  • Excellent for B2B lead generation
  • Easy CRM integration
  • Actionable data for targeting

Cons

  • Limited to identifying company visitors, not individuals
  • Expensive for small teams

Pricing

  • Free plan (identifies up to 100 companies)
  • Paid: $99/month (Unlimited companies)

7. OptinMonster: Website traffic monetization

OptinMonster provides world-class tech to build a better email list, amass more leads, and covert sales.

The tool offers a wide range of services to help capture potential leads on your website with a simplified setup requirement and a plethora of conversion templates. 

Key features

  • Customizable lead capture forms
  • Simplified A/B testing
  • Page-level targeting
  • Advanced traffic redirection
  • Analytics and insights
  • 700+ Templates
  • Lightbox popups

Pros

  • Easy to use 
  • A wide variety of templates
  • Personalization options
  • Integrates with most platforms

Cons

  • Limited customization for advanced users
  • No free-to-use features

Pricing

  • Basic: $7/month 
  • Plus: $17/month
  • Pro: $25/month
  • Growth: $37/month

8. Keap: Lead management automation

Keap is an advanced automation tool that can reform whole business processing.

This CRM tool also increases lead generation, sales, and marketing automation, improves retention, and ultimately contributes to your revenue growth.

Key features

  • Small business automation 
  • Small business CRM
  • Reporting
  • Integration with other apps
  • Marketing automation
  • Lead capture
  • Lead management 
  • Email marketing
  • Text marketing 
  • Sales automation 
  • Lifecycle automation 
  • Pipeline and lead management 

Pros

  • Combines CRM and marketing tools in one platform
  • Great for service-based businesses
  • Strong customer support

Cons

  • A steeper learning curve for new users
  • Limited scalability for larger businesses

Pricing

  • Pay annually: $249/month 

9. Zoho: Lead management and business automation

Zoho is an all-in-one CRM and business automation software company aimed at streamlining business operations and scaling along with business growth.

It offers many products for sales, marketing, HR & operations, finance, and business operations. 

Key features

  • Major suites: CRM Plus, Finance Plus, People Plus, Workplace, Marketing Plus
  • Zoho One: a unified cloud service 
  • Email campaigns
  • Forms & surveys
  • Marketing automation 
  • Landing page builder
  • Live chat app
  • Unified sales CRM

Pros

  • Affordable and scalable for all business sizes
  • User-friendly interface with strong customization options
  • Wide range of integrations

Cons

  • Some features require third-party add-ons
  • Limited customer support for lower-tier plans

Pricing

  • 14-day free trial
  • Standard: $25/month/organization
  • Premium: $59/month/organization 

10. LinkedIn Sales Navigator: LinkedIn-based lead generation

LinkedIn is another business ecosystem, and most of your B2B leads use the platform. That’s why LinkedIn Sales Navigator is such a powerful tool to identify, engage, and manage leads on LinkedIn.

You can efficiently uncover connections, discover past customers, and perform advanced searches for leads with the Navigator. 

Key features

  • Lead engagement
  • Account prioritization
  • Leveraging key signals 
  • Relationship explorer 
  • Relationship map
  • Account alerts
  • 50+ advanced search filters
  • CRM integration 
  • Data validation 
  • ROI reporting

Pros

  • Access to LinkedIn’s vast professional network
  • Easy to identify and connect with decision-makers
  • Real-time updates on leads and accounts

Cons

  • High pricing for small teams
  • Limited functionality outside of LinkedIn

Pricing

  • One-month free trial
  • Sales Navigator Core: $99/month
  • Sales Navigator Advanced: $149/month
  • Sales Navigator Advanced Plus: Custom 

How to Utilize a B2B Lead Generation Funnel to Get More Leads

The lead generation funnel is a structured process through which a lead is identified and carefully guided through various stages to become a paying customer. 

There are different stages in a funnel, and the lead demands a different approach at each stage. 

As the potential customer base passes through the funnel, the number of leads decreases, and only a tiny percentage of the original lead group successfully comes out as paying customers. 

According to Marketo, merely 4% of your website visitors are ready to purchase. This implies that your approach to guiding potential leads into the funnel must be carefully curated. 

The most crucial aspect of curating your approach is content. Content is the king here because it’s the only non-intrusive and organic way to communicate to the lead base. 

Let’s see these stages and how they affect your lead and demand generation efforts.

The stages of a B2B lead generation funnel

Stages of B2B lead generation funnel
Source

Three broader stages of the B2B lead generation funnel are: 

  • Top of the Funnel (TOFU)
  • Middle of the Funnel (MOFU)
  • Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU)

These include various stages of lead behavior: awareness, interest, desire, action, and conversion

Top of the Funnel (TOFU)

  • Stage: Awareness
  • Goal: Attract

This is the top of the funnel where a user has visited your page and you’ve recognized them as potential leads. 

This is the stage where you build awareness and espouse interest in your potential leads about your brand without focusing on your products. 

Content plays a crucial role in marketing for the TOFU audience. These are the types of marketing content you can leverage: 

  • Social media posts (attractive graphics and videos for LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, & X)
  • Blogs (optimized for the search engine, with industry-relevant topics)
  • Guides 
  • YouTube videos (animation or otherwise addressing the pain points)
  • Podcasts 

In this stage, you only want to build a connection and trust with the user, so they lend you their contact information. 

Middle of the Funnel (MOFU)

  • Stage: Interest, desire
  • Goal: Engage

In the middle stage, you engage with the visitors and turn them into leads. 

Once a visitor has visited your page and shown interest in your page by downloading gated content or leaving their contact, it means they’ve found a solution to their problem. 

That’s your cue to engage them with your MOFU marketing material. 

