Every B2B company needs quality leads to sustain its existence in the market. If you want to grow, you will need a marketing strategy that increases and automates your lead generation process. A lead is any person who is interested in a company’s product or service.
Your role as a B2B marketer isn’t just to build awareness of your brand cause you’re also responsible for sending qualified leads to your sales and marketing team. If you’re not following this, then your inbound marketing or outbound marketing campaigns might need improvement. So if you want to maintain a competitive edge, then you should do the same. Let’s take a look at what is lead generation is and what would be the best strategies to use.
What is B2B Lead Generation?
B2B lead generation is the way that B2B marketers use to drive potential customers for their organization. This contains a variety of incoming marketing strategies that create visibility, awareness, and interest from the prospects within the target audience. It is a process of attracting the trust of your business and growing their interest in caring for it, all of which is the ultimate goal of turning them into a customer.
Most lead generation campaigns start by capturing leads such as collecting their names and contact information and then adding them to the sales channel. Every lead contains the information you have about them. For example, basic lead generation could be getting a B2B contact database, contact details, and company names/location/job titles.
Why Do You Need Leads?
Leads are the lifeblood of any B2B operation. Without them, your sales pipeline dries up, and growth stalls. Here’s why they’re essential:
- Fuel for Sales: Leads are potential customers. No leads, no sales—it’s that simple. They give your sales team someone to talk to and convert.
- Business Growth: To expand—whether it’s increasing revenue, entering new markets, or scaling operations—you need a steady stream of new clients. Leads are the starting point.
- Targeted Outreach: B2B leads aren’t random; they’re businesses that match your ideal customer profile (ICP). This focus saves time and money compared to casting a wide net.
- Revenue Predictability: A consistent lead flow lets you forecast sales and plan resources. For instance, if you know 10% of leads convert, generating 100 leads means 10 likely deals.
- Competitive Edge: In 2025, markets are crowded. Companies that actively generate and nurture leads stay ahead of competitors relying on word-of-mouth or luck.
- Relationship Building: B2B sales often involve long cycles and trust. Leads give you a chance to educate and connect with prospects before they’re ready to buy, positioning you as their go-to solution.
How to do b2b lead generation?
To execute B2B lead generation effectively, you need a structured approach that combines strategy, tools, and persistence. Below, I’ll break it down into actionable steps you can follow, grounded in what works as of March 05, 2025. This assumes you’re starting with a business that has a defined product or service and a general idea of your target audience.
Let’s get into it.
Step-by-Step Guide to B2B Lead Generation
1. Define Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
- What to Do: Identify the businesses you want to target. Consider industry (e.g., tech, manufacturing), company size (e.g., 50-500 employees), revenue, location, and the key decision-makers (e.g., CTOs, HR managers).
- How: Use existing customer data, market research, or tools like ZoomInfo or LinkedIn Sales Navigator to analyze who benefits most from your offering.
- Example: If you sell cybersecurity software, your ICP might be mid-sized tech firms with remote teams, targeting IT directors.
2. Build a Lead Magnet
- What to Do: Create something valuable that entices prospects to share their contact info—like an eBook, checklist, free trial, or industry report.
- How: Identify a pain point your ICP faces (e.g., “How to Reduce Data Breaches by 50%”) and produce concise, actionable content. Host it on a landing page with a simple form (name, email, company).
- Tools: Canva for design, Google Docs for drafting, or HubSpot for landing pages.
- Example: A logistics company might offer a “Supply Chain Optimization Checklist” PDF.
3. Set Up a Website Hub
- What to Do: Make your website a lead-capturing machine with clear calls-to-action (CTAs), forms, and optimized content.
- How: Add a blog with SEO-friendly articles targeting keywords your ICP searches (e.g., “best CRM for wholesalers”). Include pop-ups or banners offering your lead magnet. Ensure it’s mobile-friendly and fast-loading.
- Tools: WordPress, Yoast SEO, or Google Analytics to track performance.
