Lead generation is the process of attracting and converting potential customers into sales prospects by identifying their interest in your product or service, capturing their contact information through valuable offers, and nurturing them until they're ready to buy. This fills your sales pipeline and drives revenue. See how to automate your lead generation process with these proven use cases.
Companies that excel in lead generation leave nothing to chance. In fact, lead generation is one of the most highly optimized areas of marketing strategy, with new lead generation tools and ideas constantly emerging.
Businesses that fail to keep pace are likely to be left behind. For anyone with a role in marketing, gaining a clear understanding of the latest strategies and ideas in this field is essential.
What Is Lead Generation?
Lead generation is the practice of identifying potential customers who show interest in your business, capturing their contact information, and turning them into qualified sales prospects. It's how B2B companies fill their pipeline with buyers who are actively looking for solutions, reducing wasted outreach and shortening sales cycles.
A lead is any prospect who shows interest in your product or service through specific actions. Every company defines "high-quality lead" differently based on behaviors that signal buying intent.
Interest can be expressed through webinar registrations, content downloads, or demo requests. Sales and marketing teams use lead scoring to assign values to these behaviors and determine when a prospect is ready for sales engagement.
Why lead generation matters for B2B revenue teams:
Fills your sales pipeline with qualified prospects who have expressed interest
Reduces wasted effort by focusing on prospects who match your ideal customer profile (ICP)
Shortens sales cycles by pre-qualifying buyers before sales engagement
Improves conversion rates through targeted nurturing based on buyer intent signals
Types of Leads
Not all leads are created equal. Understanding different lead types helps sales and marketing teams prioritize their efforts and align on qualification criteria.
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a prospect who has demonstrated enough behavior to be considered qualified and ready for sales intervention. MQLs typically engage with marketing content, download resources, attend webinars, or visit high-intent pages on your website. They've raised their hand, but they're not yet ready for a sales conversation.
Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
A sales qualified lead (SQL) is any qualified lead who has been accepted, nurtured, and then associated with a business opportunity. SQLs have been vetted by sales development representatives (SDRs) or meet specific criteria that indicate they're ready for direct sales engagement. They have budget, authority, need, and timeline.
Product Qualified Lead (PQL)
A product qualified lead (PQL) is a prospect who has used your product through a free trial, freemium model, or demo and demonstrated behaviors that indicate purchase intent. PQLs are common in SaaS businesses where product usage signals buying readiness more accurately than traditional engagement metrics.
Service Qualified Lead
A service qualified lead is an existing customer who has indicated interest in upgrading their service, purchasing additional products, or expanding their contract. These leads often come through customer success teams and represent expansion revenue opportunities.
How the Lead Generation Process Works
While lead generation strategies come in many forms, the fundamental process can be divided into four stages. Each stage moves prospects closer to becoming pipeline opportunities.
Step 1: Attract Prospects
The first step in effective lead generation is to attract potential customers. This happens at the top of the funnel (TOFU), where awareness is the primary goal. You need to get on the radar of buyers who have a problem you can solve.
Success here is vital. You can only nurture and convert leads if you have their attention in the first place.
Common attraction tactics include:
Blog posts and SEO-optimized content
Social media engagement
Paid advertising campaigns
Thought leadership that positions your brand as a trusted resource
Step 2: Capture Contact Information
The aim here is to collect information about potential customers that will be useful within the sales pipeline, including demographic and technographic data, names, phone numbers, and email addresses.
Successful lead capture usually relies on creating a customized offer. An informative webinar with experts discussing cutting-edge industry topics, a comprehensive guide to the latest KPIs in your industry, or further high-value collateral often seals the lead-capture deal. The key is to exchange value: prospects give you their information in return for something that helps them solve a problem or make a better decision. See how to scale your results in our lead generation use case gallery
Step 3: Qualify and Nurture Leads
Once you have contact information, leads enter the middle of the funnel (MOFU). This is where qualification and nurturing happen in parallel:
Lead scoring: Assign numeric values based on behaviors and how well prospects match your ideal customer profile (ICP). Firmographic data like company revenue and industry, plus demographic factors like job function and management level, determine qualification thresholds. Leads that match your buyer persona should score higher and require less activity to qualify.
