What is Lead Generation?

Lead generation describes the process of identifying and attracting prospects that fit your ideal customer profile (ICP) – and then converting them into qualified sales opportunities.

The term ‘lead generation’ covers the whole strategy, from getting the attention of a potential prospect to engaging them more with your brand, educating them about your offering, and eventually turning them into a customer.

It’s a huge pressure point for marketers: according to HubSpot’s State of Marketing Report, 61% consider lead generation their top challenge.

Why is Lead Generation so Important?

When done well, a lead generation strategy fills your pipeline with a steady stream of prospects that you can engage until they’re ready to buy – and then hand these hot leads over to your sales colleagues.

It’s the lifeblood of businesses that sell higher-value products and services because:

• It sustains business growth. A steady flow of leads ensures continuous revenue.
• It enhances sales efficiency. When sales teams focus on high-quality sales leads, conversion rates improve.
• It builds brand authority. By attracting prospects that are interested in your niche, you establish industry credibility.
• It improves ROI. Targeted lead generation campaigns minimize wasted efforts and maximize marketing spend.

Almost half of professionals said generating enough leads to meet B2B sales targets was a real challenge in 2024, according to Sopro’s State of Prospecting research.

B2B vs B2C Lead Generation: What’s the Difference?

You might think that lead generation is exclusively a B2B pursuit, but plenty of B2C businesses are focused on generating leads, too.

For example, property agents focus on people searching for their next home, car dealerships target buyers considering a new vehicle, educational institutions market to prospective students looking to upskill, and financial services firms look for customers who are exploring investments or managing their money.

The main differences between B2C and B2B lead generation are who gets targeted (people vs businesses), how long the process takes (B2B sales are notoriously slow), how many leads you expect to get (B2C lead volumes are higher) and how much it costs to acquire those new leads (B2C is often kinder to the budget).

This guide focuses on B2B lead generation.

What Are the Main Types of B2B Leads?

There are many different ways to categorize your leads, but the most common distinctions are:

• Cold leads. This describes the prospects that are a great fit for your product or service, but they haven’t engaged with you yet. The ideas is that if you can make them aware of your brand, they’ll become a customer, so they’re often reached via cold calling, LinkedIn outreach and other multi-channel marketing campaigns.
• Warm leads. These leads are already aware of your brand and have shown some interest by engaging with you through things like downloading content or attending webinars. These are one of the most valuable types of leads, because they’re proven to convert faster, so they’re often targeted with warm calling.
• Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). These leads are a mix of the above, because they fit your ideal customer profile (ICP) and have already engaged with your company, but they’re not ready to buy just yet. The goal of the marketing team is to nurture these MQLs and spot the subtle buying intent signals that suggest the lead is ready to buy, and then hand the opportunity over to the sales team to close.
• Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs). These leads have shown signs they’re ready to buy and are the right fit, so they’re prioritized by the sales team. Sometimes, that’s because a MQL has been handed over and accepted as sales-ready by the sales team, so it becomes a SQL. Other times, the lead could’ve been found by any number of outreach activities by the business, but it becomes a SQL once they’re ready to buy.

How Does Lead Generation Work?

There are two main types of lead gen marketing: inbound and outbound.

Inbound is when a prospect comes to you. They’ll be enticed to engage with your brand through tactics like content marketing, social media, and paid advertising that are designed to lure them onto your website.

Conversely, outbound is when you reach out to the prospect. It’s usually done through cold calling, outbound email marketing and messaging on platforms like LinkedIn.

Most businesses use a mix of inbound and outbound lead generation because it brings the best of both worlds: inbound drives long-term scalability and can bring leads organically, while outbound keeps the pipeline filled with opportunities.

What Is the Typical Lead Generation Process?

While every business will generate leads differently, there’s quite a defined process that you follow in order to turn a prospect into a customer:

1. Identify target audience. Define your ideal customer profiles (ICPs) based on industry, company size, and pain points, so you know who to target and where to find them.
2. Generate leads. Whether you use outbound marketing or inbound marketing, email marketing, LinkedIn messaging, cold calling, or something else, this is the stage where a lot of activity happens to find those leads.
3. Score and qualify leads. For each new lead that comes in, you should score them based on their fit, engagement level and readiness to buy. The ones that are sales-ready will skip the next stage.
4. Nurture leads. Most people aren’t ready to buy immediately, so you need to have a plan in place for how you’ll nurture a relationship that builds trust and educates them about your products and services.
5. Handoff to sales. Once a lead is sales-ready, it’s passed on to the sales team so they can pick up the conversation and close the deal.

What’s Working in B2B Lead Gen?

There are so many ways to generate leads, from finding more leads from your website and embracing growth hacking techniques to simply picking up the phone to speak to prospects.

Here’s what’s reliably shown to work in lead generation today:

