B2B lead gen is easier than ever.

Historically, B2B marketing teams have had one primary job: 

Generate qualified, engaged leads for the sales team.

For early-stage teams and small businesses, this – along with digital analytics – is pretty much all marketing is. As the business grows, the lead gen mandate joins a more diverse set of duties: brand development, social awareness, market research, competitive positioning and differentiation, CX and journey mapping, &c. However, even at the largest enterprises, marketing’s lead gen mandate never fully sunsets. It’s always part of the responsibility matrix.

Tools like Seamless, Apollo, and LinkedIn Sales Navigator fuel B2B lead gen in profound ways. They make it easy to generate B2B leads quickly and inexpensively. In a matter of minutes and for < $100/mo, we can generate lists that contain thousands of qualified business professionals. Events, webinars, landing pages, compelling content offerings, paid campaigns – these all still matter. But we’re not as absolutely dependent on them in the same way we once were.

If a campaign is faltering, for example, and marketing isn’t delivering the leads sales needs to make quota, tools like the above can help deliver as many persona-aligned, information-qualified leads as necessary to fill the gap.

This changes the nature of B2B marketing in important ways.

In this reality, what role do B2B marketing and sales teams play?

Liberated from the onerous tactical demands of constant lead gen, marketing and sales teams are now free to focus their collective energies on four strategic, value-driven activities:

• persona definition and development (“Who are we trying to reach?”)
• messaging development (“What words and value props will resonate with these personas?”)
• systems engineering (“What processes do we use to evaluate leads, drive meetings, uncover opportunities, and close deals?”)
• data analysis (“Looking at the results of all our efforts, what adjustments do we need to make to personas, messages, and systems to improve ROI?”)

Making these four elements work harmoniously ensures that leads who enter the top of our funnels move through constructive, results-oriented, well-defined nurturing processes and toward positive revenue outcomes.

Let’s explore this in action using a simple execution framework.

Sample Tactical Plan + KPIs

Build the Launchpad (Month 1)

Develop a compelling problem/solution statement. Ensure the pain and your business’ “medicine” resonate with existing customers or prospective customers. Adjust persona hypotheses as necessary and develop a few two-touch cold email templates organized around these discoveries. 

These email templates have a single purpose: get cold prospects to book sales calls.If you’re looking for some high-performing samples, you can find them here. Want to know why shorter sequences are better? See this.

Test the Rockets (Month 2)

To maximize cold email delivery, use this checklist to ensure your email domain has the necessary DNS records, begin monitoring DMARC, and activate a mail warming service. If necessary, set up a CRM to manage contacts, engagements, and email templates. 

Next, use a tool like Seamless, Apollo, or LinkedIn Sales Navigator to build lists of relevant customer prospects. Segment these and email different versions of your cold email templates. Depending on outcomes – meetings, no meetings – version messaging, fine-tune persona models, and initiate additional rounds of outreach until we hit the meeting goal.

KPI/Goal

• 5-10% meeting conversion rate.

Blastoff (Month 3)

Once you’re seeing a 5-10% outreach > meeting conversion rate, let’s build a sales call framework and a prescribed sales process. This will allow us to document lifecycle terms (“What does ‘Sales Qualified’ mean?”) and processes (“What do I do when a new lead is assigned to me?”) and engage more sales reps and scale up your sales process. Find a sample workflow here and a human-readable playbook here.

As outreach yields meetings and meetings yield conversions, scale up outreach volume to reach target KPIs.

KPI/Goal

• 5-10% meeting conversion rate
• 1% win rate.

Entering Orbit (Month 4+)

Continue scaling outreach and meetings. Continue versioning messaging, persona models, and email templates and other content as necessary to reach (and sustain) your ultimate target KPI’s.

KPI/Goal

• 10-15% meeting conversion rate
• 2-3% win rate
• 3x ROI on budget

How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Embrace the Post-Lead-Gen World

The lead-gen world was a world of scarcity and reactivity. Leads were precious and both marketing and sales teams had to react to unpredictable inbound flows. There were feasts (“This trade show generated 500 new leads that need to be contacted in the next 72 hours”). And there were famines (“We spent $5,000 on a paid campaign and got no qualified leads”).

Moving beyond the constant pressures and expenses associated with traditional lead gen not only allows marketing and sales teams to focus more on strategic, high-value activities. It also moves these professionals into a world of surplus and proactive empowerment. This is the main benefit of the post-lead-gen world:

Marketers and sales reps control the execution tempo and can scale it at a comfortable rate. And because leads are so plentiful and inexpensive, sales and marketing teams get many more “at bats.” This translates into more practice time, more latitude for experimentation and learning, and, ultimately, greater freedom to develop effective techniques, content, and persona models.

This tactical plan should help any sales and marketing team pivot to the new reality; methodically test, iterate, and scale their efforts; and leverage their new freedom to increase meeting and win rates and drive sustainable revenue growth.