B2B Lead Generation: What It Is and What Actually Counts
A straight look at B2B lead generation for companies that have grown on referrals: what the term means, outbound versus inbound, and which metric is worth tracking.
What is B2B lead generation?
B2B lead generation is the work of getting companies that could buy from you to show interest, so that your salesperson can have a conversation with the right person. It covers everything from finding the right companies to sparking interest and booking a meeting. What counts is not the number of contacts, but the number of conversations with decision-makers who have a need.
That sounds obvious. Yet much of what is sold as lead generation is measured by something else entirely: emails sent, downloads, clicks. Numbers that grow nicely in a report and rarely say anything about next quarter's sales.
Selling to other companies also plays by different rules than the consumer world. The purchase often involves several people, the decision takes time and the number of potential customers is small. A few hundred well-chosen companies can be a bigger market than it sounds.
A lead is not a lead: from contact to meeting
Marketing teams usually distinguish between two levels. An MQL is a contact that marketing considers interesting, for example someone who downloaded a guide. An SQL is a contact that a salesperson has spoken to and judged to be a real business opportunity.
The gap between the two is where the money disappears. Marketing hands over a long list, sales makes the calls, and it turns out that only a few had budget, need and authority. The rest were curious, students or competitors who wanted to read the guide.
That is why you should have a single definition of what counts: a qualified meeting. A person who fits your ideal customer, who has a problem you can solve and who has agreed to set aside time with your salesperson. Everything before that is activity. Everything after it is sales.
Outbound or inbound: what suits a company that lives on referrals?
Inbound means the customer comes to you: through search engines, content, webinars, trade shows or ads that get someone to fill in a form. Outbound means you make the first contact, with a personal email, a call or a message.
Both work. But they answer different questions.
- Inbound builds over time. It takes content, visibility and patience, and it mostly catches people who are already searching for you or for your type of solution. Paid ads are faster, but then you pay for every visitor, including the ones who were never a fit.
- Outbound can be started with a clear target group and a good message. You choose which companies you want to talk to, and you don't have to wait for them to find you.
Referrals are in themselves the best lead source there is: the recipient already trusts the person who made the introduction. The problem is that you don't control them. They bring a couple of conversations in a good month and none at all in a bad one, and they dry up once your network has been worked through.
For a company that has grown this way, our recommendation is to start with outbound. You already have a picture of which customers work best, that is, an ideal customer, but no way of reaching more of them. Inbound requires you to build an audience first. Outbound requires you to know who you want to reach, and you already do.
That doesn't mean inbound is wrong. Good content makes every cold contact easier, because the recipient can look you up and find something worthwhile. But as a first step toward something predictable, outbound is quicker to put in place and easier to measure. If you wonder whether cold email works in your particular market, it's better to ask than to guess: book a free 30-minute call and go through how big the market is and how your ideal customer could be reached.
Why mass mailings have such a bad reputation
Many have already been burned. A tool, a list, a couple of thousand emails, and the result was a few angry replies and a domain that suddenly landed in the spam folder.
The fault rarely lay in the channel. It lay in sending the same text to everyone. Then it becomes nobody's text, and the recipient's inbox learns to filter the sender out. If the email is instead written in the recipient's language, to the right role and with a clear reason for getting in touch, it's a completely different matter. We cover how that works in our guide to B2B cold email.
And what about deliverability? An email that never shows up is wasted, however good the copy. Authentication with SPF, DKIM and DMARC is the foundation, and it is explained step by step in the piece on why emails end up in spam.
What counts in B2B lead generation
Here is the simplest way to tell a well-thought-out approach from one that just looks busy. Ask what is being measured.
Emails sent? Opens? The number of contacts on a list? All three tell you how much has been done, not what it led to. The open rate is also unreliable, since some email clients download images automatically and count an open that no human made.
Measure instead in the order closest to the deal:
- Qualified meetings that actually took place.
- How many of them became a concrete opportunity for your salesperson.
- Which segments and which messages were behind the best meetings.
- How many replies were interested, how many were declines, and why.
The last one is underrated. A no with a reason, for example "we already have a supplier" or "wrong person, talk to purchasing", is information about your target group. Someone who reads every reply learns more in a month than someone who only counts emails.
How to set it up yourself
You don't need a big system. You need a routine.
- Define your ideal customer. Industry, size, region and above all who makes the decision. Write it down on one page. If you can't describe the person, you can't write to them.
- Build a small list and check it. Better a few hundred companies you can justify one by one than thousands you hope will fit.
- Write several versions of the message. One per segment, in the recipient's language. Test them against each other and keep what gets replies from the right people.
- Send sparingly and from the right sender. A few emails per inbox per day, a short sequence, and separate domains that have been warmed up before the first send. Don't use the company's main domain for experiments.
- Read and answer every reply. This is where interest becomes a meeting, or drops away because nobody got back in time.
- Book right away and send the background along. The salesperson should know who is coming, what the person said and why it fits.
The last point is often forgotten. A meeting where the salesperson goes in blind starts with ten minutes of questions that were already answered in the email thread.
In-house or with help
Should you do this yourself or hire someone? It mostly depends on time. The work isn't difficult, but it is relentless: lists, copy, deliverability, replies, bookings. It doesn't survive being something you do when there's room in the calendar.
If you bring in help, ask the same question as above. What gets reported? Is it activity, or is it meetings with people you would have wanted to meet yourself? Ask to approve the copy before anything is sent, and ask for a trial period instead of a long contract. A supplier that is confident in its way of working rarely has a problem with that.
Start by writing down your ideal customer on one page and working out how many companies in Sweden actually fit. Whether the answer is a few hundred or a few thousand, you already have a market to work with, and the next step is to write the first email to one clear recipient.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between an MQL and an SQL?
An MQL is a contact that marketing finds interesting, for example after a download. An SQL is a contact that a salesperson has spoken to and judged to be a real business opportunity. It is the SQL, or in practice a qualified meeting, that is worth measuring.
Should you choose outbound or inbound?
For companies that have grown on referrals, outbound is usually the fastest way to get predictability, because you choose which companies you reach. Inbound builds over time and works best as a complement.
Which metric matters most in lead generation?
The number of qualified meetings with the right decision-makers. Emails sent, opens and lists show activity, but not whether it leads to deals.