10 Proven Strategies to Find B2B Leads
Don’t worry, this isn’t another generic intro about how “B2B leads are the lifeblood of any business” and “essential for sales success.”
You already know that lead gen is important. Whether you’re a bootstrapped startup founder wearing multiple hats or a junior marketer at an international SaaS enterprise, your company’s very existence hinges on your ability to drive consistent and high-quality leads.
Lead gen will never be easy. But you can make it significantly less difficult by basing your strategy on the right mix of techniques and bolstering them with well-chosen tools.
If you’re new to B2B lead generation, this guide will help you build your system from the ground up. If you’re a seasoned pro, you’ll find tips and suggestions to further refine and develop your approach.
Sound good? To quote perhaps the most overused ChatGPTism, let’s “dive” in.
What Is B2B Lead Generation?
B2B lead generation is the process of identifying and engaging potential customers. Lead generation focuses on the initial awareness or “top of funnel” phase of the customer acquisition journey.
There are several categories of leads. Marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) and sales-qualified leads (SQLs) are the most important. A marketing-qualified lead is a lead who has shown enough interest in your product or service—such as by responding to an ad or reaching out for more information—to be seen as having a reasonable likelihood of becoming a customer.
At this stage, lead generation ends and lead nurturing begins. Lead nurturing is usually the responsibility of the sales team (although marketing teams may play a role alongside sales reps). A lead transitions from an MQL to an SQL when they have been through the nurturing process and are ready to buy.
Lead generation is important because it’s the foundation of any successful sales funnel. It’s directly tied to baseline metrics like revenue, growth and profitability. B2B companies with effective lead generation strategies generate 133% more revenue compared to “average” companies that don’t fully engage potential buyers.
How to Find B2B Leads That Boost Your Business
Without further ado, let’s look at the strategies themselves. Keep in mind that the idea isn’t to apply everything blindly. Rather, you should find the right mix for your target audience and product.
1. Find B2B Leads via LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn has one of the most complete, most accurate B2B lead databases. 89% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for lead generation, and 62% say its effective over the long term.
Here’s how to generate leads with LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
Purchase a paid LinkedIn plan if you don’t already have one.
Use advanced search filters to target specific industries, company sizes, job titles, etc. based on your ideal customer profile (ICP).
Use LinkedIn's InMail feature to reach out directly to B2B prospects and decision-makers with a personalized message that clearly outlines your value proposition.
Follow up, again keeping everything personalized.
Here’s a sample template based on the three Cs (compliment, case study, call to action) of successful outreach:
Hi {prospect name},
Love what you’re doing at {prospect company name}. I was particularly impressed by your {recent prospect company achievement).
At {your company name}, we provide {your service}. We recently helped one of our clients achieve {client result).
We’d love to do the same for you. Are you free for a quick call this week?
And here’s what an example looks like in practice with Microsoft as an example:
Hi Bill,
Love what you’re doing at Microsoft. I was particularly impressed by your latest VR headset release.
At Artisan, we provide fully automated, AI-driven lead gen. We recently helped one of our clients triple their VR sales.
We’d love to do the same for you. Are you free for a quick call this week?
2. Start a Customer Referral Program
Research shows that referral programs are among the most effective low-cost lead-gen strategies, with 86% of companies that use referral programs experiencing growth.
If you don’t already have a referral program, you’re potentially missing out on Everest-size mountains of inexpensive leads.
Here’s how to launch a referral program:
Decide on an attractive referral incentive. Incentivize existing customers to refer new leads by offering discounts, rewards, or bonuses. Offer an incentive to both the referrer and the recipient.
Build referral infrastructure. Create referral program landing pages and track referrals through your CRM. While there’s significant variability between industries, data shows that a referral rate (the percentage of your total sales that come from referrals) of around 10% is healthy.
Contact existing customers. Foster strong relationships with customers to encourage advocacy and referrals. Include referral emails in your email onboarding sequences and newsletter broadcasts.
Test and refine. You’re unlikely to create a perfect referral program right off the bat, and that’s OK. Continuous A/B testing of your incentives, landing pages, and email outreach ensures ongoing improvement.
3. Find and Reach Qualified Leads With AI Sales Tools
AI sales tools streamline the process of finding and reaching qualified leads through automated lead scoring, data enrichment, personalized outreach, and hands-off optimization.
AI sales tools also allow salespeople to focus on high-value activities like pursuing the most promising potential leads, which is the key to improving conversion rates and, ultimately, revenue.
Let’s take the example of Artisan, an advanced lead-gen AI tool, to see how you would prospect in this way:
Define your ICPs in detail to lay the basis for personalization and segmentation.
Create outreach templates, allowing AI to add a high level of lead personalization.
Let Artisan consult its lead database of over 300 million leads to put together a highly relevant list of targets.
Use AI-based insights to improve your response and conversion rates with ongoing outreach optimization and lead scoring.
Tools like Artisan are powerful for two main reasons.
First, they allow for a largely hands-off approach, with AI taking over many manual tasks such as outreach personalization and lead filtering.
