B2B Lead Generation Ideas
Seven B2B lead generation ideas for senior sales and marketing managers.
B2B lead generation is hard. Finely tuned, well-funded marketing operations can forecast inbound lead volume with a high degree of confidence but performance is almost always non-linear and choppy. And no wonder, B2B sales cycles are notoriously long, complicated, and unpredictable — and have even “grown more complex” in recent years, according to Forrester.
Indeed, our clients are reporting B2B sales cycles 2-3X longer in 2025 as compared with last year, a symptom of uncertain economic conditions. This means we B2B marketers and sales professionals need more lead volume to meet sales targets. Here are seven B2B lead generation ideas that will work even in a tough economic environment.
- Get Social. Experiences differ for B2B companies trying to make some of the more consumer-ish social media platforms like Facebook or TikTok work for them. Not so when it comes to LinkedIn, which is now owned by Microsoft and features case studies from gold standard global brands like Cisco and Goldman Sachs using the platform successfully. Proper etiquette is required and it takes some practice to understand the terrain but LinkedIn works as a B2B lead generation tactic often than not. [See our recent “LinkedIn B2B Best Practices” post for more detail and ideas.]
- Go Old School. Most B2B companies generate leads and new business through a combination of digital, event and direct outreach programs. Few sizable companies are able to grow consistently if overly reliant on any one of these channels. In tight economies when companies cut back on marketing expenses, the digital channel gets increasingly competitive because it’s the most cost effective. Organizations with the financial wherewithal to continue to invest in big ticket items like events and sales teams — i.e., traditional in-person B2B sales tactics where most leads are still generated, regardless of the state of the economy — will get more bang for the buck in a down market.
- Advertise. Over the past decade, investors in the business-to-business category have fully embraced digital advertising and other online marketing tactics and encouraged their portfolio companies to do the same. Their influence has played a big role in catapulting the B2B marketing category into a multibillion dollars industry. Advertising programs are complicated and require a long-term, lifetime value view of new customer acquisition in order to make the ROI argument, but it’s no longer a question of “if” these tactics work but rather “how well”. And advertising can make contributions at every stage of the customer buyer journey. [Learn more about B2B PPC advertising best practices.]
- Focus On Top & Middle Funnel. When corporate spending gets unpredictable, bottom-of-funnel activity gets extra competitive, and this opens up opportunities for companies to shift focus and fill up the pipeline with new contacts who are early in the buying cycle. This is what Gartner describes as the “problem identification and solution exploration” phases, when prospects are getting a basic understanding of the landscape — learning about the issues, jargon and challenges. It’s an opportune time to get on radars and shape how prospects think about the vendor landscape.
- Formalize References. B2B buyers place enormous value on trust signals that are propagated through case studies and testimonials. These assets play an invaluable role in the B2B buying process but take time, the expenditure of personal relationship capital, and sometimes even legal departments to get created and approved. It’s not unusual for concept-to-approval to require six months or more, so it’s best practice to always have one or two of these in development to keep the library fresh. [B2B video marketing could be an option here.]
- Make Good Noise. A topic that most B2B sales professionals prefer not to dwell on is the knowledge that, at any given time, only 5% of our total available market (“TAM”) will be actively shopping for our solutions. It’s called the 95:5 Rule and while “a deceptively simple fact, it has profound implications”. That is, most B2B marketing activities are aimed at creating memory links for when buyers do come into the market, if only because most prospective B2B buyers are not considering our offers. This is also broadly understood as brand awareness. B2B sales professionals can help keep their brands top-of-mind with important audiences by finding ways to make “good noise” with them and email correspondence is remarkably effective in this regard. Getting into the habit of sending 1-2 custom emails each day to customers, partners, or influencers with a new piece of research or relevant industry news announcement or unique POV — something genuinely useful to the audience — will produce results over time in the way of inbound leads.
- Don’t Overthink It. “There is nothing new under the sun.” The B2B lead generation ecosystem has undergone a dramatic evolution over the past decade, flooded with the latest and greatest ideas that incorporate A.I. (artificial intelligence), ABM (account based marketing), social media and technology. And the buyer journey has evolved so that a meaningful percentage of targets (~40%+) don’t want to interact with vendors until they have a handle on the issues. This is a shift in behavior, certainly, but is not tectonic. Fundamentals remain the same: prospects have problems they need solved and vendors have offerings that could address those challenges. Lots of efforts — by way of campaigns, advertising, outreach, and thought leadership — can help affect prospects’ thinking about the issues, and these are valuable. But even in the midst of an AI and automation frenzy, relationships matter. Keep doing whatever you’ve been doing for years or decades to keep the proverbial phone ringing — until it doesn’t.
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Tim Bourgeois is a director at East Coast Catalyst, a B2B PPC agency. Contact him at tbourgeois (at) eastcoastcatalyst.com to learn how ECC can help your organization with B2B inbound lead generation.