What Is Lead Generation? Common Methods, Keys to Success and Examples

The era when a good product sold itself is over.
What most B2B executives and marketing leads face today sits upstream of close rates, namely the serious problem of running out of prospects (leads).

If any of the following is happening at your company, you need to act.

‘We collected several hundred business cards at a trade show, but almost none turned into meetings’
‘Website traffic is up, yet no enquiries come in’
‘Our sales team is worn down by cold calling and nothing accumulates as an asset for the organisation’

Solving these problems does not mean firing off one isolated activity after another. It means building lead generation into the organisation as a system

Within the frame of demand generation, the overall picture of B2B marketing, this article explains what role lead generation plays, and specifically how to carry it out and how to evaluate it.

Summary
・Lead generation is the critical process that supplies the first fuel for demand generation
・As buying has moved online, building contact before sales ever speaks to the buyer is essential
・Success requires content built on persona design and low-friction calls to action (CTAs)

▼Who this is for
・Anyone short of new enquiries and running out of accounts to call on
・Anyone whose advertising and trade shows do not lead to meetings, with no clear idea what to fix
・Anyone who wants to move beyond individual sales talent and build a system that accumulates revenue
・Anyone who has an MA tool but is not getting full use of it

1. What is lead generation?

In B2B marketing, the first step in designing a strategy is understanding the terms correctly.
First, a systematic look at where lead generation sits in the wider process and why it matters.

1.1 Lead generation is the entrance to demand generation

Lead generation is all the marketing activity involved in acquiring prospects (leads) who are interested in your products or services。

It is not wise to look at this activity in isolation. B2B marketing has a larger frame called demand generation, and lead generation sits in its first phase.

Demand generation only becomes a mechanism that contributes to revenue when the following three steps work together.

Phase	Name	What it involves	Purpose
Stage 1	Lead generation (acquiring prospects)	・Exchanging business cards at trade shows ・Document requests from the website ・Enquiries and so on	Capturing the customer’s contact details and adding them to your list
Stage 2	Lead nurturing (nurturing prospects)	・Sending a newsletter ・Seminars and other channels to provide useful information	Maintaining and strengthening the relationship and raising intent to buy
Stage 3	Lead qualification (qualifying prospects)	Identifying the most likely buyers among the leads you have nurtured	Extracting the hot leads that sales should approach first

Lead generation therefore supplies the fuel for the whole marketing process.
Without a supply of good enough leads, the nurturing that follows and the meetings after qualification do not work either.

Related article:
What is demand generation? Concrete methods and implementation steps for maximising leads, meetings and revenue

1.2 Why an organised effort is urgent now

Strong salespeople once cold-called and dropped in on their own, taking a lead all the way from first contact to order. Buying has changed dramatically since then.

US research firms report that about 60% of the B2B buying process is complete before the buyer meets a salesperson. Buyers identify their problem through search, compare solutions and draw up a shortlist before any conversation.

That is, A company buyers never find may not even make it onto the shortlist。

Moving from an organisation that depends on individual selling ability to a system that uses digital tools such as CRM and MA to generate prospects continuously is a management priority that decides whether the business grows.

1.3 What NowVillage does

We have focused on lead generation on the web since we started.
We run the activities below, which later chapters also cover.

• Website
• Blog
• Case studies
• Downloads
• Specialist publications
• MA (marketing automation)
• SNS
• YouTube
• Radio
• PR

and so on

In principle we treat these assets as capital, and invest readily in whatever the strategy calls for.
There is still plenty we want to do, and we push as far as we can while balancing marketing against everything else going on internally.
Day to day we think about how to get found by the people we are aiming at, and how to interest them. When the lead generation design fits, conversion through the later stages improves and results come more easily。
In our own case, leads from the activities above convert to meetings and orders at a higher rate than leads from anything else.

2. [The methods] Choosing the right online and offline activities

Lead acquisition covers a lot of ground: the right method depends on who you are aiming at and what your product costs.
Here are the main methods, split into online and offline.

2.1 Online activities (asset-building and fast-acting)

The main online activities are these.

