11 Ways To Generate More B2B Sales Leads For Every Client

Agencies can’t afford to rely on the same old B2B lead generation strategies and tactics indefinitely.

For instance, right now, you might be seeing a ton of success from adding “personalized” AI-generated videos to cold emails. But pretty soon you’re going to hit diminishing returns.

That’s why you should always be on the lookout for new methods – and, to help you out, I’ve rounded up 11 of my favorite tried-and-trusted ways to generate more B2B sales leads for your clients.

Let’s get into it…

1. Leverage Multichannel Outreach

Sure, it’s totally possible for a sales and marketing team to generate leads at scale while relying 100% on cold email or cold calling.

But, in our experience, one of the simplest ways to level up your lead gen efforts is to add another marketing channel or two to your strategy.

I’m going to share a simple, four-step example from QuickMail’s outreach playbook that incorporates the #1 B2B social media platform, LinkedIn:

When we started using this tactic, we were seeing open rates of around 77% with reply rates of 18% – 25%. That’s pretty solid, with cold email statistics showing that approximately 50% of campaigns have a reply rate of <10%.

Why does it work so well?

Mostly, it’s because we take the time to find highly relevant prospects (more on this later). But it’s also because the people we’re reaching are super active on LinkedIn. So by the point when we land in their email inbox, they’re already somewhat familiar with our name and brand from other digital channels.

Which means they’re more likely to open and read our emails. 

FYI you can learn more about the above campaign in this short video:

2. Test Copy Variations

Testing campaign variations is a key part of any agency's sales process, helping your sales reps understand what resonates with your client's ideal customer profile (and what doesn’t).

When it comes to testing, a lot of articles will tell you to try different email subject lines. Not this one, though.

Sure, subject lines are kind of important. But, in our experience, most recipients open the majority of emails they receive, regardless of subject line. In fact, one of our clients ran a campaign that used the sequence step number as the subject line – “1” for the first email, “2” for the first follow-up, and so on – and it was delivering a 35% reply rate!

So, instead of endlessly testing subject line variants, try playing around with the valuable content in your email body instead.

Not only can it help you identify winning intros, hooks, and CTAs, but it also means you’re not sending identical emails to large numbers of recipients – which reduces your chances of being flagged by spam filters.

Of course, manually rewriting all your emails takes time. 

Time that you’d rather spend on finding higher-quality prospects, analyzing campaign performance, and optimizing your sequences.

That’s why we introduced a feature called Reword with AI, which automatically rewrites every single email you send (without changing the original meaning).

Best of all, it’s available as standard with all QuickMail plans.

3. Add a Timely Hook

Making your outreach messages feel timely creates a feeling of urgency and scarcity around your offer. Which, in turn, encourages potential customers to reply.

Cool – so what does that look like in practice?

Well, you could say that a mutual contact just brought them up in a meeting. Or that you’re planning a podcast on a topic that relates to their specialism and you’d love them to appear as a guest.

Really, it can be anything, just so long as it explains why you decided to reach out now.

4. Send Automated Follow-Ups

Every sales team understands the importance of following up with prospective customers after the initial contact to guide their purchasing decisions.

In fact, our research shows that 55% of cold email campaign replies come from a follow-up email, with the highest-performing campaigns containing (at least) three follow-ups.

Despite this, there are still plenty of cold outreach pros that aren’t following up effectively. They’re not sending enough follow-ups, or they’re following-up with some B2B prospects but not others.

Or, in some cases, both.

The obvious solution is to remove the human factor by automating your follow-up sequences.

That’s why QuickMail makes it super simple to add follow-up steps spanning cold email outreach, cold calls, LinkedIn, and even SMS.

Learn more: How To Write a Follow-Up Email With 10+ Templates & Examples 

5. Make Automations Feel "Human"

In many ways, automation is a lead gen agency’s best friend, allowing you to generate more leads with fewer resources.

But it can be a double-edged sword.

Your prospects are savvy. They likely receive a ton of cold outreach messages, and they can spot automated emails a mile off. If they know they’re not dealing with a real human, they’re unlikely to read your email – let alone reply.

 That’s why it pays to give your automations a human edge.

For example, at QuickMail, we’ve been running campaigns where we CC a colleague in the middle of a sequence. We send one or two “standard” outreach emails, then a third saying something like: “By the way, I’m adding our founder Jeremy to the conversation.”

Here’s how it looks in QuickMail:

This isn’t possible with most cold email software, so it makes the campaign feel more natural (and less automated).

6. Optimize Email Deliverability

Email deliverability isn’t a big concern for our customers, because we offer a bunch of deliverability-enhancing tools.

I’ve already mentioned one – Reword with AI.

Another is Deliverability AI, which automatically swaps out inboxes with low deliverability scores for higher-performing ones. 

And then there’s blacklist monitoring, MX bounce protection, unsubscribe headers, built-in email list verification to weed out invalid email addresses… the list goes on.

That’s why QuickMail users enjoy an average inboxing rate of 98% from millions of sends across all email service providers.

But if you’re using a different outreach tool (why??), you might still be struggling with your deliverability rate. And if a bunch of your emails are landing in the spam folder, you’re not generating the maximum possible value from your campaigns.

