Our Complete List of 34 Ways to Generate B2B Leads in 2025

As an inbound marketing agency, we understand the challenges businesses face when it comes to generating B2B leads.

Whether you’re a sales professional, a marketer, or a business owner, lead generation is the lifeblood of your revenue pipeline. With businesses typically allocating between 5-20% of their revenue toward lead generation efforts, it’s crucial to explore every possible avenue to ensure a steady flow of qualified leads.

This article is designed for both sales and marketing professionals - after all, alignment between these two teams is essential for driving revenue.

Below, we’ve compiled a comprehensive list of 35 strategies to generate B2B leads, divided into outbound and inbound approaches. For each strategy, we’ve included actionable tips to help you improve your results.

Outbound B2B Lead Generation Strategies

1. Cold Calling

The oldest and most direct way of doing outbound marketing.

Cold calling is essentially having a list of numbers from potential prospects and calling them to pitch your service or offering.

The benefits of cold calling are clear - you can have a clear, uninterrupted line of communication with your prospect. However, data suggests that committing to cold calling is an inefficient use of resources.

On average, it takes eight cold call attempts to connect and reach a prospect. Compounding this stat, only 1% of cold calls result in a meeting. That’s one in one hundred connected calls. If we’re using this maths, that results in a single meeting for every eight hundred calls made.

2. Cold Email Outreach

Similar to cold calling, cold email outreach is the slightly less intrusive version of direct outreach.

Cold emailing requires emailing a target account list instead of calling them. However, the benefit of cold email outreach as opposed to calling is that it’s more effective in terms of reaching your key prospects. With an average open rate of 40% on cold emailing, marketers and salespeople alike use the method as a way to reach more prospects more effectively at a greater scale.

Also, with the advancements in AI, marketing and sales professionals can now personalise these emails en masse. This means greater specificity in the emails and targeting individual problems on a one-to-one basis.

However, this approach only works when someone is considering or in the market for a solution like yours.

According to Pareto’s Principle, only 5% of buyers are in the market at any one time. Which conversely, means that 95% aren’t in the market.

With no prior communication or knowledge of both your solution and your company, there’s less chance of completing a sale without a drawn-out process.

3. LinkedIn Prospecting

Exactly the same as cold email outreach, LinkedIn prospecting is done over LinkedIn’s InMail feature, not over email.

Operating with an advertising-style pricing model, this method is seen as more reliable in order to connect with prospects as you’re targeting those you know have LinkedIn accounts (rather than relying on potentially unreliable email and phone data). This just ensures that your messages definitely get delivered to the people you need them to.

However, as mentioned, it’s a pay-as-you-go advertising model. Whereas the previous two methods can be done without any investment, InMails need a paid advertising budget behind it in order to start getting B2B Leads.

4. Attend a Trade Show

Seems like a long time ago when trade shows and exhibitions were suspended because of COVID.

Despite trade show attendance being 40% down from pre-pandemic levels, trade shows are starting to tiptoe back into the minds of sales and marketing professionals. This is because they enable the opportunity to get back in front of your prospects - face-to-face.

A lot of industries are still reliant on trade shows in order to connect with prospects. For example, one of our key industries is manufacturing, and we find that a lot of deals and transactions take place in person or at these events rather than on a Zoom call.

If your industry is in a sector which is still heavily reliant on face-to-face interaction in order to generate sales, then consider trade shows and events marketing as a way to generate B2B leads.

5. Direct Mail

Another very traditional way of generating B2B leads is through direct mail. This is the process of sending a physical form of communication via letter, parcel, etc.

There are a number of ways you can do this -it just depends on how creative you want to be about it.

You can send something as simple as a letter explaining why you think your solution is a good fit for the client. You could also send something a bit more out there like Louis Sandford did by sending a prosthetic arm with a note saying, “I’d give my right arm to work with you”.

Either way, it’s still a very effective way to get in front of your target buyer.

6. Co-Branded Camapaign

This tactic for generating B2B leads is teetering on the edge of inbound and outbound.

Co-branded campaigns enable you to take advantage of an existing audience of a complimentary service. This could be in the form of an email list, which you could mail out your resources to people who have used a similar service previously.

An example of a co-branded campaign would be doing a white paper or market research report with the help of the other company and pushing it out to their audience via email. This can be very effective as a brand awareness push and identifying people who are interested in content related to your niche.