Lead nurturing:Nurturing prospects with targeted content creates trust and engagement. Email sequences, personalized outreach, and educational resources move leads through the consideration stage.
Step 4: Convert to Pipeline
The final stage happens at the bottom of the funnel (BOFU), where qualified leads convert into sales opportunities. This is where the handoff from marketing to sales happens, governed by a service level agreement (SLA) that defines what each team is responsible for.
At this stage, leads should be sales-ready. They understand their problem, have evaluated potential solutions, and are prepared to have a conversation about pricing, implementation, and next steps. The focus shifts from education to closing, with sales teams taking over to guide prospects through the final decision-making process.
Lead Generation Strategies and Channels
Leads don't just magically appear in a company's CRM. There's a long list of ways that sales and marketing professionals can attract new customers. The most effective approach uses a mix of owned media and paid channels, tailored to where your buyers spend their time.
Owned Media Plays
Owned media strategies focus on building assets you control. These channels compound over time and typically have lower cost per lead as they mature:
Content marketing and SEO: Blog posts help you rank on search engines without ad spend while establishing subject matter expertise. The key is to map your content to specific stages of the sales funnel.
Website lead generation: Your website should be optimized for conversion with clear calls-to-action, landing pages for specific offers, and forms that capture lead information without creating friction.
Webinars and events: Online events capture interested attendees and provide opportunities to demonstrate expertise while collecting contact information from engaged prospects.
Email nurturing: Emails are great for reaching people who are already familiar with a brand, product, or service. Nurturing with an array of content creates trust, authority, and more engagement.
Customer referrals: Leads referred by existing customers convert faster and have shorter sales cycles because trust is already established.
Paid and Social Plays
Paid and social strategies provide faster results and precise targeting, especially when entering new markets or launching new products:
Outbound prospecting: Direct outreach to targeted prospects through cold email, LinkedIn messaging, and phone calls. When paired with accurate data, outbound can be highly efficient for reaching specific accounts and decision-makers.
Paid advertising: Google Ads, LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms, and Facebook Lead Ads allow you to target specific audiences with precision. Retargeting campaigns keep your brand in front of prospects who have already shown interest.
Social media marketing: LinkedIn and Facebook enable direct interaction with prospects and customers. Use these platforms for two-way conversations that build relationships with industry leads and potential buyers.
Multi-channel campaigns: Campaigns are created with a specific goal in mind, which could include generating brand awareness or promoting a new product. Effective campaigns use multiple media channels in coordination, tracking attribution across touchpoints to understand what drives conversions.
Lead Qualification and Scoring
Not every lead deserves the same level of attention. Lead qualification and scoring help teams prioritize their efforts on prospects most likely to convert, improving efficiency and close rates.
The best qualification frameworks balance two factors: fit and intent. Fit measures how well a prospect matches your ideal customer profile based on firmographic and demographic data. Intent measures the behaviors and signals that indicate a prospect is actively looking for a solution.
Lead Scoring Model
A lead scoring model assigns point values to both fit and intent factors, creating a composite score that determines when a lead is ready for sales engagement. The model should be calibrated based on historical data that shows which attributes and behaviors correlate with closed deals.
Common scoring factors include:
Factor Type | Examples | Typical Weight |
|---|---|---|
Demographic/Firmographic | Job title, company size, industry, revenue | 30-40% of total score |
Behavioral/Engagement | Email opens, content downloads, website visits, webinar attendance | 40-50% of total score |
Buying Signals | Demo requests, pricing page visits, competitor research, intent data | 20-30% of total score |
Scoring should be dynamic. As leads engage (or disengage), their scores should adjust accordingly. Score decay prevents cold leads from staying in your pipeline indefinitely based on past activity that's no longer relevant.
Lead Generation Tools and Platforms
Most B2B marketers create a workflow that incorporates the following types of software:
Customer Relationship Management (CRM):CRMs track every touchpoint from first contact through closed deal, storing customer, prospect, and pipeline data. But a CRM is just a platform. Relying on sales and marketing teams to manually maintain clean, complete data doesn't scale, which is why modern GTM teams use data enrichment and automation platforms like ZoomInfo Sales.
