The Future Of B2B Lead Generation: How To Generate Leads in 2022

Stop doing everything manually!

If you’re tired of chasing after leads and doing all the work, it’s time to let someone do the selling for you.

In this guide, I’ll walk you through a systematic process we use to generate thousands of leads and consistently book meetings each week.

In the business world, finding new leads and closing deals is one of the hardest things to do.

That’s why you see great salesman making absolute bank!

One good salesman can make a company.

Even so much so that companies out there can get away with having a shitty product purely because their sales team is killing it.

One of the biggest bottlenecks that decrease sales is simply not having enough leads.

At the beginning of starting your company, you’re usually cruising. 

Your family is buying from you, your next-door neighbor needs some consulting, and your girlfriend’s boyfriend needs a website done.

But the leads in your network usually run dry after a while.

So what now?

Your network isn’t getting you any new business, and word-of-mouth referrals only come in occasionally.

And what’s even worse, you can’t rely on word-of-mouth. It’s too unreliable and sporadic, and you can’t measure deal flow.

This is where business owners usually start researching how to generate more leads.

What is lead generation?

According to the dictionary, “Lead generation” is defined as:

“The action or process of identifying and cultivating potential customers for a business’s products or services.”

So simply put, find new customers for your business.

But as we already stated, your network is as dry as your ex-girlfriend, so where do we get these leads from?

Traditional ways to get leads

As we scour through the dark corners of the internet, the solutions that business owners usually arrive at is a cocktail of the following:

• Buy leads from some shady lead dealer on the corners of the internet streets.
• Complicated Paid Ad funnels testing out different campaigns, sometimes spending a buttload of money without results.
• Spent hours, after hours, grinding, researching companies, trying to find and connect with decision-makers, usually just finding crappy generic info@ emails.
• Create a ton of content, hoping it will get you leads through sign-ups.

Let’s dive deeper into these so they make more sense.

Your friendly neighborhood lead dealer from a shady corner on the internet

He usually promises you the world (kinda like we do, LOL), but the leads they sell are usually a one-off deal where you pay anywhere from $10 to $100 per lead and sometimes even more.

And then you reach out to these leads, and… crickets…

*chirp chirp chirp*

If you’re lucky, your outreach gets seen, but it doesn’t even get their attention half the time.

There is a myriad of factors that come into play here.

And, in the lead dealer’s defense, it’s not always their fault that the leads are unresponsive.

Later we will go into further detail about what’s needed to get a lead to be responsive and what qualifications a lead needs to be considered “sizzling hot.”

Complicated Paid Ad funnels

In my opinion, this is a way better alternative to buying leads off of the streets.

Here’s how it works:

1. Create an offer for your target audience
2. Setup an advertisement to drive traffic to your offer
3. Bribe the potential customer to sign-up with his private details to get access to the offer.

There are variations to this, but generally, this is what a lead generation paid ads funnel looks like.

There are benefits to doing it like this, the main one being that your lead decides to give you their personal details, like their email and phone number, themselves.

Which results in very high open rates and replies. Great!

But, there are massive downsides…

It’s not as easy as you think to get someone to give you their details.

This often results in your ad spend not giving you a great Cost-Per-Lead (CPL).

Getting your CPL down means testing various campaigns, sometimes spending a buttload of money without tangible results.

If your targeting isn’t correct, you’re screwed…

If your offer isn’t right, you’re screwed…

If you don’t have enough budget to test out different things… Guess what…

YOU’RE SCREWED!

So thread down this path carefully.

It takes a professional to set up a good paid ads funnel that generates quality leads for cheap, and even they need time to test.

Ok, so what’s next in line?

Spent hours, after hours, grinding, researching companies, trying to find and connect with decision-makers, usually just finding crappy generic info@ emails.

This one is also a classic and still of the most common methods to get leads!

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not a terrible way of going about it.

Especially not if you’re a hard, dedicated worker who’s completely fine with doing the most monotonous shit day in and out.