7. Search Advertising

Search advertising is the practice of using Google Ads in order to reach people when they type in specific keywords.

Difference tactics for search advertising include:

• Brand Advertising: Bidding on keywords that are related to your own company (for example, if we bid on the keyword ‘Axon Garside’. This is to ensure that your competitors don’t do the same and rank above you when people are looking for your company.
• Keyword Advertising: Doing keyword research and identifying what your audience is searching for when in-market and paying to show up first for those keywords.

This is considered a much quicker way of generating leads than inbound marketing due to the pace at which you begin ranking top for your services. However, it can end up being costly if the keyword you’re bidding on is competitive.

Furthermore, it’s not a sustainable way of generating leads. Any pay-to-play way of advertising provides a good boost in leads but isn’t a long-term strategy for revenue if your ads don’t produce the leads you require.

8. Social Media Advertising

Similar to search advertising, this method uses the pay-per-click methodology to reach your target audience when they’re browsing social media.

This is more intrusive than search advertising as you’re actively interrupting someone’s user experience whilst they scroll on social media, but when done well, you can break the status quo for the user and pique their interest in your product.

9. Social Media Retargeting

This is the exact same as social media advertising, with one key difference:

You’re targeting people that have been on your website and know who you are.

This can be especially useful to target those who have been on pages which require high intent, like pricing pages or contact pages. In the eyes of demand generation, this is keeping you top of mind when they’re browsing, reminding them of your services for at least a month following.

The benefits of this are obvious: you’re targeting those who have already been to your site and shown potential interest. By doing this, it also keeps advertising costs down by not targeting everyone in your niche.

However, the people you would target may have just been interested in learning more about you, or they may be a competitor, or just want to see the capabilities of your software - the point we’re trying to make is that they may not be in the market, wherever they were on your site.

Another further complication is the ‘cookie-less’ world we’re in now. In February 2023, a survey found that over 18% of UK respondents rejected cookies daily. For retargeting to be effective, you need the majority of your audience to accept cookies and be willing to share data with you.

10. Sponsorships

Back to some form of physical events with this method where, instead of purchasing a stand or going for an award, you can simply sponsor events and award shows that your target audience would be interested in.

Different types of things you could sponsor include:

• Award Shows
• Exhibitions
• Round-tables
• Magazines
• Podcasts

And the list goes on.

The benefits of this play are purely brand awareness. If people who would be within your ICP are interested in the show, then your logo will be front and centre - giving you authority and eyes on your product.

However, like any form of advertising or sponsorship, this can wind up being quite costly - which is the obvious downfall of this.

Another overlooked challenge is the complications when it comes to attributing revenue to sponsorships. With no form fill or direct source coming from this tactic, it can be hard to show ROI when generating B2B leads. One way to get around this is by using self-reported attribution on forms. These directly ask your audience where they found you first, enabling you to see whether the sponsorship worked or not.

11. Upselling Existing Clients

A slightly different approach here - but if you’re tasked with driving revenue and not a contact number (something we totally recommend, by the way), then consider an upsell/cross-sell strategy to your existing customers.

This requires very tight sales and marketing alignment, ensuring that the right messaging is going out to your customers at the right time and ensuring the upsell gets presented to the customer when they need it.

This is quite often partnered with ABM in organisations, driving a more strategic approach to this method. We use HubSpot to facilitate campaigns like this as it gives all departments a ‘single view of the customer’, letting them see what has been communicated to the customer at all times.

12. Gifting Prospects

A recent, popular outbound sales tactic (more so in the SaaS sector), you can gift your prospects in exchange for booking a meeting with you.

This approach is very bullish, basically forcing your prospect into a meeting with you with a gift card or an e-gift in the hope you can pitch them successfully on your demo or meeting invitation.

13. Referral Programme

According to a survey by OpenLoyalty, buyers referred to a vendor by a peer or friend are 18% more likely to stay with your company, increasing lifetime value and, most importantly, generating more revenue.

People tend to prefer buying from ‘people’ or ‘influencers’, where they value their recommendations over the content by a vendor. By generating a scheme with your existing customers (and rewarding them in the process), you can get your biggest fans to go out and find you more customers - without your sales or marketing teams having to ring a phone or click a button.

Inbound B2B Lead Generation Strategies

At this point, we would like to say we know we are an inbound marketing agency, and there’s going to be some course of bias towards the following strategies.

However, we will be giving a balanced perspective on the below tactics where we can showcase the challenges that come with each.

