How do salespeople get noticed in a crowded room? 

That question comes up often when figuring out how to generate B2B leads. For 42.1% of B2B professionals, finding the right strategy, tactic or offer to get leads’ attention is the ultimate challenge. Wanna know how to generate leads and make a big wave? Read our 26 methods below.  

 20 Ways to Generate Leads for B2B Sales with Attention-Grabbing Tactics

1) Retrace your steps with old leads

You probably have tens of thousands of old leads sitting in your CRM. If you’ve been regularly clearing out unqualified leads, these should be leads who weren’t ready to buy before. Now’s the time to re-engage them. 

Retrace your steps and find any mishandling with old leads. Maybe you didn’t follow up enough or pitched the wrong package; to grab their attention, give them a special offer to come back. 

This should be the first method you try in your B2B lead generation process. 

2) Ask customers for referrals

Referrals sent by happy, loyal customers are the most likely to convert into sales. Learning how to generate leads for B2B sales from your customers’ networks takes time and trust. You want to slowly build relationships with them until you’re comfortable asking directly for a referral or having them sign up for a referral program. Aim to ask for referrals each week, and to stand out from other reps, ask the referrer for a personal introduction or if it’s okay to mention their name in a call or email.

3) Work with B2B micro-influencers

A micro-influencer is a respected expert in your industry with a loyal following of 1,000-100,000 people. What sets smaller influencers apart from bigger names is the higher conversion rate they enjoy with their audiences. To generate leads with them, just ask if they’re willing to promote your product or service. Of course, make sure your offer fits their current projects and brand, and offer them kickback on every sale. Compensating micro-influencers will instantly set you apart from the hoard of brands who ask for free promotion.

4) Join or build a business referral network

A business referral network is a group of professionals in non-competing businesses in the same industry who share leads. Say you sell mobile app development services to educational institutions; join or build a network of other businesses who sell to schools. The best part is you benefit from their lead scoring information and other insights that may be unavailable to you. 

5) Run your own online community

What draws B2B professionals to online communities?

  • High-value professionals are in the group
  • You provide resources to make their job easier
  • The group is active daily

Creating your own online community means you can control the conversations, attract the right people, and freely pitch your services.

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6) Update your ideal customer profile 

The more you learn how to generate B2B leads, the more you’ll see how useful a B2B lead enrichment tool like Lusha Extension can be for updating your ICP. It’s a multi-browser extension that finds contact and company information when you’re in Gmail, on Salesforce, LinkedIn, and more. Each time you use Lusha Extension, you’ll discover new data about your leads to improve their ICP, like industry verticals and company revenue range. This, in turn, helps you catch new attributes you didn’t see before and fine-tune your prospecting.

7) Be everywhere your leads are

Generating leads takes a degree of eavesdropping and spying. It’s just like going to a party—you want to know who else will be there so you know how to dress and fit in. If you want to know how to generate leads for B2B sales, be everywhere your leads are hanging out online. 

This way, you can study how your leads communicate on different channels and in different situations, which will only help you send outreach messages and get noticed more.

8) Dominate ONE social media platform

How to generate B2B leads the right way? Don’t spread yourself thin across too many channels. You’ll always find one goldmine platform that brings a bounty of leads into your pipeline, so aim to dominate on that platform. Carve out time every day to spend there (individually or as a team), making a name for yourself, building brand recognition and a high engagement level over the competition. 

9) Get in front of the camera already!

By now, you know video content gets more views, engagement and shares than other formats. Yet, so many salespeople don’t take the time to get on camera. If a prospect gets hundreds of sales emails but you’re able get seen in a video on social media, who will stand out? If you’re wondering where to start, try Q&A videos that answer some of your leads’ #1 questions.

How do you generate B2B leads? Write SEO content for your website or get backlinks on other publications.

10) Take it to the next level with your SEO

You’ve probably been told time and time again that you can ‘turn your website into a lead generation machine.’ But do you know what that entails? To transform your site into a traffic-driving engine, the first B2B lead generation strategy to focus on is search engine optimization. It’s one of the most basic—yet often underused—ways to generate leads month after month for free.

