B2B lead generation is like trying to spot constellations in a sky full of stars. You need to be able to identify which companies fit your ideal customer profile, are actively looking to buy, and are ready to engage. The qualified leads will shine brighter than all the rest — and that’s where you’ll win more sales.
Salesforce data shows researching leads consumes 21% of a sales rep’s time. With the right nurturing and follow-up, quality leads turn into sales opportunities that fill up the pipeline and fuel revenue growth as deals close. Poor leads do the opposite — and you can wind up wasting effort and losing business to competitors.
Many companies learned how to do B2B lead generation through a lot of trial and error, but that’s changing. Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) are eliminating a lot of the guesswork around attracting and converting qualified leads, while the key stages and best-performing tactics are becoming increasingly clear.
In this article, we’ll discuss what exactly B2B lead generation is, plus how to tap into AI tools to generate qualified leads in a competitive landscape.
What Is B2B Lead Generation?
Unlike consumers who wander into a retail store, corporate buyers need to be actively recruited. B2B lead generation is the process of attracting these potential customers and gathering key information.
Generating leads is about looking for quality vs. volume. Qualified leads need to align with criteria such as target company size, vertical market, business need, and budget. Even in large industries, competition for leads is often intense due to longer buying cycles than in the consumer market. B2B leads can also require significant nurturing before they convert into paying customers.
Though some leads can be captured in person through live events, such as conferences and trade shows, most come through digital channels. These include website visitors exploring your product pages, email blasts or newsletter recipients and buyers researching vendors on social media services.
Managing lead generation requires collecting data and tracking engagement behaviours across digital channels to continually improve results. Your success metrics will also differ from the business-to-consumer (B2C) space. You’ll be looking at everything from cost-per-lead to leads per channel and conversion rates.
The Key Stages of B2B Lead Generation
B2B lead generation tends to be a joint activity that happens across both sales and marketing. For example, demand generation teams in marketing will develop content that builds brand awareness and compels prospects to share their contact information. Sales development reps (SDRs) will then score leads to ensure they’re qualified before passing them to account executives who book meetings, conduct demos, and work to close the deal.
The key stages tend to follow a common customer journey:
Awareness
Imagine your company runs digital ads and social media posts highlighting a common challenge facing the industry you serve. While browsing online, an individual working at the sort of business you’re targeting sees the ad or post. They may not have been familiar with your brand, but now they learn you offer products and services aimed at helping them.
Interest
Intrigued by the content in the ad or social post, the individual clicks through. They might be directed to a special landing page on your site that offers more detail about your products and services. They spend some time looking over the information to better understand your firm’s value propositions and competitive differentiators. They fill out an online form to learn more and become a lead.
Consideration
Your team sends the lead additional information or reaches out directly to chat. You need to help the lead recognize that you have the solution to one or more of their pain points. They should also begin to see how you will deliver an outstanding customer experience that’s fast, convenient, and helpful. This is a critical stage where leads can become more active or cool off completely.
Intent
The lead agrees to a formal meeting to see a demo of your product and hear a full pitch of what you have to offer them. They may share details about their budget, their expected timeline for making a purchase, and other specifics about their unique business needs.
Evaluation
Leads rarely make instant decisions. They will conduct further research about your competitors and check third-party reviews and industry analyst reports. Depending on the size of the buying committee, there can be several meetings where stakeholders need to be consulted. This is usually the longest stage of lead generation. Expect prospects to come back with additional questions or objections.
Conversion
If your sales team is successful, they’ll respond to everything the lead brings forward, using case studies, testimonials, buyer’s guides, and expert insight to win the sale. At this point, a contract may be signed, and the focus shifts to onboarding your new customer and providing top-tier support to retain them.
Core B2B Lead Generation Marketing Tactics
Generating leads is the result of providing value to your target audience. If they see the value, they’ll pay attention and engage — which marks the start of a potential customer relationship.