- Tip: Use a chatbot (e.g., Drift) to engage visitors and collect info 24/7.
4. Leverage LinkedIn
- What to Do: Connect with prospects and share valuable content on the platform where B2B decision-makers hang out.
- How: Post insights or tips 2-3 times a week, join relevant groups, and send personalized connection requests (e.g., “I saw your post on X and thought you’d find our Y useful”). Run LinkedIn Ads targeting job titles or industries.
- Tools: LinkedIn Sales Navigator for prospecting, Buffer for scheduling posts.
- Example: A SaaS provider might share a case study on LinkedIn about a client’s success, tagging similar businesses.
5. Launch Email Outreach
- What to Do: Build a list and send targeted, personalized emails to warm up leads.
- How: Use your lead magnet sign-ups or buy a compliant list (e.g., via Apollo.io). Craft short emails with a clear value proposition (e.g., “Can I share 3 ways we’ve helped [industry] save time?”). Follow up 2-3 times if no response.
- Tools: Mailchimp for free campaigns, Hunter.io for finding emails.
- Tip: Avoid spammy vibes—focus on solving their problems, not hard selling.
6. Run Paid Ads
- What to Do: Use paid channels to accelerate lead flow with precise targeting.
- How: Set up Google Ads for keywords your ICP searches (e.g., “enterprise payroll solutions”) or LinkedIn Ads aimed at specific job roles. Direct clicks to a landing page with your lead magnet or a demo sign-up.
- Tools: Google Ads, LinkedIn Campaign Manager.
- Budget Tip: Start small (e.g., $10/day) and scale what converts.
7. Host a Webinar
- What to Do: Offer a live or recorded session to showcase expertise and collect registrations.
- How: Pick a topic your ICP cares about (e.g., “2025 Trends in Remote Work Tech”), promote it via email and social, and use a platform like Zoom. Require registration to join.
- Tools: Zoom, Eventbrite for promotion.
- Example: A consulting firm might host “How to Cut B2B Sales Cycles in Half” and pitch their services at the end.
8. Automate and Nurture
- What to Do: Use tools to manage and follow up with leads efficiently.
- How: Set up a CRM (e.g., Salesforce, Pipedrive) to track leads. Automate email drips (e.g., “Day 1: Welcome, Day 3: Case Study, Day 7: Demo Offer”) via tools like ActiveCampaign. Score leads based on engagement to prioritize hot prospects.
- Tip: Personalize automation—generic blasts lose trust.
9. Ask for Referrals
- What to Do: Tap existing clients or partners for introductions.
- How: After a successful deal, ask, “Know anyone else who’d benefit from this?” Offer a small incentive (e.g., a discount) if it fits your model.
- Example: A web dev agency might email a happy client, “We’d love to help more businesses like yours—any referrals?”
10. Measure and Optimize
- What to Do: Track what’s working and tweak accordingly.
- How: Monitor metrics like cost-per-lead, conversion rate, and ROI. Use Google Analytics for website data, ad platforms for campaign stats, and your CRM for sales outcomes. Double down on high performers (e.g., if LinkedIn Ads beat Google, shift budget there).
- Tools: Looker Studio for dashboards.
3 Best B2B Lead Generation Strategies
The best way to generate more sales for your company is to make your B2B lead strategy more relevant to your industry, product, and consumer. Your sales and marketing teams must be willing to try, learn, and apply new ways to get B2B leads. This means exploring multiple strategies until you find what works.
Let’s dive into lead generation strategies for a few popular platforms.
1. Social Media Marketing
The social media platform allows you to improve your lead generation process as it allows for a more targeted approach. 62% of advertisers believe that social networks like LinkedIn have proven to be effective in generating new leads using sales navigator. It provides businesses and products with a platform where they can interact with potential customers.
Also, social media marketing is so effective, especially today that you rarely meet someone who does not have a Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram account. Ads placed on these sites are highly targeted because you can set location, age, gender, and interests among many others.
