My systematic approach to high-value B2B lead and deal generation / GTM.

In this post I want to break down how I think about and how I build custom B2B lead gen eco-systems that are designed to engage a cold prospect, educate and help them to then turn into $XX,XXX deals.

I'll share the metrics and best practices from my own experiences from working with around 20 b2b companies with varying deal sizes, starting from $5k marketing packages, to $90k/yr fintech solutions and $200k software dev & IT deals. If you don't agree with my approach, that's fine, there's multiple ways to skin a cat.

Fundamentals are mostly the same and we can split it in 3 main parts.

1. Traffic acquisition
2. Nurture & education mechanism
3. Conversion mechanism.

Where most businesses go wrong is that they try to sell their expensive service to a cold prospect.

That might look like cold emailing and cold "linkedining" (new term) prospects an offer or asking if they're interested in this and that, on the spot.

This is not a good approach for one simple reason – no one want's to be sold to. Not to say that this direct approach doesn't work, for some it works good enough to stay afloat, but it's not something you can use to drive real, inbound interest in your services. Selling to prospects that you get on a sales call from 1 email or DM is extremely hard since you have to do the heavy lifting to educate them on the call and then you also have to sell them.

My goal is to turn this dynamic on it's head. Yes, we want to reach out to cold prospects. Yes, we want to run ads. But not to sell immediately. Rather, we're inviting and getting those prospects into our ecosystem where if they go through your educational materials like reports, case studies, how-to's AND have a real pain, they will come to you to solve it.

Let's break it down.

Traffic acquisition.

There's 2 channels I use to acquire traffic. Sometimes I use both, sometimes one or the other. For the most part that depends on the TAM and what we're selling.

1 – Paid ads (LI and META) are great if you need volume and your deal size varies between $5k – $20k. If you get it right, it's a system that scales easily so you can control demand and growth fairly easily too. It's also very quick and easy to troubleshoot since you can change a variable and see the result in next 3 days.

The ultimate goal of paid ads is to get as many people in your funnel as possible. The only logical way to do it is using lead magnets. Industry specific reports with unique insights that only your ICP would care about, easy-to-code tools that only your ICP would find useful (calculators work great for me), guides and courses made to solve a very specific problem, you get the picture.

We're giving away this free value in exchange for their email address. I can already hear people yelling "But giving away stuff for free only attracts freebie seekers" That's because you don't have a mechanism in place to convert that opt-in into a deal. (I'll go into in the next sections)

To make a great lead magnet I follow this mantra:

1. Has to be industry and role specific
2. Has to solve 1 painful problem for the lead
3. No surface-level, bait-and-switch teasing BS. (using lead magnet as a sales page is a big no-no)

Lead magnet is your chance to build rapport, show your competence and build good will by actually helping your prospects before you ever speak with them. USE IT WISELY. I see many businesses only tease the solution. My advice – give away all your secrets. If you're vague, your leads will think that your approach is basic and you won't capture the interest.

For us, around 20% of lead magnet leads opt-in into the next step of the funnel where we ask much more details. Company name, website, name, phone, etc, etc.

Do this step right and you'll get leads from your ICP opting into your funnel in droves, for cheap.

One little hack I do whenever I launch lead magnet campaigns is create 5-10 lead magnet ideas, create the ads and the landing pages, but don't create the lead magnet itself. Then run ads to those 5-10 lead magnets and see what your cost per lead is AND see what quality leads you attract. My baseline KPI's are sub $15 CPL on the initial launch and 3 out of 10 leads be real, actual companies that fit the ICP.

If you hit that initially, you can reiterate on the ads and the LP and get your CPL way lower.

2 – Cold outreach (LI and email) is great if you're after high ticket or enterprise level deals.

Cold outreach is great for huge target markets and/or very high value accounts. You won't reach Elon Mush through ads, but you could through cold outreach.

Instead of blanket-spamming 10k leads that might or might not need our service we do this.

1. Score companies based on fit (we use AI for this on scale by giving it bad fit examples, medium fit examples and great fit examples while also describing why each is bad, medium or great. Then we ask to output a score from 1-10)
2. For companies that score 7 or higher, look at buying signals. Recent hires, open positions, growth or decline, recent funding, featured in news (why featured in news?) and, of course, technographics.
3. Companies that display positive signals AND are a fit based on scoring, we send a personalized message automatically.

90% of this happens automatically at this point, but don't get confused – it's not AI copy that gets sent out. We have a general template and framework that we base our messages upon and AI fills in the blanks. All that is based on what information we find on the companies and what state they're currently in.

"Hey Adam, saw that Houberz is looking for an engineer with deep understanding of X. I know first hand how hard it is to fill such roles.

I have a case study on how we did Y using X technology, thought you might be interested in giving it a quick read before you pull someone onboard."

This is the general gist of it. Combine it with reaching out to leads that are likely in-market and you'll average 15% reply rates. Blast 10k emails to random list and you'll get 0.5% – 1% reply rates.

That is how we get qualified traffic on the front end.

This is how we convert it into deals.

1.1 – Paid

Once you have people claiming your lead magnet, the magic happens on the thank you page. I've seen many people just have a generic thank you page that does not prompt the next action.

Wasted digital real estate.

Instead of leaving it blank, we either have a call booking page where we pitch a non-sales call that would help fix the lead a specific problem or a signup page for a live workshop.

2nd has higher opt-in rate, but has longer time-to-deal, 1st gives you 1-1 time with high value prospects, but is more expensive..

Ideally, run both. Best of both worlds.

On top of that, when someone opts in and claims your lead magnets, you can then email them on a regular basis as part of your newsletter which gives you another channel to nurture leads and throw offers their way.

2.1 – Cold outreach

As soon as you receive a positive response to your lead magnet offer, you send it over, find that person on LI and connect (so you have another channel and they see that you're a real human) then ask if they're struggling with a specific problem that your service can fix.

If they do, great, share more case studies, share how they could solve the problem themselves and then soft-pitch a meeting in which you propose to "continue the conversation"

For cold, each convo will be different so you will have to come up with helpful and relevant email responses on the fly.

Remember speed-to-lead. The faster you answer, the higher the chance of you pushing the lead to the next step of your funnel.

So do you need both of these acquisition channels? Do you also need to post on Linkedin and dance on Tiktok?

Depends on your business. Generally, the more eyes you have on you, the more deals you'll close. These two channels are foundation for myself and any business I consult, but to supplement that and build credibility, we're also heavily investing in LI organic.

Why? People who watch your ads and engage with your emails will check out your LI eventually. If it's barren, you won't leave an impression. If it's packed with valuable, funny, insightful and humanizing posts, not only your leads will connect with you, but they'll feel compelled to engage.

So it's not one system or another – it's all of them working in cohesion.

Thanks for coming to my ted talk.