Unfortunately for me, I’m not one of those people. And if you are an entrepreneur like me, then you would probably enjoy spending time on other things.

Digital assets like content that will generate results for more extended periods.

Like the next item on the list…

Inbound marketing aka creating a ton of content, hoping it gets you leads

I’m not going to sit here and shit on inbound marketing.

It’s one of the tried and true classics, and I don’t think it will ever go away.

Heck! This piece I’m writing right now is an example of inbound marketing. 

Inbound marketing is fantastic.

It creates traffic, establishes you as an authority, and builds rapport with your future customers.

Which is all absolutely amazing!

But… and here is the but…

You have to move mountains to reach a point where it provides a sustainable positive Return-On-Investment (ROI) on all the time and energy you put in.

There are so many things to do.

Write content, create videos, do silly dances on TikTok, go on dinner dates with your cat for Instagram reels, and much more.

And if you don’t get it right, all this time spent could go to waste.

Fortunately, I’ve been a marketing professional since 2013, so I have a good idea of what works and what doesn’t.

So, I can hear you think… What the hell am I supposed to do then?

I’ll tell you in a little bit, don’t worry.

Let’s first discuss in detail what makes a good lead. Because that’s one of the first steps of nailing your outreach and closing them deals, son!

The 5 keys to generating quality leads

We don’t just want those average leads.

For example, receptionist gatekeepers that don’t know anything about the business, where explaining your value-proposition to them would just be an enormous waste of valuable time.

This brings me to the first point. Point numero uno:

1. Get the email addresses that matter

Most people go about finding email addresses completely & utterly the wrong way.

They find a company they want to reach out to, go to their contact page, and pick up the info@ email address.

Or even worse, fill in a contact form and leave a message…

This may work if you’re targeting freelancers or small mom-and-pop shops, but if you want to sign big deals, this isn’t getting you anywhere.

The only place this will get you is the inbox of a gatekeeper, who will ignore you.

You need the addresses of decision-makers. CEOs, executive directors, marketing managers, and the likes.

So how do you get these?

Sorry, friend, you will have to keep reading. I promise I’m sharing it later in the article.

2. Enrich their emails with personal data

Now that you know who’s email addresses to get, we need to start “enriching” them.

Meaning that we add more data to the contact.

Data like first and last name, job title, phone number, social media profiles, gender, company name, et cetera.

Each extra data input we get gives us another potential touch point.

In the current day and age, we need to be in their face everywhere, not just in their mailbox.

3. Verify their emails

Often, old email addresses you find don’t work anywhere.

So there are two things that happen when you start emailing addresses that are no longer active:

1. You don’t get any replies. Duh.
2. You can get flagged for spam if you do it too much.

Therefore it’s crucial to verify if their email address is still active. 

There are services that can “ping” an email address, meaning that this service will send a simple package to this address to see if it’s “alive.”

And if it is, you will get a response.

If it isn’t, you won’t get a response, and you will know to get rid of this address. Just send it to the email graveyard. It’s useless.

Yes, young padawan, I will explain later how to do precisely this.

4. Make sure they’re in the correct niche

Yes, this is pretty obvious, and I won’t spend too much time on it.

When you’re trying to email a landscaper, make sure you’re emailing a landscaper, not a beauty salon…

Simple enough, right? Right.

5. Get a shitload of these leads (preferably on autopilot)!

Cold outreach is a numbers game.

The cold hard reality is that most of your cold outreach will not be responded to.

It’s like dating (for me, at least).

If I go to a bar, and I only talk to one girl, and I expect to get some of that sweet, sweet nectar that night, there’s a decent chance I’m probably out of luck.

But if I shoot my shot at 10 or maybe even 20 girls. My odds of getting “lucky” DRASTICALLY go up!

At that point, I wouldn’t even call it luck anymore, to be quite frank.

So why do a lot of people not increase their numbers?

Because it’s not easy to do, it’s hard work.