Sales Automation:Sales automation software can help sales teams reduce the seemingly endless list of annoying tasks that SDRs and managers hate, leaving more time for prospecting and lead nurturing. The core components commonly found in a sales automation solution include:
Sales dialer capabilities for high-volume calling
Email templates with personalization and automated A/B testing
Activity management for automatic task creation and communication logging
Multi-touch, multi-channel sequence builders with custom triggers, phone and email cadences, and performance tracking
Some sales automation software is even more specialized, handling specific tasks like gathering contact information for inbound leads, and analyzing sales calls for key insights.
Marketing Automation Platform (MAP): Just like sales automation, marketing automation software can eliminate repetitive tasks, freeing marketers to focus on creation, rather than distribution. Marketing automation is great for managing key components of your lead generation campaign, like email marketing, social media marketing, and ad campaigns, in a way that makes it incredibly easy to personalize messaging. For example, an automation for pop-up signup forms can help with building a better email list.
Intent Data and AI Platforms: Modern lead generation increasingly relies on buyer intent signals and AI-driven automation. Intent data platforms identify when prospects are researching solutions in your category, even before they visit your website. AI platforms like ZoomInfo Copilot automate research, outreach, and follow-up while maintaining personalization at scale.
Lead Generation Best Practices
The most effective lead generation programs follow proven principles that improve both volume and quality:
Understand the buyer's journey: Creating an effective lead generation strategy is based on truly understanding how your leads become customers. Make sure the individual stages are well connected and remember that the journey will vary between different types of leads.
Create offers for every stage: The first offer is often free content. Then, you might provide more information or reduced pricing in exchange for their details before finally delivering your sales offer.
Collect the right data: Aside from filling your pipeline, the secondary purpose of lead generation is to collect information that can be used later in the sales process. Almost any data is potentially useful for sales reps, and it's possible to supplement data collection using a solution like ZoomInfo.
Measure what matters: Track cost per lead (CPL), conversion rates at each stage, pipeline velocity, and ultimately revenue generated. These metrics tell you which channels and tactics are working.
Align sales and marketing: A service level agreement (SLA) between sales and marketing outlines what each department is responsible for at each stage of the lead qualification process. Research by Forrester shows that highly aligned companies grow 19% faster and are 15% more profitable.
Test and optimize continuously: Run A/B tests on landing pages, email subject lines, call-to-action copy, and form fields. Small improvements compound over time.
Reduce form friction: Leads will be more likely to sign up for something if they only have to fill out three lines, rather than 10. Ask only for the information you truly need at each stage.
Lead generation strategies can quickly become complex, multilayered affairs, especially in a world of constantly ballooning marketing tech stacks, growing competition among vendors, and new trends in audience development and content consumption. But the most well-oiled GTM teams know that they can rely on cutting-edge platforms to identify opportunities, engage customers, and win faster.
ZoomInfo offers a range of powerful tools that can assist your team with lead generation. Just as importantly, they are linked in one easy-to-use platform. Sign up for a free trial to test drive it for yourself.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is the Difference Between Lead Generation and Demand Generation?
Demand generation is the broader category, focusing on creating market interest and driving it through the entire buyer's journey. Lead generation is a subset of demand generation that focuses specifically on capturing contact information and converting prospects into qualified leads.
How Long Does It Take to See Pipeline Impact From Lead Generation?
B2B lead generation typically takes 3-6 months to produce measurable pipeline impact, depending on your sales cycle length and how quickly you nurture leads through qualification stages.
Which Lead Generation Channels Convert Best for B2B?
Customer referrals, product-led free trials, and targeted outbound consistently deliver the highest conversion rates, while content marketing and SEO generate the highest volume at the lowest cost per lead. Track attribution across your entire channel mix to understand what drives revenue, not just volume.
Can AI Automate Lead Generation Without Hurting Quality?
Yes. Tools like ZoomInfo Copilot automate research and personalized outreach at scale while maintaining quality by using AI for execution speed and keeping human judgment in the loop for strategy.