Tips for Lead Generation

Lead generation has become one of the central disciplines in B2B marketing, and the conversation around how to do it well has evolved substantially over the past few years. The combination of marketing automation platforms, content marketing, search optimization, and increasingly active social channels has changed what a serious lead generation program looks like — and the brands that adapt earliest tend to build durable pipelines that compound over time.

What follows is a framework for thinking about lead generation in 2012, drawn from work we've watched succeed across B2B sectors.

First, treat content as the foundation. The brands generating the highest-quality leads are publishing substantive material — whitepapers, research reports, webinars, case studies — that prospective buyers find genuinely useful before any sales conversation. Thin promotional content does not convert. Substantive content does. The discipline is a multi-quarter investment, not a campaign.

Second, build the landing page infrastructure deliberately. The path from a prospect's first encounter with the content to the form fill has to be designed with intent. A landing page with a clear value proposition, a focused form (asking only what the brand will actually use), and a credible visual treatment outperforms a long-form generic page by a wide margin. The discipline of A/B testing the elements — headline, form length, copy, image — separates programs that improve over time from programs that stagnate.

Third, install marketing automation early. Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, and HubSpot have all matured into platforms that handle lead nurturing, scoring, and routing at scale. The brands that invest in setting these up correctly — with disciplined lead scoring, segmented nurture tracks, and clean integration with the sales CRM — extract substantially more value from the same lead volume than brands operating on email blasts and spreadsheets.

Fourth, treat the relationship between marketing and sales as a shared operating function. The most common failure mode in B2B lead generation is a gap between what marketing produces and what sales considers usable. The fix is a service level agreement — agreed definitions of what constitutes a qualified lead, agreed handoff criteria, agreed follow-up commitments. Brands operating with this discipline see materially higher conversion from lead to opportunity.

Fifth, do not ignore social. Twitter, LinkedIn, and the broader social channels are increasingly material to top-of-funnel discovery. The brands using LinkedIn for targeted distribution of their content, and Twitter for ongoing visibility with industry analysts and journalists, are seeing returns that the brands ignoring these channels are missing.

The fundamentals of lead generation have not changed — identify prospective buyers, engage them with relevant material, qualify their interest, hand them to sales at the right moment. What has changed is the toolset. The brands building durable B2B pipelines are the brands investing in content, automation, sales alignment, and the social layer as integrated parts of the same program.

Substantive content — whitepapers, research reports, webinars, case studies — that buyers find useful before any sales conversation. Thin promotional content does not convert; substantive content does.

Which marketing automation platforms matter?

Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, and HubSpot have all matured into serious platforms that handle lead nurturing, scoring, and routing at scale. The differentiator is disciplined setup, not the choice of platform.

How should sales and marketing relate?

Through a documented service level agreement covering lead definitions, qualification criteria, handoff timing, and follow-up commitments. The chronic friction between the two functions resolves through agreement on the operating model.