• Cold calling. It’s an old tactic, but it’s a reliable one. And it’s as simple as asking sales reps to work their way through a list of contacts and make the first introduction to a potential lead. Yes, it takes a lot of calls to convert customers, but it’s still a powerful tactic when done properly.
• Email prospecting. Not everyone picks up the phone, which is why email can also be impactful. By sending a personalized email to the contact, you give yourself more opportunities to introduce your company and its products or services.
• LinkedIn outreach. The Sales Navigator tool allows you to find decision makers and contact them with personalized messages or connect with them and build a relationship through the social media channel. Not only does it help sales reps to find new leads, but it broadens their network – and if they post, it helps position them as trusted experts, too.
• Paid advertising. Platforms like Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads and Meta for Business help you reach people on a much larger scale, but you need to make sure your targeting is tight otherwise you may waste budget by paying to show adverts to prospects that aren’t relevant.
• Content marketing. Whether it’s engaging website content, compelling social media posts or interesting case studies, the right can entice people to check out your website. And if you publish high value content, you can gate it so that prospects exchange their contact details for access.
• Email marketing. In B2B lead generation, it’s still common to see businesses buy data lists and send mass emails to establish a relationship. But email marketing also has another important role in lead gen, because it helps you to nurture leads and drive engagement with your content. This keeps them warm until they show signs that they’re ready to buy.
• Retargeting. If someone has engaged with your website, emails or social media posts but didn’t convert, you can put your brand in front of them again with retargeting adverts. It’s like a second chance to convert them, and is powerful because you know the person is already interested.
• SEO and organic search. By optimizing your site for online searches, you’ll build solid foundations for long-term inbound lead generation campaigns by making sure that people find you when they look for answers that you can help with.
• Webinars and events. Hosting live sessions are a great way to bring your brand to life, demonstrate your expertise and build trust. Plus, when people register to attend, they’ll leave their details so you can market to them afterwards.

What Are the Current Lead Gen Trends?

The current lead generation trends are all centered around AI and machine learning, and how you can use these kinds of tools to do more with less.

They include things like:

• AI-powered lead scoring: machine learning will improve the accuracy of lead qualification.
• Hyper-personalization: generic emails won’t cut it; personalized messaging will drive results.
• Interactive content: quizzes, calculators, and interactive case studies will engage prospects better.
• ABM (account-based marketing) growth: companies are focusing more on targeting high-value accounts.

We’ve got a blog dedicated to lead generation trends that covers this in more detail.

How do You Measure Lead Gen Success?

There’s no shortage of lead gen metrics to obsess over, but sometimes too much data makes it harder to see how you’re actually doing.

To measure the true impact, and success, of your lead generating activities, you should look at:

• Number of MQLs and SQLs generated. Ultimately, you need to know how many leads you’ve generated and this is one of the clearest metrics to use.
• Lead-to-customer conversion rates will tell you how many leads actually convert, which helps refine your targeting and become more effective.
• ROI ties your campaigns back to revenue and is a transparent way to review performance.

Take a look at our blog on the top lead gen metrics for more information.

Tips to Improve B2B Lead Generation

Lead generation is a very broad topic, and the tactics that work can vary by business or industry. But if you want to start getting more leads, the first thing you need to do is understand your lead gen metrics and review your current performance.

You need to see if any of your current activities give you a good conversion rate and identify those that are under-performing. For a quick win, you could consider allocating more budget to the campaigns that are converting well and pausing spend on the ones that aren’t.

It’s also a good idea to check if you’ve tested some of the most successful lead gen strategies, too. These include:

• Content. Have you been putting out interesting content on your website and social media platforms? Take a look at the content that’s had the most views and think about how to do more of that, because if you lean into what’s already resonating with people, you’ll have more chance of reaching a wider audience.
• On-page SEO. Do you have the right strategy to attract people who are searching for your kind of product or service? Are you targeting the right topics? Use free tools like Google Search Console and GA4 to understand what terms drive impressions and clicks, and which pages get actual views from organic traffic.
• Referral marketing. Do you have a reward scheme to incentivize existing customers to recommend you to their peers? If not, what could you offer – and who could you ask for a referral?
• Lead nurturing. Are you regularly speaking to your colder leads to make sure they’re still aware of you and warming up as they go through the buying cycle? If you aren’t, start sending a monthly email newsletter and see if that helps.
• Live chat. Are you helping prospects find the right information or speak to a sales person quicker with the use of live chat? It’s a great tool that turns your website into an additional member of the sales team who’s available 24/7.

If you find that your marketing activities bring enough people to your website, but you’re just not converting them into leads, you should also look into how conversion rate optimization can help you drive success.

Some quick wins for CRO include:

• Optimize your forms to remove any friction and encourage more completions.
• Refine your call-to-action wording, design and placement.
• Publish hyper specific landing pages that focus on just one action from your website visitors.
• Test personalizing content and CTAs to specific industries or businesses.

What Lead Generation Tools Can Help?

With so much to do, it’s important that you lean on the right lead generation software to help do some of the heavy lifting.

Some of the most essential lead gen tools include:

• CRM software (e.g., HubSpot, Salesforce). This kind of software organizes your leads, tracks interactions, and automates outreach, so you can focus on keeping leads warm instead of updating their status.
• Marketing automation (e.g., Marketo, Pardot). These tools streamline lead nurturing through email and workflows that share content with your leads and keep them engaged with you.
• Website visitor identification (e.g., Lead Forensics). These tools can tell you which companies are visiting your website and what pages they look at. This helps you find warm prospects you’d never be aware of otherwise and come up with ideas of how to tailor your outbound calls.
• Chatbots & AI assistants (e.g., Lead Forensics Chat). This type of tool engages prospects 24/7 and captures leads instantly, acting as an extra member of the sales team.
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator. The social platform’s tool, called Sales Navigator, enhances LinkedIn prospecting and outreach and is helpful when you can’t get a response to calls or emails.

Find More Leads with Website Visitor Identification

The average B2B website converts just 2% of its traffic. That means the other 98% of visitors bounce without doing anything.

Lead Forensics helps you uncover the leads you’d otherwise miss, by identifying the companies that are browsing your website but don’t fill out a form.

Plus, when you can reveal which organizations are browsing, what pages they view, and how often they return, you can spot the buying signals that are so often overlooked – and send more MQLs to your colleagues in sales.

That insight helps you prioritize high-intent accounts, personalize follow-up, and generate more qualified leads from traffic you already have.