Your website is your business’s home online; it’s where your leads come to visit, check out your offer, and see if they want to stay. Now, would you invite a guest over to your house when you have a sore throat, hacking cough, and blazing fever? Only if you’re crazy! It’s poor etiquette and nearly impossible to entertain guests and make them feel comfortable when you’re sick.

Here are two issues that could be keeping your website unhealthy:

  • You don’t invest in an SEO expert: Only a specialist or an agency can conduct a good SEO audit. You can read as many ‘SEO for beginners’ guides as you want, but it’s too easy to make mistakes that will cost your business new leads. An expert can root out tricky technical issues like navigation and site structure and website speed that are making it impossible for your site to rank in search engines or be used with ease.
  • You have no documented SEO strategy: When you work with an expert, they’ll also review the SEO strategy you have in place, and if you don’t have one, they’ll help create one specific to your business and customers that outlines the best keywords, content strategy and on-page optimization to bring qualified leads.

This B2B lead generation strategy is a great starting point to gain a clear picture of your website’s health, help you discover new ways to rank higher in search, and get more leads knocking at your front door.

11) Go on a business podcast 

Podcast guests can choose shows from all over the world to speak on. The average listener tunes in 7 hours per week, and brands that advertise their products and services on business podcasts enjoy an average 14% rise in purchase intent, says MusicOomph. Make a list of the top 30 podcasts in your industry, start building relationships with the hosts, and most importantly, offer a special discount to their audience as an incentive to bring in more listeners.

12) Perfect your sales cadence

If you want to learn how to generate leads for B2B sales, you need to perfect your sales cadence. The perfect cadence masters timing, how many messages you send, and how you send them to close an appointment or deal. To design your sales cadence, ask three questions to leads:

  • “What time can I contact you?”
  • “Which channel do you prefer?”
  • “What subject line will stick out to you?”

It’s also important to maximize your speed-to-lead ratio. It’s how much time elapses between when a potential customer expresses interest in a product or service and when they’re contacted by a sales representative. This metric is important because it’s one way to measure how efficiently a sales team is able to generate leads and convert them into customers.

A high speed-to-lead ratio shows that reps are quickly identifying and following up with potential customers, which should lead to increased sales. Conversely, a low ratio suggests that the company is struggling to generate quality leads or convert them into paying customers.

13) Be direct in cold emails

When leads open your email, they should stop dead in their tracks. The email should introduce you and your company in one sentence, then immediately get to the heart of the email—them. Rambling about why your company is great and what you had for breakfast this morning will have them hitting the delete button in seconds. Focus on one relevant issue in your sales pitch. Also, add an email signature with a clear headshot to make it memorable!

14) Try competitive cold calling

Cold-calling competitions are a thing, in case you didn’t know. They juice up the typical mundane morning cold-calling session by turning it into a game. Here’s how it works: get the sales team together and try to beat your cold calling numbers. You can split up into groups and offer a prize. Cold-calling competitions can double or even triple your usual haul of leads and scheduled appointments. 

15) Nail your follow-up voicemails

Half of all cold calls will go straight to voicemail. If you want to know how to generate leads for B2B sales, don’t dial a cold call without a voicemail script ready. This is too important to wing. 

Prepare a 30-second script that references who you are and what you’re offering. A response-worthy voicemail ends with a question and call to action, such as “Is this a problem you’re dealing with?Call me back and let me know.”

16) Host a webinar or workshop series

B2B professionals love webinars, but they’re constantly bombarded with ads and emails for one-off webinars and workshops. A weekly series is more labor-intensive, but can add millions of dollars to your pipeline if done correctly. There are multiple advantages to doing a series: you can nurture them week after week, and you can plan your topics to go into more advanced lessons and solve bigger problems to build excitement. 

The team should decide how to generate B2B leads while promoting their values.

17) Get a little controversial

Many big brands are known because they take a big stand on issues. Climate change, bullying, diversity, you name it! If you find out your company supports any social causes, you can weave that into your content and offer. 86% of consumers believe that companies should take a stand on social issues, according to Shelton Group. This strategy might push some leads away, but your courage to speak up will draw more attention to your campaigns. 