You can generate lots of leads through social media but it’s not easy and takes a well-thought-out strategy.
Facebook has been a leading producer since its inception. Initially, companies could use outgoing links in their posts and information in their bios to attract strangers to their websites. However, when Facebook Ads was launched in 2007, and its algorithm began to favor accounts using paid advertising, there was a dramatic change in the way businesses use the platform to capture leads.
Twitter has Twitter Lead Gen Cards, allowing you to generate leads directly to tweet without leaving the site. Username, email address, and Twitter username are automatically drawn to the card, and all they have to do is click “Submit” to take the lead.
LinkedIn has been expanding its role in advertising since its earliest days. Also, you can see many LinkedIn alternatives to generate leads online. When it comes to lead generation, LinkedIn creates Lead Gen Forms, which automatically fill users’ profile data when they click on the CTA, making it easier to capture information. LinkedIn is the only popular social media platform today and is widely used by B2B lead generation. The purpose of the platform is to help professionals and business owners connect with their industries. It provides all kinds of features and data to help you do just that.
2. Content Marketing
This is an amazing selection of companies with interesting content to share: articles, videos, and more. To make it work you have to do a lot of research to know what kind of language you should use; what content your clients can enjoy; those who listen to him, etc. Advertisers also report that content marketing has helped them successfully generate demand and earn in the last 12 months.
To get into this habit, read this helpful blog post about creating content for different categories of consumer travel. With less than 100 monthly searches of targeted keywords, Snack Nation, an office snack provider, has struggled to increase B2B leads with its SEO efforts.
Read your team and give them a high-quality copy. This will provide you with great search engine optimization (SEO) for your website. SEO is about increasing page views in a way that is often unintended so that potential leads find your website through search engines. Search engines can be one of the best marketing tools for any business. If you are successful with SEO, you will get new customers quickly and basically for free.
To win an SEO game, you need to have a solid content marketing strategy that provides information to your target audience that will get the most value out of it. Make sure you have a strategy that is not only good for your customers but something that your team can consistently adhere to.
3. PPC – Pay-Per-Click
SEO and content marketing take time. PPC is one of the easiest ways to get results quickly. It can work best if you know who your target audience is. However, it can also be very expensive depending on the industry you are in. When we say pay per click (PPC), we are referring to the ads on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Google receives 3 billion searches a day, making it a major asset in any ad campaign, especially lead gen.
The performance of your PPC campaign depends largely on the seamless user flow, as well as your budget, targeted keywords, and a few other features.
It is also important to remember that most people use Adblock (or other programs) these days, so there is a possibility that they will not even see the ads or other clicks. Or because of GDPR, they may simply opt out of your advertising.
8 Best B2B Lead Generation Tools to Get More Leads in 2025
Every B2B marketer should have a set of tools to assist in their advanced production efforts. With the right B2B lead generation tool, reps can do manual tasks and spend a lot of time closing tracks.
While there are plenty of marketing tools on the market, listed below are key skeletons to solidify the entire B2B leading gen process. If you are looking to automate your processes, get the top lead generation tools.
Let’s take a look at the different tools you can add to your lead gen strategy today:
1. Getcontacts.io
Getcontacts.io is a lead generation platform that provides targeted sales leads and prospects including contact direct dial/mobile numbers.
All leads will be hand-curated and 100% manually researched. It specializes to find e-commerce and amazon seller leads with advanced filters like tech spend, FB ad insight, product average price, website traffic, and more.
It assures over 97% lead accuracy and leads replacement guarantee as well.
2. Zoominfo
ZoomInfo is a global leader in market intelligence solutions. It empowers business-to-business marketing and hiring professionals to achieve their number by combining state-of-the-art technology with unmatched data entry, accuracy, and depth of contact.
In addition to the most accurate B2B contact data in the forum, ZoomInfo profiles provide information about job responsibilities, professional certificates, and honors, job information.
Find out about B2B companies that you won’t find anywhere else. Department size and reporting structure, technical prices, staff, and revenue.