14. Create a Blog

Here’s how I was taught the importance of blogs.

You can create a website, do the keyword research behind it and make it live. It will rank for a couple of keywords, but people will only find you if they’re looking directly for your business, which, if you don’t have good brand awareness, means that people aren’t really going online and searching for your company.

That’s where blogs come in.

If you’re producing educational content around your business sector, showcasing how you’re uniquely positioned to solve that problem and your unique opinion/perspective, you’re attracting more people to your website and converting them into leads.

Take this blog for us. We hope it will rank for the keyword “b2b leads”. From this, we will promote our ‘B2B Marketing Planner’, a resource you can take away and plan your inbound marketing strategy on.

The keyword highlights the problem you (as the user) may have, and we’re offering our unique perspective whilst giving you the actionable advice to go away and fix it - lamenting us in your minds.

15: Create Pillar Pages

However, there are some keywords that are really competitive and hard to rank for.

This is where pillar pages come in. Pillar pages are really in-depth, informational articles which explain in more detail than your competitors what something is or how to do something.

An example we have is our ‘5 Stages of HubSpot Implementation’ pillar page. Ranking against other HubSpot Solution Providers is tough, but by writing something with really deep expertise and knowledge, we’re able to rank in the top 5 results for a keyword that’s competitive and drives a lot of traffic to our site.

If your content provides real value to your prospects, you will find some start to fill in forms as they trust you as the thought leaders and experts within your space. We saw this with our client Huthwaite, where an individual page within their niche generated £200,000+ in revenue - just from that page ranking highly in a competitive space.

16. Create Gated Content like eBooks

There’s some controversy surrounding this, but hear us out.

Gated content still has its place in modern B2B inbound marketing. Although its role may have shifted due to the amount of information your prospects have free and at their fingertips, they still want the option, if needed, to take away a PDF and read something in their own time.

By having content that’s hidden behind a form, you can get information from your prospects and generate B2B leads. However, be wary. These customers may just be interested in the content and not your services. When communicating with them, make sure you remember that and don’t just push the hard sale - nurture them into trusting you with other bits of content before sending them assets which require a higher amount of intent to use your service.

17. Do a Webinar

Ah - the live TV of inbound marketing.

Webinars are a great way of generating B2B leads. This involves doing a live broadcast of your internal (or external) experts talking about informational content related to your niche.

There are a number of different places, ways and strategies to do this well. We saw some success doing webinars on LinkedIn - with the option of either letting people watch for free or gating it behind a form.

This places experts in your sector close to your brand and is an alternative to blogs in providing educational content for your prospects. Furthermore, this can act as evergreen content, sitting on your site afterwards for anyone to watch.

18. Start a Podcast

Similar to webinars, podcasts are an alternative way of generating informational content for your audience in a different format from written ones.

This can be a great way of producing educational content at scale, with the ability to repurpose the audio and video into snippets for organic social (or paid social), email newsletters and everything else in between.

However, it’s important to note that this may take a while to ramp up and generate B2B leads. Podcasting is a very long-term strategy as users can consume the content without having to fill in a form and - even more scarily - without ever having to come to your website.

It’s important when doing podcasting to realise that the same inbound marketing principles still matter when producing content like this. Inbound marketing is marketing in the way buyers want to buy - by becoming problem-aware, finding their solution via your content and converting as they see your business as the authority in that sector.

If your audience is engaged with podcasts and continually consumes your content, when they do eventually enter the market (remember Pareto’s principle earlier?), they will think of your brand first and become a customer.

19. Promote Content via Social Media

Social media can be a powerful tool in terms of pushing out your content and offering it to people within your niche and following.

As a free way of promotion, by simply posting your content on social media, though either a company page or a personal page (more in this next), you get eyes on the activities and offers your company is producing.

20. Build a Personal Brand

Remember when I said people buy from people?

Building a founder/specialist-led strategy that leads on personal expertise places that individual as an expert within your sector. Consequently, this will place your business with a certain level of authority, too.

With people leaning towards buying from people and not vendor-led content, this is a strong way of generating B2B leads via channels like LinkedIn and email that have a personal touch.

H3: 21. Build an Interactive Tool

Interactive tools are free-to-use (or gated) resources that provide actionable use for prospects looking for a particular, easy solution.

For example, HubSpot has a free-to-use tool that grades the performance of your website. Although gated, it provides free insights into where your website is failing, whether that be with core web vitals or accessibility.