Category	Example	Character	What it involves and its advantages
Content (owned media)	・Website ・Blog posts (how-to articles) ・SEO (search engine optimisation) ・Guides such as white papers and collections of case studies ・Social posts (LinkedIn, X, Facebook and so on)	Asset-building	・Publish useful articles that match what customers are searching for ・Results take time, but the articles and white papers you accumulate work like a salesperson on duty around the clock, holding down cost per acquisition (CPA) over the medium to long term
Press releases	・Announcing new services and features ・Publishing research reports ・Partnership news	Asset-building	・Coverage in the press can bring large exposure quickly ・It carries the credibility of public information, and can bring traffic from the article itself as well as more branded searches
Online advertising (search advertising, display advertising, social advertising and so on)	・Search advertising ・Display advertising ・Google Demand Gen campaigns ・Drive traffic to the website and prompt document requests and enquiries	Fast-acting	Results come easily, but advertising costs fluctuate and the competition shifts・Immediate exposure is possible to people searching particular keywords or matching particular attributes ・It also carries the risk of costs spiking over a short period
Webinars (online seminars)	・Run online seminars on product expertise, industry trends and ways to solve problems ・Capture lead details in exchange for registration, draw out attendees’ interests directly and carry them into nurturing	Hybrid (asset-building plus fast-acting)	・Hold the seminar online and make your case to many customers at once ・Reusing the recording as an on-demand archive turns it into a lasting asset for attracting prospects
SNS	・Running official accounts ・Posting regularly on LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and similar	Hybrid (asset-building plus fast-acting)	・Share expertise and company culture to build trust with followers ・Posts that resonate get shared, reaching latent audiences that advertising alone cannot and building awareness

The greatest advantage of online activity is that results are easy to see in numbers and that you can reach a wide audience without being limited by location。
A stable base for attracting prospects needs balance: produce short-term numbers with fast-acting work such as online advertising while growing asset-building work such as SEO alongside it.

2.2 Offline activities (trust-building)

The main offline activities are these.
Offline activity works very well for building trust face to face and for reaching executives and decision-makers who rarely use digital media。

Example	Character	What it involves and its advantages
Trade shows and expos	Awareness and contact	・You can collect a large number of business cards in a short time ・Most visitors are still gathering information, so success depends on having something to catch them: an email the next day, a follow-up call
Taxi and lift advertising	Awareness and contact	・Use executives’ and managers’ travel and waiting time to make your case through sight and sound ・Making your name familiar lifts branded search volume and trust
Seminars and conferences	Trust and intent	・Share expertise directly at your own events ・Questions answered in person build deep trust, which helps move buyers towards high-value products and complex services
Direct mail	Trust and intent	・Put something physical directly into the decision-maker’s hands ・It reaches people digital advertising misses, and enclosing a well-made booklet or a sample sets you apart
Referrals	Trust and intent	・Introductions from existing customers and partners ・The meeting starts with trust already in place, so close rates are very high and good leads follow directly

With offline activity, nothing matters more than not letting it end at a single contact。
For example, load the business cards from a trade show into your CRM and then send useful information regularly by newsletter. In other words, a design that keeps the warmth of offline contact alive through a digital system is the approach to lead generation NowVillage recommends。

3. Three steps to designing a lead generation strategy that works

Starting from the activity, with ‘let’s run some ads’ or ‘let’s write a blog’, is not a good idea.
Without a strategy as the blueprint, results stay limited however much budget you spend.
Who, what and how you deliver it. Three steps to results you can count on.

3.1 Step ①: define the persona and the customer journey

First, Be clear about whose problem you are solving and what that problem is。
The key here is how sharply you can resolve the person you are aiming at
A setting as loose as ‘a department head in manufacturing’ will not produce a message that lands.
Even inside the same company, concerns differ by role.

What the line manager worries about:
‘We want to cut the hours this takes’ and ‘we want to prevent human error’

What the executive worries about:
‘We want to improve the overall margin’ and ‘we want to drive digital transformation across the company’. Is the lead you want the decision-maker who holds the authority, or the person on the ground who carries out the work?
This persona setting decides the quality of the content you create afterwards.

3.2 Step ②: design content around the persona’s problem

Organise the information needed to solve the persona’s problem and move them towards considering you.
It is important to organise that information by the stage the customer is at, as below.

Example	Character	Information needed
Awareness	There is a problem but no known solution	・Industry trend reports ・Explainers covering the basics (‘what is X’) ・Collections of tips for working more efficiently and so on
Stage	Comparing solutions	・Comparison tables against other providers ・Simulations of what adoption looks like ・The advantages and disadvantages of each approach and so on
Decision	Final checks before adoption	・Concrete case studies ・Detailed pricing ・Material for getting internal approval and so on

In this way, assembling content that answers the customer’s questions and worries before they raise them keeps the consideration process moving smoothly.

3.3 Step ③: design the path (optimising the CTA)

After someone has seen an article, an ad or other content, design when you prompt them and what action you ask for (the CTA, or call to action)。

The problem most companies run into here is putting nothing but an enquiry button on every page. For someone who has only just begun gathering information, an enquiry that means talking to a salesperson straight away asks far too much. For example,

• Document requests
• Newsletter sign-ups
• Downloading a white paper

In this way, offering a low-effort halfway point (a micro-conversion) prevents drop-off and can improve the number of leads dramatically.

4. Setting KPIs and measuring results: chasing volume alone fails

When you introduce lead generation, what the marketing lead should watch most closely is how the KPIs are set。
Most companies make lead volume the only goal, and that is where the trap lies.