Second, they are excellent for scaling. The size of Artisan’s database and the unlimited capacity of its AI engine means you can ramp up your lead gen in a fraction of the time it might otherwise take.
Ready to find perfect-fit B2B leads on autopilot? Supercharge your sales with Ava, Artisan’s AI business development representative. Experience fully automated, intelligent outreach that fills your pipeline quicker than you can say “lead gen!” Get in touch now.
4. Engage Prospects Through Social Media
LinkedIn is the top platform for B2B marketing, with YouTube coming in second. Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter are also powerful, pointing towards the need for an omnichannel approach.
Here’s how to create content that hits those all-important engagement buttons:
Understand the platform: The type of longer-form written content that works on LinkedIn isn’t going to fly with Instagram audiences familiar with snappy video shorts. Platform-specific expertise is a must for your marketing team.
Focus on value: Social media users are savvy. Always keep the question, “Where can I provide value?” at the forefront of your mind. Thought-leadership insights, original studies, and news commentary are all good contenders for content. Think in terms of your customers’ pain points.
Connect with influencers: Share and share alike. Connect with and redistribute the content of other influencers, widening your audience and opening the door to potential collabs.
Use hashtags: Yes, hashtags are still valuable. Use them appropriately and they can give your content a small lift.
Engage: There’s nothing that screams, “I don’t care,” than a comments section without any replies from the poster. Show your audience you value them by responding to their comments and shares.
Don’t be scared to sell: Being over salesy is one of the surest ways to alienate your audience. But there’s a risk of going too far in the opposite direction, too. Around one in every five posts can include a call to action.
5. Consider Using Web Scraping Tools to Find Qualified Leads
Web scraping has become something of a dirty phrase in digital marketing. This is perhaps understandable because of how open to all sorts of evil spammery it is.
However, scraping can be done ethically, safely, and legally. Artisan, which collects data that’s shared with consent, is one example of a company operating ethically in this space.
Here are four tips to conduct web scraping safely:
Use tools like Artisan, Octoparse, Import.io, and ParseHub to extract contact information from websites. You don’t need any technical expertise to do this.
Ensure compliance with data privacy regulations and ethical guidelines when scraping data. For example, GDPR applies in the EU. Generally speaking, third-party providers will take care of regulatory responsibilities.
Clean and verify scraped data to maintain accuracy and relevance. Ensuring the accuracy of data can have a significant effect on your outreach delivery rate.
Test the effectiveness of different databases. Not all databases are equal and there can be significant differences in lead quality and accuracy. Some databases are better suited to specific industries.
6. Leverage SEO-Focused Content Marketing to Attract Leads
Companies with blogs produce an average of 67% more leads per month than companies that don’t have active blogs.
In addition, well-executed SEO strategies can drive an ROI of up to 1000%. Not bad by any stretch of the imagination.
Here’s how to make SEO-based content marketing work for you:
Diversify your strategy: Create high-quality, informative content in a range of formats. Short blog posts, long pillar articles, case studies, ebooks, and whitepapers all have a place.
Target “sweet spot” KWs: While it’s important not to overestimate the competitiveness of the keywords you can rank for, going for the easiest option isn’t always best, either. Find the sweet spot KWs you can rank for given your domain’s authority.
Put quality first: EEAT has become one of the most well-known Google acronyms among content marketers. It stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust. Prioritize these factors when creating content.
Take care of technical SEO: Keyword density, featured snippets, content length, meta descriptions, internal links—all are important for rankings. Content quality is vital. But don’t overlook the technicalities.
Tailor your CTA to the relevant stage of your funnel: A page with high buyer intent, like “Best lawyer to get me out of prison now”, should push visitors to book a call or buy a service immediately. Pages with lower buyer intent, such as “What's the difference between a divorce and criminal lawyer,” should have a softer call to action, such as the opportunity to download a free guide in exchange for an email.
7. Generate Leads by Re-Engaging Your Email List
Your email list likely contains at least some unengaged subscribers. These are potential customers, and it often doesn’t take much to reconnect.
So, how can you turn uninterested subscribers into sizzling hot leads? Enter the re-engagement campaign…
Here’s a quick five-step process for re-engaging inactive subscribers:
Segment your inactive B2B subscribers where possible, such as by age, location, or sign-up date.
Send them a tailored offer such as a voucher or free gift.
Automate follow-up reminder emails.
Nurture the leads who have shown initial interest with further personalized emails and offers.
Use a clear call to action prompting them to trial your product or book a call with the sales team.
8. Use Cold Outreach to Find New B2B Leads
Does the thought of cold outreach send a shiver down your spine? If you’re put off by the idea, you’re not alone.
However, cold outreach, especially email, works. Studies show that the average response rate of around 17% for personalized emails of the kind Artisan provides is .
Here are some key tips to help you get the most out of cold outreach:
Take a multi-channel approach: The best approaches leverage multiple channels, with email outreach, social media outreach, and cold calling all accounted for.
Automate wherever possible: Cold outreach requires scale. As such, AI and automation tools can help to enhance efficiency by scheduling and automating email sequences and crafting personalized messages based on prospect data and behavior.