Tactics like this have a broad range of uses, too. A tool can be something as complicated as an in-depth audit of the area your solution solves or as simple as a calculator. This is beneficial to the company as you can help people make a decision whether they need to take action, but also, the consumer feels as if they get a fair value exchange from your company.

22. Start a Newsletter

Another potentially longer form of B2B lead generation, but starting a newsletter can be a really good way of creating rapport with your target customers and pushing your content further. The reason it’s not a quick way of generating B2B leads is that your audience is signing up to hear informational content from you - not looking to be sold to.

However, it’s a very good way to continuously demonstrate expertise and stay in the minds of your audience.

The very best newsletters are ones that are both informational and actional - describing the problem and solution in detail and enabling your audience to take action. A way you can do this is by deploying zero-click content. This is basically where your audience isn’t required to go to another location to get the information they need and can read it straight off the email.

Of course, this means the KPIs you measure will shift from click-through rates to analysing the amount of content consumed (you can see this metric within HubSpot).

To push this tactic even further, partner it with the personal brand strategy from earlier. As mentioned, people buy off people. If your staff can demonstrate a high level of subject matter expertise and generate fans, people are more likely to raise their hand and cite a personal newsletter as an example.

Kyle Poyar does this very well with this weekly go-to-market newsletter for his company, SubStack. It provides in-depth, zero-click, actionable information advice for SaaS companies in the first person. It reads as more personal than from a vendor and still provides the level of expertise you expect from a vendor.

23. Generate Case Studies

Generating social proof should be one of the number one priorities for generating B2B leads, so much so that 92% of consumers are more likely to trust peer recommendations over advertising.

These case studies should demonstrate what the client’s problems were, what you did for them and the results and feedback afterwards. This demonstrates that you clearly understood the scope and requirements of the project whilst having the expertise to deliver a solution that fixed their problems.

We do this for our success stories - also creating video case studies which add a personal touch and put a face and voice to the client, adding a personal touch.

24. Utilise AI-Powered Chatbots

Okay, okay - this doesn't have to necessarily be powered by AI.

However, chatbots can be extremely effective in converting your customers from people who don’t know how your solution can help them to point them in the right direction and put them on the path of working with you.

We like to view chatbots as guidance for the user, helping them get from point A to point B on your website. Whether that be finding informational content or helping them fill out a contact form, chatbots will improve the user experience of the users on your site.

25. Offer self-serve journeys on your site

I want to reiterate this point again: Buyers want to buy the way they want to buy.

According to recent surveys, nearly 100% of B2B buyers now want to self-serve at least part of their buying journey, with a significant majority (around 77%) starting their research online before contacting a sales representative.

You can’t force a sale or a high-intent action upon someone. If someone wants to find information pertinent to their specific situation, you should allow them to do so without having to contact your sales team.

An example of this would be enabling an ‘interactive demo’ on your site. This allows your audience to play around with your tool/solution and see if it solves their problem before engaging in a conversation with your sales rep.

If you’re not in a software-related industry (like manufacturing), you can offer up assets like product sheets for users to examine. This allows them to see if you offer what they’re looking for and can solve their very specific problem before pushing the hard sale on them.

26. Answer Q&A’s on Forum Sites

Forums exist for the sole purpose of understanding other individuals’ approaches and opinions on a certain topic.

You can generate B2B leads by finding forums exclusive to your niche and helping them figure out a solution to a particular problem they have - whether your product solves it or not. Forum sites you can start with this include:

• Reddit
• Quora
• Specific industry-related forums (for marketing, something like the Exit Five Community can be used)
• Facebook Groups

It’s important to note that this isn’t a time to do a hard sell. People are looking for real solutions to their problems, not a pitch. Be helpful rather than bullish.

27. Create thought-leadership COntent

Thought leadership is a tactic thrown around without much regard for how to do it properly.

To have thought leadership that carries weight, you first need to have a strong opinion. This perspective needs to drive an emotive response for your audience and, in some cases, think about solutions in a different way than they already would have.

Thought leadership takes form in many different channels. It could be a white paper or market research report, or it could be simply a post on LinkedIn (with your aforementioned personal brand) talking about how you would approach something. The important thing is having something different to say - something that cuts through the noise online.

28. Digital PR

PR is often viewed through the eyes of very traditional marketing, publishing a story or a ‘win’ to an industry magazine and hoping it makes it in.