4.1 Balancing lead quality against volume

If lead volume doubles but the names are all individuals outside your target, revenue does not follow.
Worse, inside sales spends more hours on the phone, the team wears out, and the genuinely promising customers wait longer – exactly the wrong way round.

To prevent this, the following two definitions must be agreed with sales in advance

・MQL（Marketing Qualified Lead）
A prospect generated by marketing that meets agreed criteria such as industry, job title and behaviour

・SQL（Sales Qualified Lead）
A prospect that sales has reviewed and accepted as workable. Marketing’s real goal should not be the number of business cards collected but the number of MQLs and SQLs that sales is glad to receive.

4.2 The measures (KPIs) to track

To judge how the work is going, observe the following measures regularly。
Rather than simply chasing numbers, the first step to improvement is digging into why the number is what it is.

Measure (KPI)	How it is calculated	When the number is poor, likely causes	Examples of action to take
CPA (cost per acquisition)	Cost of the activity ÷ number of leads	・The advertising targeting is too broad ・New competitors have driven the cost per click up	・Narrow the targeting and make the ad copy more specific ・Strengthen SEO as a content asset to hold down advertising costs over the medium to long term
CVR (conversion rate)	Number of leads ÷ site visits	・The form has too many fields and people abandon it ・The guide offered has little to do with the article it sits in	・Cut the form down to the minimum number of fields ・Match the guide on each page to the concern that page addresses
Meeting rate	Number of meetings ÷ number of leads	・A lot of the traffic comes from outside the target audience ・Follow-up after a download is slow	・Add job title and problem fields to the form to raise quality ・Automate alerts in your MA tool and call while interest is still warm

The most important thing when analysing KPIs is knowing exactly which stage customers drop off at

A low conversion rate, for instance, may not be a website design problem at all: what you are offering may ask more than the reader’s level of interest supports. Asking a reader who has only just started looking to make an enquiry raises the barrier and simply causes drop-off.

Conversely, when lead volume is healthy but the meeting rate is low, the handover criteria between marketing and sales are usually vague.

With CRM and SFA in place and in use, you can see the whole sequence: which route a customer came in by, and how long it took to reach a meeting.

Using that data to shift KPIs gradually from lead volume to meeting quality lifts the productivity of the whole sales organisation sharply.

5. Installing it in the organisation: breaking the wall between marketing and sales

The biggest obstacle to making lead generation stick in an organisation is conflict between departments.
A tool on its own will not solve it: how you close the gulf of feeling between them decides whether it works.

5.1 Ending the fruitless argument about who sent bad leads

Almost without exception, the early days bring the following exchange of blame.

・What sales says
‘The leads marketing sends are nowhere near ready; calling them wastes our time. Bring us customers who are closer to buying.’

・What marketing says
‘We go to the trouble of generating leads and handing them over, and sales is far too slow to act. We want each one followed up properly.’

This invisible wall exists because neither side can see what the other is doing.
To break it down, you have to take opinion out of it and put data at the centre as a shared language。

5.2 Making data visible with SFA and MA, and the cycle of improvement

Using SFA and MA tools to make the whole process visible, from acquisition through to order, moves the organisation forward in the following ways.

Where the two connect	What it means in practice	The advantage it brings
Linking activity to outcome	Track which articles and ads produced the leads that eventually became orders	You can identify the activities with the highest order rates and concentrate budget and resources there
Regular feedback	Sales shares its impression of lead quality from meetings back to marketing through the CRM	First-hand comments such as ‘customers who came through this article know their problem and are easy to talk to’ feed back into the work
Automated alerts	Detect high-intent behaviour, such as three visits to the pricing page, and notify sales immediately	Sales can reach out with a reason to call now, so their hit rate goes up

The sign that lead generation has taken root is a team able to hold constructive, data-led discussions: leads from this article close well, so let us produce more on similar themes.

6. Lead generation builds an asset

Lead generation is not a one-off campaign or a passing fashion. It is work that becomes an asset to the business: communicating your value to the market continuously and building relationships with customers over time。

Understand the demand generation frame properly, set the right KPIs, and have marketing and sales work as one. The system you build that way, one that keeps generating leads and meetings on its own, is hard for competitors to copy and becomes a powerful engine behind your growth.

A good place to start is getting an accurate picture of your current cost per acquisition (CPA) and the meeting rate that follows it. The moment those become numbers you can see, bottlenecks you had not noticed appear, along with concrete clues for the next stage of growth.

NowVillage supports the whole span of this work: designing the lead generation strategy, selecting methods, setting up the tools that support them, and helping marketing and sales work together.

‘We have no marketing strategy for generating leads’
‘We bought the tool but we are not using it well’

‘We do not know how to get the departments working together’
If any of this sounds familiar, do get in touch.
We will build a repeatable system for selling with you, shaped around your own problems.