18) Master LinkedIn prospecting

It’s safe to say there’s no way to generate B2B sales leads without LinkedIn. But many reps on the platform haven’t explored all of its possibilities. LinkedIn takes dedication to learn, which is why you should take their Sales Navigator course to supercharge your lead generation efforts. 

Most importantly, use Lusha Extension when you’re prospecting on LinkedIn. You’ll gain access to your leads’ current business email addresses (sometimes multiple emails if they have more than one job), phone number, and job role among other data that’s not easily accessible through LinkedIn. 

19) Get on Twitter

According to Twitter, 93% of users are planning to buy something from a small- or medium-sized business they follow. The platform often has a relaxed and casual vibe, so it’s not the place for a hard pitch, but a place to start and contribute to work-related discussions and strengthen your relationships. Our tip: create a branded business account, follow your leads, and join in on trending, relevant topics. 

20) Answer questions thoughtfully on Quora

Quora is a question-and-answer platform with over 100 million users. Quora answers can commonly be found on the first page of Google search results. The secret to turning Quora into a lead-generation machine is to thoroughly answer relevant questions your leads are looking for and give a link back to your website. Really show your expertise, mention your product or service, and include expert quotes to get more thumbs up and views to your page.

21) Put more thought into your lead capture forms

Lead capture forms play a pivotal role in generating leads. In fact, when designed intuitively, they can double the number of leads you receive. When visitors come to your site and sign up for your email list, read your blog, or download any content, you need a way to prompt them to hand over their contact information. But an unfit lead capture form will actually do the opposite. There’s a few reasons:

  • The form is too long: The fewer fields you have, the more leads you’ll generate, so keep your contact form to 3-5 fields. When asked to answer more questions, many leads will grow annoyed and opt-out of your offer.
  • You don’t ask the right questions: Besides the standard phone number and email address, a useful lead capture form includes at least one question that helps qualify your lead, such as “What sales problem do you want to us to cover in the webinar?”
  • The form isn’t in enough places: Your signup form shouldn’t only live on your home page, but on every high-converting page like your landing pages, about page, inside your blog posts and anywhere that gets traffic!
  • You don’t test conversions: Run A/B split tests to see which design, length, and CTA bring you the most conversions. If you don’t, you’ll never be able to make informed decisions to strengthen your strategy.

SEO is always the first area to improve with any B2B lead generation strategy

22) Scale back your marketing channels

The annual fight to secure enough marketing budget sometimes feels like you’re on the battlefield at Gettysburg. Marketing teams often fail to get enough money for their B2B lead generation strategy because they haven’t or can’t prove the ROI of past activities. Constrained to such a tight budget to execute their strategy, marketing and sales teams fall flat when trying to generate leads from multiple channels. 

If this is you, give yourself a better shot at attracting more leads by focusing on a single channel and maximizing all its potential. We know you feel pressure to be everywhere at once, but if you don’t have enough resources to give every platform a fair shot, it makes more sense to stick to a few.

Working on multiple channels at once lowers your focus and productivity, especially when you lack the proper budget, team size and time availability. Neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley states you get more work done, become more creative, have less stress, and get better results when you focus on one thing at a time. Imagine how many leads you’re losing when you bite off more than you can chew.

Whether you’re trying to get leads from LinkedIn or Facebook, this B2B lead generation strategy is all about:

  • Utilizing every feature the channel has to offer
  • Training your team to become experts 
  • Not wasting your lead gen budget
  • Putting in 100% effort to maximize the number of leads you get

23) Get the entire company generating leads on LinkedIn

People buy from people. That’s why sales reps who put in the time on LinkedIn—contributing insights daily; showing their unique personality; and building a community around shared values, ideas, and goals—make a killing on the platform. And notice we said ‘sales reps,’ not ‘companies’; company pages on LinkedIn, unless they’re a household name like Google, usually fail to receive engagement and attract a following. 

That’s why the more people you have social selling, the more successful your B2B lead generation strategy will be. Sales leader and coach Todd Cohen says it best: “Forget your job title, everyone is in sales.” 

