Lead generation tactics: the ones that produce B2B leads, what each costs, and how to pick three.

What lead generation tactics are, and how they differ from strategy

Lead generation tactics are the specific, repeatable methods a business uses to find potential buyers and get a way to contact them. Publishing a guide that ranks for a question buyers search is a tactic. Sending a five-touch cold email sequence to a list of people who fit the profile is a tactic.

Running a webinar, offering a template, opening a free trial, asking customers for referrals, running LinkedIn ads: each is a tactic, with its own cost, its own speed and its own kind of lead.

The strategy is the layer above: who the buyer is, whether to lean inbound or outbound, which two or three tactics fit the company's stage, and what happens to a lead once it exists.

Lists of lead generation tactics run to thirteen, twenty or thirty items, and most companies read them the wrong way, as a menu to order everything from.

The useful reading is as a catalog of what is possible, from which a small number are chosen for a reason.

This page gives the catalog with the trade-offs, then the method for choosing, because a company running eight tactics badly produces fewer opportunities than one running two well.

Inbound tactics and outbound tactics

Every lead generation tactic in marketing or sales is one of two kinds, and the split is the first decision in any lead generation strategy.

Inbound tactics make the buyer come to you: they search, read, watch, download, sign up, and at some point identify themselves. Outbound tactics take you to the buyer: an email, a message, a call, a booth, an ad shown to a list.

Inbound leads arrive warmer and less predictably; outbound leads arrive on a schedule and colder. The two are not rivals.

Outbound to companies whose people visited the pricing page is warmer than outbound to a list; inbound from a company a rep wrote to last quarter closes faster because the name is familiar. A strategy usually holds one of each.

Lead generation tactics for marketing teams and for sales teams

Most lead generation tactics belong to one team. Marketing owns the inbound tactics: the content marketing that ranks in search, the social media posts and video that build an audience, the webinars, the lead magnets, the paid campaigns, the landing pages and the email nurture that follows.

Sales owns the outbound tactics: building the list of prospects from the ideal customer profile, the cold email sequences, LinkedIn prospecting, calls, and the follow-up process that turns a reply into a meeting.

The handoff between them, the point where a marketing lead becomes a sales lead, is where most lead generation strategies leak, because the two teams measure different things and neither one owns the leak.

The fix is a shared process and shared data. One definition of a qualified lead, written down. One CRM where every tactic's leads land with their source.

One report that follows leads from the first touch to the opportunity, so that the marketing team sees which content produced prospects who bought and the sales team sees which outbound triggers produced meetings.

A business that runs marketing tactics and sales tactics as separate programs ends up with two dashboards that both look fine and a pipeline that does not; a business that runs them as one funnel can tell which tactic to fund next.

Fourteen B2B lead generation tactics, compared

The table gives each lead generation tactic's kind, the intent a lead usually carries when it arrives, the cost pattern, and how long it takes to produce. The columns matter more than the list; a tactic is chosen by how those four fit the company, not by how often it appears in articles.

What each tactic needs to work

Lead generation campaigns, and the process behind every tactic

A tactic becomes a campaign when it has a target audience, a start and end date, a budget of money or hours, and a number it is meant to produce. The process behind a lead generation campaign is the same whichever tactic it uses.

Marketing or sales defines the target audience from the ideal customer profile and builds the list or the targeting. Someone creates the asset: the page, the email sequence, the webinar, the ad and its landing page.

The campaign runs through its channel for long enough to produce a sample. The leads land in the CRM with the campaign as their source, get enriched and scored, and go to a person.

And the data comes back as a report: leads, qualified leads, opportunities and cost, by campaign, which is what makes the next choice of tactics a decision rather than a guess.

Most lead generation strategies fail at the third and fifth steps. The campaign is stopped before it has produced a sample, or it runs without a source field, so the business never learns which campaigns created the customers.

A team that runs three campaigns a quarter with clean data learns more about its market in a year than a team that runs twenty without it.

How to choose lead generation tactics for your company, step by step

1. Write the ideal customer profile

   Who buys, at which company, with what problem. A tactic that reaches the wrong buyer is not a tactic, it is spend.

2. Find out where those buyers research

   Search, peers, LinkedIn and other social media, events, review sites, communities. Ask ten customers how they found you and what they read first.

3. Pick one fast tactic and one compounding tactic

   Outbound or paid for leads this quarter; search content or referrals for leads next year. A trial or a lead magnet if the product allows one.

4. Build the capture and the response

   A form or a reply path, enrichment, routing to a person, a first message within the hour for inbound and a cadence for outbound.

5. Run each tactic long enough to judge it

   A cold email tactic needs a few hundred sends; a content tactic needs months. Judging before that measures the setup, not the tactic.

6. Measure to opportunities, then prune

   Leads, qualified leads and opportunities per tactic, cost per opportunity. Keep the two or three that produce, and stop the rest.

Tactics by company stage

The right lead generation tactics change with the stage of the business.

A new company with no traffic and few customers runs outbound, because it is the only tactic that produces this quarter, and starts search content at the same time so that it produces next year.

A company with its first customers adds referrals and reviews, which cost little and carry more trust than anything the company says about itself.

A company with traffic adds lead magnets, chat and a trial, because inbound visitors are now worth capturing. A company with a sales team and budget adds paid ads for launches and retargeting, events where its buyers gather, and partners who share its market.

At every stage the count stays at two or three tactics run properly, and the tactic being added replaces one that stopped producing.

How to measure lead generation tactics

Published lead generation benchmarks for these numbers come from vendor surveys of their own users and vary by market, deal size and list quality. They are useful for knowing what to measure and useless as targets. The comparison that decides budget is between your own tactics, on the same period, in the same CRM.

Mistakes that make a tactic look like it failed

The mistakes below make a lead generation tactic look like it failed when the process around it did.

• Running eight tactics at once, none with an owner.
• Judging cold email after fifty sends or search content after six weeks.
• Sending inbound leads to a queue instead of a person.
• Gating content that should attract traffic.
• Counting leads instead of opportunities, which rewards the tactics that produce the most names.
• Buying a list and calling that a tactic.
• Copying a competitor's tactic without their buyer.
• Stopping a compounding tactic because it produced nothing in the first quarter, which is the quarter it was never going to produce in.

In a sequence

Outbound lead generation tactics feed the 10-day cadence directly: a list of prospects, a trigger, and five touches.

The email below is touch 1 of a cold email tactic that runs on a hiring trigger, one of the cheapest and most reliable signals in B2B, and it names the trigger, makes one observation about what it implies, and asks one question.

Subject: The two SDR openings at {{company}}

Hi {{firstName}},

Saw the two SDR roles went up last week. The first quarter with new reps is usually where the follow-up touches get dropped, because nobody has written down which ones to send.

We keep a one-page cadence that new reps run from day one, five touches over ten days. Want a copy for the new hires? A one-line reply is enough.

{{senderName}}

Frequently asked questions