Lead generation in the B2C space is typically aimed at specific individuals, such as a busy working mother. The content brands use often focuses on the consumer’s personal interests, needs, and aspirations. In B2B, the lead represents an entire company, with higher-ticket products and services that will be used by a team or even the organization as a whole.
Some firms still rely on cold calling, where they rent a list of businesses to reach out to people out of the blue. A more strategic approach starts by considering your ideal customer profile and the way they prefer to consume information. From there, explore and experiment with any of the following tactics:
SEO and AIO
Many buyers begin their search for products and services on search engines like Google, so start by auditing your existing content to make sure it’s optimized to show up in results pages. This process is called search engine optimization (SEO), whereby you identify the likely keywords and keyword phrases your target customer would use and then weave that language into landing page copy, anchor text, and H1s.
Complement this step with optimizing for AI search tools, recognizing that B2B buyers are increasingly turning to chat-style interfaces to get advice on their next purchase. Optimizing for AI goes beyond keywords to think through the types of questions people will ask.
Questions could be as specific as, “What are some top vendors that supply affordable office equipment for large businesses in XYZ locations that are ergonomically designed?” Your content should provide meaningful answers to these queries in order to be recognized by large language models (LLMs). This will help generate traffic and increase the chances of visitors finding you and converting into leads.
Pay-per-click (PPC) Ads
Paid advertising services enable B2B firms to get in front of highly specific audiences. PPC ads can run across niche ad networks and publisher sites that focus on relevant topics, often in natural, non-intrusive formats.
Popular PPC options include Google search ads and platforms like LinkedIn, which cater primarily to B2B audiences.
With PPC, your creative needs to be highly compelling to get every click, but you’ll easily be able to report on your results.
Content Marketing
Building a B2B brand depends on offering insight, advice, and inspiration. People may come to your site and social channels looking for products and services, but you’ll build confidence and trust with leads by creating, publishing, and distributing valuable content. This is the beauty of content marketing.
Start with your blog, which can offer your take on industry trends, the context behind your strategy, product announcements, and a peek into your corporate culture.
Use webinars, white papers, and e-books to provide more in-depth education, and case studies (in both written and video format) to offer social proof that your brand is a strong industry partner.
Email marketing can be an effective way to distribute your content to your existing database, as can social media. Email can also be a powerful tool for lead nurturing and drip campaigns that move leads toward conversion.
Some of this content, like e-books, can be gated with a form to capture lead information. In blog posts and videos, you can offer dedicated email addresses or other calls-to-action (CTA) that engage leads for follow-up activities.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
ABM offers an even more focused approach to lead generation. Sales teams will create a list of target accounts that represent the biggest opportunity in terms of revenue and lifetime value.
Marketing teams then develop a highly personalized campaign that drills down into granular challenges within each account. Leads are nurtured through a variety of digital channels, including retargeted ads and email.
When it works, ABM creates a deeper and longer-lasting customer relationship with greater return on investment (ROI).
Referral Programs
If you work with partners, such as resellers, integrators, or professional services firms, you can incentivize them to provide you leads in exchange for a commission or referral rate. You can also generate referrals by collaborating with partners on co-branded content such as e-books, webinars, and in-person events.
Some brands generate leads through affiliate marketing, where third parties promote demos or content-marketing assets via their own channels. Even in the B2B sector, influencers such as authors, speakers, and consultants with large followings can be valuable affiliate partners.
Lead Magnets
Prospective customers want data too, especially if it tells them something new about their own business and its challenges. Lead magnets deliver these insights by offering interactive digital experiences that engage users and turn them into leads.
An online cost calculator, for example, can allow a website visitor to quickly estimate the budget required for a particular project or initiative. Other lead magnets include tools to help build the business case for a purchase or a quiz that clarifies business needs.
The best lead magnet is a free trial of a digital product or service you offer. Even if it only works for a limited time, a free trial suggests high buyer intent and provides the lead with more context about your offering before taking the discussion further with a sales rep.