3. Lusha
Lusha is one of the most reliable email marketing tools for B2B and retailers. Lusha provides accurate and accessible communication data through its simple, self-help products.
With Lusha sales and marketing professionals, they can identify, engage and close their targeted prospects.
B2B engagement is based on trust. Lusha helps you build that trust using simple tools which allow you to enrich and verify business profiles with higher confidence. With Lusha, marketing and sales professionals can identify, engage and close prospects.
Lusha also helps business professionals establish quick and authentic communication with their leads, contacts, and candidates.
4. Swordfish AI
Swordfish is one of the most powerful human search engines in the world. Swordfish compiles data from some of the world’s top personal authentication providers such as Hoovers, Dun & Bradstreet, Experian, and hundreds of other independent sources and live feeds to provide the latest, legitimate, and accurate contact information you want.
Get Direct contact information in seconds including cell phone numbers + emails from public profiles. Swordfish is used by the world’s top employers, traders, and investigators in the top defense, technology, and government sectors.
From Fortune 500 Executive recruiters to entrepreneurs only, Swordfish is at your fingertips to make finding a contact more efficient, accurate, and easy to use.
5. Lead For Business- Lfbbd
Lead for Business is a lead generation company that provides eCommerce, B2B leads, and Amazon Seller leads all around the world. Lead for Business will help to connect you with your ideal prospects through its B2B business contact database.
Lead for Business offers a full spectrum of lead generation and data-related services that enable you to get the most accurate results you want in today’s hyper-targeted, buyer-led B2B sales processes. Lfbbd provides eCommerce leads, and Amazon Seller leads b2b leads with accurate contact data.
The whole process helps to reach the right person with the right delivery at the right time. That reduces costs and improves the efficiency of your marketing efforts.
6. SignalHire
Find Valid Emails and Phone Numbers with Signalhire. It Provides guaranteed real-time contact information for employers, marketing professionals, and advertisers.
It also provides personal and work contacts. All emails are available in real-time mode before displaying any on-screen contact details verified by third-party verification tools.
SignalHire is equipped with powerful search filters that allow you to find contact email addresses by a person’s name, title, or location. Find candidates or directly contact decision makers using SignalHire built-in ATS if you do not have the software.
7. Store Leads
Store Leads is one of the best eCommerce databases where you could get targeted eCommerce leads with 30+ data points. The Store Leads database of more than 4.5 million active e-commerce stores is suitable for lead gen, market research, and data enrichment. The information is updated weekly to ensure it is up-to-date.
Store Lead provides marketing agencies and app developers the information needed to succeed. Upgrade your lead website to make the best decision-making decisions. Take advantage of our CRM integration or build your affiliate solution.
The website is updated weekly to ensure that its comprehensive set of features is timely and accurate. Use any combination of 60 search filters to customize the site and find the right audience for you.
8. UpLead
UpLead is a B2B data provider and technology company based in Southern California that provides instant access to millions of certified B2B contacts via direct email addresses.
Search by industry, location, sales volume, number of employees, community versus privacy, contact title, job title, level of management, the technology used, and more to find your next customers.
Build checklists without dodgy data, bad buyers, and low leads. From UpLead you can scrape millions of contacts and sell access to a website without looking for easy accuracy. It helps you build a clean checklist that you can link to your marketing tools and generate new leads in it, right away.
Data accuracy is one of the # 1 priorities for UpLead. So it provides a 95% or more accuracy guarantee.
API and CRM integrations are available.
UpLead is ranked the #1 Lead Intelligence software by G2
Conclusion
B2B lead generation is difficult because you cannot simply copy and paste a strategy that would work for someone else. Things that work like crazy for one business can fall completely into another business.
Creating a proper B2B lead gen strategy is about using the right tools and techniques. Hopefully, this guide will help you discover the best platforms and strategies you can use to drive more opportunities on your website.
Check out our plans or talk to sales to find the plan that would be right for you.