Personalize, personalize, personalize: Personalization is crucial. You don’t need to hand-write every message with a fountain pen. A good template with ample space for your automation tool to add individual elements is more than enough.
A tool like Artisan is perfect for cold email automation. The AI functionality, unmatched by any competitors, allows for a level of personalization much greater than traditional if-then automations.
9. Host Webinars for B2B Sales Leads
Webinars have mahoosive (that’s the technical term) conversion rates, and they’re excellent for turning cold leads into hot ones. In fact, 73% of B2B marketers say that webinars are their “most effective” lead gen strategy.
Here are some tips for hosting next-level webinars:
Ask your existing audience, which is likely a sample of your broader market, what webinar topics they’re interested in.
Always collect registration data to follow up with attendees afterward.
Include a clear call to action at the end of webinars, whether to sign up to your service or book a sales call.
Make webinars available for a period after they’ve ended to overcome timezone constraints.
Repurpose webinar content into other formats like blog posts and infographics to extend reach.
Some marketers worry that webinars represent a complex technical challenge. A few years ago, this might have been true. However, with the prevalence of easy-to-use webinar software, this is no longer the case.
10. Optimize Website Landing Pages to Increase B2B Leads
When does a website visitor become a lead?
We’re sure there are lots of technical business-school answers to this question. But we prefer a simpler working definition: a visitor becomes a lead when they pass on their contact details.
Here are three tips for using landing pages to turn visitors into leads:
Create dedicated landing pages for specific marketing campaigns and ads targeting B2B leads (there’s nothing worse than a landing page totally out of sync with an advert).
A/B test landing page elements such as headlines, CTAs, and forms to improve conversion rates on an ongoing basis.
Use analytics tools to identify and replicate your best landing pages and associated offers.
Ensure that technical on-site elements like your page structure and navigation are easy to use.
Always include a clear, straightforward CTA on your landing pages, whether a download link for a lead magnet or the option to book a sales call.
Best Tools to Supplement Your B2B Lead Generation Strategies
Once you’ve got an ironclad marketing strategy, you need tools to help you execute.
Most marketers rely on an integrated tech stack rather than a single tool. That said, the trend in recent years has been towards multifunctional all-in-one platforms rather than narrow “point” solutions. While you’ll have additional tools for supporting tasks, most of your sales prospecting will likely take place in a single app.
We recommend that you try the different solutions on offer to get a sense of which one best fits your business.
Here’s a quick overview of the top lead generation tools to get you started:
1. Artisan
Artisan is an all-in-one outbound sales and lead generation platform that puts AI at the core of its functionality. Artisan’s personal assistant, Ava, builds personalized campaigns and populates them with leads from the 300 million-strong database. It uses the latest AI capabilities to intelligently automate all aspects of lead filtering, outreach, and optimization.
Features
Database of 300 million B2B contacts (including technographic data, e-commerce data, and more)
Automated campaign creation and management
A proprietary waterfall that selects optimal personalization for each lead by scanning multiple data sourcesIntelligent personalization
Email warmup and deliverability enhancement
Price
Artisan has a custom pricing model to ensure customers get the best possible value. Contact a sales representative to get a personalized quote.
Supercharge your sales with Ava, Artisan’s AI BDR. Experience fully automated, intelligent outreach that fills your pipeline quicker than you can say “lead gen!” Get in touch now and see the power of AI-driven outreach for yourself.
2. Lemlist
Lemlist is a well-known cold email outreach tool offering comprehensive features for building lead target lists, automating email marketing outreach, and following up with interested leads.
Features
Lead database
Email automation
Email warmup
AI support for sequences
Price
Lemlist offers a range of plans. Plans are priced between $39/month per user and $159/month per user.
3. Hunter.io
Hunter.io is perhaps best known as an email search engine. The platform now includes email automation and outreach tools and is well-suited to smaller B2B businesses.
Features
Leads database (with limited monthly searches)
Campaign management
Integrations with third-party tools
Price
The Starter plan is $49/month, and the Business plan is $499/month. A limited free plan is available.
4. Snov.io
Snov.io is a sales enablement and outreach tool that emphasizes automation. It has a large database of leads—though users have a set number of credits every month—and some AI support.
Features
Lead database with monthly credit limits
Automated outreach management
AI email writer
Price
Snov.io pricing is on a moving scale (starting at $30/month) based on the number of lead credits users want. A free trial is available.
It’s Time to Say Goodbye…
If you’re not seeing the results you want from your lead gen efforts, don’t despair. Putting together a successful strategy takes time and a lot of trial and error. With perseverance, you’ll gradually build a consistent and scalable lead generation machine.
If you are already generating leads successfully, you can expect ever-improving results as you continue to test and refine.
The value of automation and prospecting tools can’t be overstated. A platform like Artisan helps you at every stage of the lead gen and sales process, from finding contact details to sending personalized follow-ups. Even better, many routine tasks are automated, allowing you to focus on what’s most important.
Now, it's time to start finding those hungry customers and filling your sales pipeline…
Ready to supercharge your sales? Experience fully automated, intelligent outreach that fills your pipeline quicker than you can say “lead gen!” Get in touch now and see the power of AI-driven outreach for yourself.