Every single department in your company should be using LinkedIn to generate leads. From sales, marketing and customer service to accounting all the way to the CEO, absolutely everyone has a unique perspective into your product or service and can generate leads that only they can reach.

Here’s some tips for LinkedIn lead generation:

  • Post often: You don’t always have to pump out content daily, but everyone should aim to engage their connections at least once a week.
  • Add the right connections: When you receive or send a new connection request, make sure they fit your ideal customer profile. To gain valuable information on the person, the team can install Lusha Extension Chrome Extension. Lusha works on LinkedIn to not only find your prospect’s personal phone number and email, but also reveals details on their job role, industry, and specializations that may not be written in their profile. Having best lead generation tools available stops you from adding the wrong people.
  • Clean up your current connections: LinkedIn is only effective if you have ideal leads on your list. Before you even start, have your team clean up by removing connections that don’t match your ideal customer profile.
  • Train the team in LinkedIn: LinkedIn offers a free online course on lead generation as well as one for Sales Navigator which will help anyone (even non-reps) become a better social seller and generate leads.

A B2B lead generation strategy should focus heavily on ways to build organic traffic.

24) Buck the trends with content marketing

You’ve probably created your fair share of content to attract inbound leads. And that’s a smart idea; content marketing has one of the highest ROIs out of all B2B lead generation strategies. Not only that, but the leads that come in through this method are automatically more qualified, engaged, and educated. However, the biggest challenge in content marketing is adding new information, ideas, and insights so it stands out in the sea of content.

At the dawn of the content marketing gold rush, it was easy to create irresistible articles, white papers, infographics, or case studies full of fresh insights. Today, there’s so much content in the B2B space, you’re lucky if 100 or more people get to consume half of what you create. 

So how do you steal the show and get people interested in your offer?

  • Find the missing link: Discovering the gap in content means listening closely to your customers. If you can tune in, they’re already telling you what they need to see and giving you insight into the nuances of their problems. If your offer is special, so are your customers’ needs, so there’s no reason for your content to look like anyone else’s.
  • Dare to be different: Keep an eagle eye on your top 5 competitors. See what content is getting the most engagement and interest for them. Then, see how you can reimagine it into something better. Animalz, a content marketing agency, is a great example. They noticed how much noise there was about content marketing, how much content their competitors had written that added very little value to their customers and just sat on their websites collecting dust. Animalz decided to start blogging about the topic—but instead of giving the usual how-to guides, they wrote gems like “Top of Funnel Content Creates All Kinds of Problems” and “Your Blog Is Not a Publication.” Animalz’ blog is full of articles that go against the grain and challenge traditional best practices in the industry. When you bring something new to the table, you’ll attract more B2B professionals who are looking for new ideas to grow and become more productive.

25) Discover your ‘smash hit’ content ideas

The day will come for each sales rep or marketer when you run out of ideas or need to scale down content creation. But never fear—if you have evergreen content (topics that are always relevant to your audience), you can talk about it over and over from various angles and in different formats without boring your audience. 

Mariah Carey’s 1994 holiday song “All I Want for Christmas Is You” has soared up the Billboard charts every December since its release. Even if you’re not familiar with her other music, you’ve heard this song; it’s the quintessential Christmas song loved by folks of all ages, and each year it grows Carey’s fanbase and brings her more sales, accolades, and money. 

You want evergreen content that can be played over and over like a timeless Christmas song, so you work less and it generates new leads each year on autopilot.

In this B2B lead generation strategy, reuse your content ideas that will always be relevant. That way, you’ll only have to make a few touch-ups and repurpose it to your audience. It will keep you at the top of search engines for years and continually drive traffic to your website.

Key Takeaways

  • Work on your approach: Always consider what everyone else is doing, and do something special to stand out.
  • Generating leads requires variety: B2B professionals are everywhere online. Some places they like to talk business, while others they prefer casual convos. Be there and get noticed.
  • You need a B2B lead enrichment tool: You can’t learn how to generate B2B leads without first knowing everything about them, can you? That’s why Lusha Extension gives you your best shot at getting accurate and hard-to-find company information that’ll help you improve your ideal customer profile. Get started with Lusha Extension.

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