However, this has now been taken into the digital age. Digital PR takes the same core principles of PR but focuses more on getting ‘placed’ in digital articles, linking directly back to your website.

With a lot of news outlets posting online as opposed to in print, you can create a data report showcasing interesting first-party data and request that an article be published on the website.

This is not only good for brand awareness and credibility within your niche (both important for generating B2B leads) but also for SEO and visibility. The more reputable backlinks you acquire, the more your domain authority will increase in the eyes of search engines, and the higher (in principle) your content should rank.

29. ABM

ABM is often viewed as the reverse of inbound marketing but still focuses on the same core principles: helping your prospects find solutions to their problems and presenting yourself as the logical solution in a way the prospect wants to buy.

ABM takes a selective approach when picking prospects, choosing to focus on a slimmer set of potential customers based on shared specific pain points and challenges and market to them with hyper-personalised content and communications.

This is good if you have a clear understanding of your ICP and customer personas, understanding exactly how your customers view you and how you solve their problems. It allows you to be much more targeted and selective with who you market to.

However, before embarking on ABM, make sure you have the foundations in place. Make sure you know who your target buyers are and how your solution specifically targets them.

30. Speak at Industry Events

We’ve decided to place this in inbound as it’s willingly giving away information content and a unique perspective rather than interrupting people’s day.

Speaking at industry events places your company and experts in an authoritative position. It creates the presumption that you’re the market leader - that’s why you’ve been asked to speak at the event.

31. Automated Email Nurturing

Inbound marketing automation is still an incredibly useful tool for marketers and salespeople alike to generate B2B leads.

Email nurturing is basically taking those who have downloaded informational content and ‘feeding’ them more content until they trust you and want to work with you.

An example of this would be how we closed our client, Redway Networks. We sent out an automated nurture sequence to people who had downloaded a website asset previously, sharing our complete set of website assets free of charge - and free of forms.

After viewing a couple of our emails, they replied to one of the emails requesting a meeting to talk about whether we could support them in the design and build of their website - generating a new website project for the team.

Tools like HubSpot can really help with this, with the built-in functionality to send automated sequences of emails to prospective clients.

Once again, it’s important to note that this shouldn’t be a straight sale of your services unless you're confident that the people you’re sending it to are in the market for your services.

Nurturing sequences, as the name suggests, should nurture people along to the solution of their problems and nurture your relationship with your prospect rather than just sell your product.

32. Use your email signature

Anyone remember how Hotmail got so big?

Hotmail was able to grow substantially by having strategically placed call-to-action in every single user’s signature.

Now, although a tactic similar to this may seem old hat, promoting content and offers through your email signature is still a valuable tool to generate B2B leads.

33. Online Reviews

As we've continuously mentioned, people buy off people.

Requesting your existing or old customers to leave reviews on review sites (like G2 or Capterra) can help create an unbiased perception of your brand fuelled by your customers. Another place to obtain reviews is on your Google My Business page - often the first thing people will see when searching for your company.

34. Improve the user experience (UX) on your website

Finally, look at your website when looking to generate B2B leads.

Does it:

• Communicate what you do clearly?
• Have an easy-to-use interface?
• Make it easy for your visitors to convert?
• Make it simple for your visitors to find content?

Answer all of these honestly and make a plan of action of how to make all of these questions a yes. Using tools like HotJar, HubSpot (or any other CMS with reporting functionality), and Google Analytics will help you ascertain the answers to these questions.

Aside from the tools, you should be looking out for metrics such as:

• Conversion Rate - how many of your website visitors are converting into leads.
• High-Intent Conversion Rate - how many of your website visitors are completing high-intent actions like downloading pricing guides or requesting a meeting.
• Time spent on page - how much time are people spending on an individual page?
• Bounce rate - what percentage of visitors are leaving your website after reading that page?

This will help you understand the user experience on your site and prioritise actions accordingly.

Taking the First Steps to Generate More B2B Leads

Whew, that was a lot.

Understanding and prioritising your next steps when generating B2B leads can be overwhelming. With so many tactics and strategies to drive more revenue through either sales or marketing, knowing where to start can be a daunting task.

We know a thing or two about generating B2B leads, especially in the current digital landscape. Our Inbound Marketing: Reinvented guide can help you navigate how to create an inbound marketing strategy that converts customers in 2025 and helps you piece together the relevant tactics from above into a coherent, powerful strategy for your business.