Use different content formats to engage with the leads to usher to the next step in the funnel, such as: 

  • White papers
  • E-Books
  • Newsletters 
  • Webinars
  • Other helpful tools 

Build your content based on your target audience’s wants, what you offer them, and if you have enough resources to create the material. 

Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU)

  • Stage: Action/confirmation, conversion
  • Goal: Convert 

The leads become prospects in this stage. The bottom of the funnel is where the leads have gone through your product’s offering and consider you the ideal solution to their problems. 

All that remains is to offer tailored content to the prospects so that they can finally invest in your product or service. 

You can consider the following BOFU content to target the prospects for conversion: 

  • Product demos
  • Case studies 
  • Reviews 
  • Testimonials 
  • Comparisons 
  • Discounts & offers
  • FAQs

The prospects trust you, now you need to carefully tend to the trust with credible information and comparison so they understand that you’re the perfect choice for them. 

B2B Lead Generation Best Practices 

The goal is to ensure your lead generation strategies align with your target market. How does that happen? Ensure you’re on top of management practices and aware of the proven tactics. Let’s see what these tips and practices are: 

Define your ICP

Have a clear picture of what your ideal customer looks like. 

A proper ideal customer profile or ICP ensures that you recognize high-quality leads, ultimately saving time and boosting your chances for conversion.

One way to do so is to list parameters your ideal customer should fit, such as industry, job role, company size, and more. 

Segment your audience

Segmentation helps you divide your audience into specific groups. 

You can target these groups based on their demography, interests, age group, or more. This way, you ensure that your marketing approach is tailored to the target segment. 

Funnel targeted content

You can’t have the same marketing content for all stages of the lead generation funnel. 

Create targeted content for each stage, such as educational content for the top of the funnel, solution-oriented content for the middle of the funnel, and decision-making aids for the bottom. 

Create gated content

Create helpful, downloadable content in white papers, ebooks, and research papers to help your leads. 

However, make sure your downloadable content is gated behind a login requirement or free email subscription to gather the contact information. 

Leverage SEO and content marketing

SEO works best for drawing in organic visitors. Optimize your website and blog pages so that search engines appear on top of result pages. 

Strategic content marketing, such as email marketing, social media marketing, SEO, and more, can help you garner leads effectively and organically. 

Partner with industry experts and influencers

To be seen is the point at the top of the funnel. You can appear in significant places if you partner with industry leaders and influencers with massive followers. 

Partnering with credible thought leaders of the industry also places you in the trusted category, while enhancing your whole outlook.

Use analytics to track key metrics

Tracking marketing performance and defining key performance metrics are crucial factors in improving your lead generation campaigns. 

Track your website traffic, social media impressions, conversion rates, open rates, inquiries, and other metrics to define your performance. Improvise based on the data and observe the results then. 

Use live chat

Automate your website’s chat support to provide a live chat feature. 

With real-time chat support, customers can connect with you better and get rudimentary assistance in no time.

Lead Generation Examples

Let’s look at some examples of successful lead generation to give you an idea of how these strategies play out: 

Example 1: Co-selling

In a co-selling partnership, LastPass, a password-managing software company, and Partner Tap, an enterprise ecosystem platform, successfully identified high-yield accounts and scaled their revenue. 

Through PartnerTap’s co-selling strategies, LastPass recognized 15,500 new logo accounts from only one partner. 

The result was that LastPass was able to multiply its revenue four times in only the first year of its co-selling strategy. 

Example 2: Referral programs

EngageBay, an all-in-one CRM software provider, offered a charming referral incentive, drawing in a significant influx of sign-ups. 

It announced a 30% recurring commission every month through its referral program. So, for instance, if they get a revenue of $500 a month from your referrals, you get $150. 

Example 3: Gated content

Webflow, a website design company, leverages the gated content tactic quite well. Usually, it offers a slew of useful content through blogs and videos. However, it’s one of the most coveted webinars on the topic “Guide to SEO in Webflow” and is always accessible after a quick lead gen form fill-up. 

Webflow ensures that it has the details on the leads through forms in exchange for helpful content in webinars that address pain points. It’s also mainly addressing SEO issues on its platform, making soft-selling possible for its products. 

How B2B Lead Generation Services Can Benefit You

B2B lead generation services are the professional agencies that identify and map potential leads on your website on your behalf. These B2B lead generation agencies specialize in various lead generation strategies such as prospecting and data enrichment, along with marketing outreach such as email campaigns, bulk messaging, cold calls, etc. 

What are the pros of lead generation services? 

  • Frees up resources to focus on other essential business operations
  • Access to experts, skilled individuals, and advanced tools that would otherwise incur the most cost to the company
  • Efficiently scalable along with business growth without having to set up an in-house department

What are the cons of lead generation services?

  • Outsourcing lead generation services can be expensive for small businesses
  • Not all services would deliver high-quality leads or services 
  • Depending too much on outsourcing can limit the internal scaling capacity of a company 

However, a balanced partnership with a trusted lead generation company can help you with better lead generation management. The chances of your campaigns also increase with expert insights and modern tools at your disposal. 

Conclusion

In conclusion, if done right, B2B lead generation can be highly lucrative for a business.

These leads can be further nurtured through targeted marketing campaigns and personalized content to convert into paying customers. The various stages of leads can offer insight into customizing campaigns based on target market.

An internal marketing or sales team for lead generation management can help you scale quality leads and drive demand generation.

EngageBay is an all-in-one marketing, sales, and customer support software for SMBs, startups, and solopreneurs. You get contact management, lead scoring and automation, lead capture tools, omnichannel marketing, sales funnels, email templates, and more.

Sign up for free with EngageBay or book a demo with our experts.

An older version of the article was authored by Nicole Malczan.

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