How B2B Lead Generation Has Transformed
Even if the B2B lead generation tools and tactics you initially use work well, expect to learn and adapt as your business grows. Generating leads isn’t a one-time task — it’s an ever-evolving discipline shaped by shifts in your target market, advancements in technology, and changes in buyer behavior.
Buyers, for example, are increasingly aware of lead generation tactics because their companies are busy gathering leads of their own. This means they know providing their contact information will likely result in being targeted by a rep and added to a nurture campaign. For that reason, the content they see needs to be particularly relevant and enticing.
B2B marketing has also become so widespread and pervasive that buyers are more skeptical of bold vendor claims. Case studies and testimonials are more important than ever, and leads will focus the evaluation stage of their journey on review sites and reputable market research sources. They’ll spend a significant amount of time verifying information before engaging with a rep.
With more competition than ever before, buyer expectations are higher. Buyers will ignore one-size-fits-all marketing content in favor of personalized messaging delivered in channels where they already spend time. Nurturing efforts need to respect time, professional boundaries, and procurement policies.
The work involved can go beyond what busy sales and marketing teams can accomplish on their own. That’s why more organizations are adopting B2B lead generation services and tools that can automate key processes to boost productivity and accelerate revenue growth.Marketing teams, for example, can use Marketing Cloud to streamline and enhance the way they develop campaigns, while sales teams can lean on Sales Cloud to collect and manage leads so reps never miss an opportunity. Agentforce takes B2B lead generation software even further with AI.
The Growing Role of AI in B2B Lead Generation
Reps don’t need to invest valuable time on repetitive tasks such as lead scoring and tailoring their follow-up activities. AI can instantly create personalized, one-to-one campaigns that speak to leads like individuals.
As inbound leads come in, agents can use CRM and external data to determine the best engagement strategy. They can offer timely, accurate responses to questions, update reps’ pipelines with emerging opportunities, and even book meetings on their behalf.
Whether it’s crafting a quote for a lead or coaching reps before they reach out, AI B2B lead generation software like Agentforce can work quickly and at scale. Reps can practice their pitch with an agent and get objective, consistent feedback based on customer data. Insights from sales conversations can also help refine and improve B2B lead generation strategies over time.
Best of all, AI offers predictive scoring, giving reps data-driven insights into how likely a lead is to convert — eliminating the need to rely on gut instincts alone.
Measuring B2B Lead Generation Success
Effective B2B lead generation has a direct impact on the bottom line, but you only get there if you keep a close eye on key metrics along the way. We mentioned a few of these already, like CPL. Here are a few others to add to your dashboard:
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)
MQLs are determined when a lead shows interest in your brand by engaging with your content. Beyond clicking on an ad, they might have downloaded a white paper, registered for a webinar, or filled out a form on your website. Market teams tend to send MQLs directly to sales for further action.
Sales Qualified Leads (SQL)
Reps act upon MQLs by reaching out to leads and taking them further through the buyer journey. If leads demonstrate an active intent to purchase and indicate they’re ready to have a conversation, they become an SQL. You may wind up with fewer SQLs than MQLs, but this distinction helps determine where your reps will prioritize their efforts to close deals.
Pipeline Velocity
How quickly does a lead pass through each stage before becoming a paying customer? This is pipeline velocity, and as your lead generation strategy evolves, your goal should be to make it as short as possible.
Conclusion
B2B lead generation is an investment in time and resources that pays long-term dividends. It helps you identify your most likely future customers and align your sales and marketing teams on the highest-priority opportunities. Generating leads also increases your proficiency in connecting across digital channels, analyzing data, and creating a plan for sustainable growth.
To maximize results, balance the effort you put into setting up lead generation campaigns with ongoing monitoring and measurement of your results. Even small changes in your tools and tactics can have a huge impact and save time while reducing costs.
Above all, remember that leads are people — even if they represent a B2B company. They’re ultimately looking for you to help them overcome challenges, achieve goals, and further their career success. You’re not just driving conversions — you’re building relationships with customers ready to reward you with their loyalty.