So they reach out to a few leads, don’t get a response, and give up.

But what if we could skip the hard work part and start blasting out messages to thousands of people every month, completely automated?

Sounds pretty sweet, don’t it?!

I’ll explain how we do it.

Welcome To The Future Of B2B Lead Generation

Scotty, beam me up. We are in for a ride!

I will be sharing some stuff here that’s going to feel illegal to you, but no worries, it’s perfectly legal.

In the world of big data, there are loads of opportunities. The internet is jam-packed with valuable data up for grabs.

So let’s use it.

Sending Out Cold Emails Automatically

Emailing people probably isn’t new to you, and doing it automatically isn’t either.

I have a rough idea of what your mailbox looks like, and I’m going to make the bold assumption that most of the emails you have in there are probably sent to you by cold email software.

This will probably make you wonder:

“I know all these emails in my mailbox are sent out automatically, and I know they don’t know me personally, so most of the time, I don’t even bother opening them.”

That, however, doesn’t mean that we can’t make our emails look like it’s been sent manually by us.

There are many tricks we can use to make it look like we’ve sent our email by hand, while in reality, we sent out the same email to thousands of people at the time.

Later I will also dive a bit deeper into how we do this.

But the most important thing to know is: that cold email outreach works.

There’s no doubt about it.

Scraping Website Data

As I mentioned, most salespeople get their lead data by manually picking it from a website and then pasting it into a spreadsheet.

But this stuff is tedious and very time-consuming.

Using data scraping tools, we can do this entirely on autopilot.

So instead of extracting the data one by one, web scrapers allow us to scrape thousands upon thousands of leads while we’re Netflix & chilling…

Here are some scraping tools we use:

• D7LeadFinder.com
• Apify.com
• ProxyCrawler.com

Pretty neat, right? In the tools section of his ebook, I will go over exactly what we use what specific scraper for in detail.

Enrich Emails With Personal Data Automatically

Tired of trying to find the personal business emails of decision-makers?

This is also something you can completely automate.

So instead of needing to browse the internet for hours, trying to find the CEOs, Executive Directors, and so on, we can just use some fantastic tools to do it for us.

We these specific tools for this:

• Hunter.io
• ProxyCrawler Leads API Finder

These tools make finding decision-maker emails one of the easiest jobs on the planet.

The only thing you need is their domain -or company name.

Go and try it out for yourself. They have a free plan available where you can try it out:

But do you think the fun ends here? Nope. Let’s keep going.

I hope I’ve been blowing your mind so far.

And no worries, later in this ebook, I’ll lay out the exact strategy on how we use all these tools to make it more concise for you.

Scraping Active Social Media Accounts

Since you’ve made it this far, I’m going to make the bold assumption that you’ve at least done some form of cold outreach before.

A big part of cold outreach these days is connecting with your leads on Instagram.

You need to stay top of mind and build rapport with your leads. You can do that by either engaging with their content or having them engage with your content.

Building these relationships can be pretty time-consuming, so we will also automate part of this process.

We will use a tool called Phantombuster.com for this.

Here are some things we can automate:

• Based on the first name, last name, and company name, we can automatically search for their LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter profiles and send a connection request;
• We can use software that automatically likes their posts or even watch their stories;

And all of this, ladies & gentlemen, will be done automatically, without a single manual intervention needed.

The only manual intervention that needs to be done will be when your lead starts replying to you.

But then you’re already in. You’ve been noticed, and now is the time to make your sales skills shine!

Automated Omnichannel “In-Your-Face” Outreach

The combination of these tools is the basis of our “sauce,” our “secret” formula to generating thousands of high-quality leads and closing deals daily.

Applying these tools & mental frameworks correctly will change how you run your business.

Want to get a look inside our kitchen? Book a free 15-minute demo call, and we will show you everything.

By the end of this demo call, you will have a clear understanding of the next steps you can take for your business to start generating consistent and reliable leads and close deals daily.