7. Build Better Prospect Lists

Okay, so if QuickMail has “solved” the problem of low email deliverability, what else should you be focusing on to improve campaign performance?

Simple: boosting your response rate.

In a world where potential buyers are bombarded with cold emails night and day, volume is no longer the solution to getting more replies – it’s all about quality.

Finding higher-quality prospects means vetting every prospect to make sure they’re a strong match for your client’s target audience. Taking a quick look at their job title won't cut it. At QuickMail, we do this for our own campaigns by checking the prospect’s website to make sure they’re…

• A lead gen agency…

• …providing email and/or LinkedIn automation services…

• …and with at least three existing clients

If they tick all those boxes, we’ll reach out. If not, we move on.

8. Optimize Campaigns for Replies

Getting more responses isn’t just about finding more relevant prospects – it’s also about sending campaigns that are easy to reply to.

By that, I mean removing the barriers that typically stop potential leads from responding.

Instead of pitching the client’s product and hoping to close the deal with an email or two, you should be “selling” the initial meeting by explaining how much they’ll benefit from jumping on a call with you.

It requires way less commitment from the prospect, so they’re more likely to reply.

Or, if that doesn’t work, back off one step further and “sell” a five-minute video that they can watch at their own convenience – which, in turn, “sells” them the value of a call.

With QuickMail, you can track reply rates back to when the original email was sent:

So there’s never any doubt which campaigns are generating replies (and which are falling flat).

9. Give Potential Clients a Reason to Respond

The “soft-touch” strategy I laid out above can be a super effective way to boost your response rate. But it’s not the only viable approach.

I spend a bunch of time analyzing our clients’ outreach campaigns to see what’s working – because if there’s a new B2B lead generation tactic that’s doing big numbers, I definitely want to know about it.

Many of our customers see reply rates of 20%+ with barely any manual input.

These top performers do whatever it takes to convince ideal customers to reply. I even saw one campaign that achieved a 27% response rate by bribing people with a $20 Amazon gift card.

Sure, this is one of the more extreme B2B lead generation efforts. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it actually makes sense.

Let’s assume that only people who replied went on to claim their gift card. In that case, they were paying $540 per 100 contacted leads (plus the cost of their QuickMail license).

Now, imagine their client is paying $3,000 for one lead a day. By spending $540 on Amazon gift cards, they’re generating a full month’s worth of leads. Plus they have seven to roll over into the next month.

I wouldn’t expect this approach to work in every niche – let’s be honest, it sounds kinda spammy.

But it just goes to show that you’re more likely to get results if you give people a clear reason to respond.

10. Localize Your Outreach

A little localization can be a powerful tool when it comes to generating leads from cold outreach.

For instance, let’s say you’re targeting prospects in a non-English-speaking country.

Sure, you could just assume that they’ve got enough English to understand your messages.

Or you could score some bonus points by taking the time to write in their native language (you can always get some help from Google Translate), then pivot mid-sequence by saying something like: "I'm jumping in here, Jane’s away this week, sorry I only know English…"

It barely takes you any longer, but it makes your lead generation campaign feel a lot more personal.

11. A/B Test to Learn What Works

In the world of cold outreach, A/B testing involves creating two variants of an outreach message and sending them to different segments of your audience, with the goal of discovering which variant works best.

To give a simple example, you might test two versions of a cold email CTA:

• Variant #1 encourages the prospect to book a call by replying to the email

• Variant #2 prompts them to book a call by clicking a calendar link

The winner is whichever variant generates the most leads.

Provided everything else about the email is the same, and assuming you sent it to a large enough sample of prospects, you can feel pretty confident in rolling out the winning variant across the rest of your campaigns.

Read more: 8 Best Practices for A/B Testing Email Outreach

Generate More B2B Sales Leads With QuickMail

By this point, it should be clear that there are plenty of things you can do to generate more B2B sales leads for your clients – but that many of them only work if you choose the right lead generation tools.

QuickMail is the best fit for lead generation agencies, because we’re built for businesses like yours.

We take care of all the deliverability stuff for you, so you can spend more time finding the right prospects and creating engaging campaigns.

Find out what we can do for your lead gen agency by booking your QuickMail demo call.

FAQs

What is B2B lead generation?

B2B lead generation is a process that involves finding B2B buyers who are likely to be interested in buying a specific product or service, then targeting them through marketing and/or sales campaigns. A “lead” is someone who expresses interest in buying the product/service in question – such as by booking a product demo or viewing a pricing page.

Why is B2B lead generation important?

B2B lead generation is important because it fuels business growth for B2B companies. Without a constant stream of leads in their sales pipeline, those brands won’t be able to replace churned customers and keep hitting their revenue targets. No leads means no sales, which ultimately means no more business.

What are the different types of B2B sales leads?

There are three main types of B2B leads:

• Marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) are leads at the top of the sales funnel who respond to marketing campaigns, such as downloading a piece of gated content (like a white paper) or submitting a contact form on a landing page.

• Sales-qualified leads are typically aware of the product/service you’re selling, are a good fit, and have an immediate need.

• Product-qualified leads have signed up for a free trial of a product and started seeing some value from it, making them likely to upgrade to a paid version.