Five techniques you need for lead generation and your sales funnel

Lead generation is essential for every sales leader, yet it often feels complex and frustrating. For B2B teams, consistently generating qualified interest requires both analytics and emotional insight. Revenue Grid helps you master this balancing act.

Lead generation involves converting prospects into customers after they already exhibited an interest in your company and its products. This usually occurs in a variety of ways including blog posts, promotions, real-world events, applications, etc. This variety offers the sales professional plenty of options to use.

Yet many teams struggle to fully master the lead generation process. You need a well-defined system that combines marketing, writing, sales, and other aspects to generate profit. In particular, there are five techniques you need to master to achieve excellent lead generation.

This guide is for: Sales managers and revenue leaders at mid-market and enterprise SaaS companies looking to solve challenges like long deal cycles, complex buying committees, and fragmented sales data.

Overview of Sales Lead Generation Techniques

Here are the five core techniques every B2B sales team should master:

1. Attracting Prospects with High-Value Offers – Create magnetic content that draws qualified leads
2. Leveraging Social Media for Lead Generation – Build strategic social presence across key platforms
3. Effective Follow-Up Strategies – Nurture prospects through structured communication
4. Building a Referral Network – Cultivate relationships that generate ongoing leads
5. Tracking and Analyzing Lead Generation Results – Measure and optimize your funnel performance

Types of Sales Leads

Understanding different lead types helps you prioritize efforts and tailor your approach:

• Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs): Prospects who have engaged with marketing content and meet basic criteria
• Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs): Leads that sales has validated as ready for direct outreach
• Cold Leads: Prospects with no prior interaction with your company
• Warm Leads: Contacts who have shown some interest through website visits, content downloads, or referrals
• Hot Leads: High-intent prospects actively evaluating solutions and ready to buy

Understanding the Sales Lead Generation Funnel

Sales and lead generation can be readily envisioned as a funnel. This is because the process involves sifting through a large amount of names and prospects, identifying which of these names are viable as sales leads, then turning these leads into customers at the end. It’s like being a prospector, shifting soil through a funnel to find a nugget of gold.

Your prospect is the nugget of gold at the top of our prospector’s funnel. As gold goes through a sieve your prospect starts as a lead, then via sales calls and follow ups they’re sieved through the funnel until you can convert them into a customer.

Using digital channels like social media and high quality content marketing makes your job far easier than traditional prospecting. You may well have a lot of information to sift through but there are ways to streamline the lead generation process. So let’s look at the five key aspects you can use to win at lead generation and ace your funnel technique.

1 – Attracting Prospects with High-Value Offers

A loadstone is a magnetic rock and this is exactly what you need to start lead generation. Your offer needs to be distinct enough to draw attention, intriguing enough to retain interest beyond first impressions, and be as solid as a rock. Don’t skimp on time or funds on your offer as it needs to be high quality.

Your offer can be a variety of different things so you need to decide what’s most fitting for your product. You also need to ensure that it’s simple, as if it’s too complicated your potential prospects will be put off. Generic information boxes and limited call-to-actions won’t cut it as they’re forgettable. Give something to your potential lead instead.

Offer exclusive content for example, or a detailed guide about your product. Then you can follow these pieces of content up with a unique discount. By giving your potential lead something for free, your offer will attract them into your sales funnel through simple magnetism.

Revenue Grid Advantage: Revenuegrid’s Platform automatically captures and scores leads from your high-value offers, syncing directly with Salesforce to ensure no prospect falls through the cracks.

2 – Leveraging Social Media for Lead Generation

You’re not going to get anywhere with your leads if you don’t have a solid social media system to rely on. After you decide what your offer will be, start working on a social media strategy based on it. By doing so you’re not simply following a trend you’re making an excellent data driven decision.

On average a business will grow by 24% if it uses social media to drive lead generation. It’s inexpensive as an average lead costs $0.80 on Facebook, and $2.50 on Google. Research which social networks work best for your product then move forwards to aligning your sales process with your social media strategy.

Platform-Specific Strategies:

• LinkedIn: Focus on thought leadership content and direct outreach to decision-makers
• Twitter/X: Share industry insights and engage in relevant conversations
• Facebook: Use targeted ads for broader awareness campaigns
• Instagram: Visual content showcasing company culture and behind-the-scenes content

You don’t necessarily have to pay for leads or advertisements either. You can run promotions and giveaways for your subscribers that are linked to your offer, or share links to exclusive content to drive up unique hits and viewership on your landing page. Social media gives you considerable flexibility in generating leads so exploit it to its full potential.

3 – Effective Follow-Up Strategies for Sales Leads

If you’ve employed a decent social media strategy you should subsequently receive feedback from your prospects. For every comment, email, submission etc you receive you need to direct your potential customer to your product. You achieve this by using a good follow-up system characterised by high quality writing.

Your main follow-up tool is the humble email and each of your emails must be structured the same way:

• Value First: Each email must offer value to the customer, such as a financial incentive or useful insight
• Authority: Write in a detailed and authoritative manner that builds trust
• Clear Call-to-Action: Always end with something the customer can do, like clicking a link or scheduling a demo

You can adapt this three tiered structure to any social media content including posts, tweets and videos. What matters is that they retain the same structure, tone and direction throughout.

Best Practices for Nurturing Leads:

• Segment leads based on behavior and engagement level
• Create email sequences tailored to different buyer personas
• Use personalization beyond just first names – reference specific pain points
• Provide educational content that moves prospects through the buying journey
• Set up automated workflows for consistent follow-up

4 – Building a Referral Network

The next stage after your follow ups is cultivating and maintaining a strong network of contacts that can boost your referrals. You can start in-house by getting your team to actively network, both online and offline, to generate a wider group of supporters. This effectively serves as free marketing for you as well.

Why do you start building a network at this stage of funnel? Because a strong network of contacts will feed you follow ups via referrals and positive reviews. It’s a cyclical process but it’s better to launch the process with follow ups rather than the other way around.

Don’t be afraid of being up front about asking for referrals either, you might be surprised by just how much people appreciate being direct. Offer perks as part of the referral process and make them part of your overall sales system. Both you and your customer stand to benefit.

Offline Lead Generation Strategies:

• Industry Events: Attend trade shows and conferences to meet prospects face-to-face
• Networking Groups: Join professional associations and local business groups
• Speaking Opportunities: Present at industry events to establish thought leadership
• Direct Mail: Send targeted, personalized mail to high-value prospects
• Phone Outreach: Strategic cold calling to qualified prospects

5 – Tracking and Analyzing Lead Generation Results

By this point, your team should have captured valuable data on each lead. With Revenue Grid’s analytics and Salesforce integration, you can segment, track, and optimize every interaction automatically. This will prepare you for the next cycle of lead generation.

Key Metrics to Track for Lead Generation Performance:

The following table outlines essential metrics every sales team should monitor to optimize their lead generation efforts:

These metrics provide a comprehensive view of your lead generation performance and help identify areas for improvement.

Sort your leads by demographic groups including age, location, gender etc, to get a more detailed view of your customers. You can use a variety of analytical programs and metrics, the key here is to be as detailed as possible. Once you arrive at your key metric start posting Adwords (you won’t need to spend more than $20-40 per day) and start using search engine optimisation to boost traffic and unique visits.

Sync this up with your network contacts and consider how you can target prospects with more detailed content. With each round of lead generation you’ll generate improved data and as a result, improve your sales.

Revenue Grid customers like Emerald Scientific have improved pipeline efficiency by over 20%—see their story.

How to Qualify and Score Sales Leads

Lead qualification and scoring are essential for prioritizing your sales efforts and improving conversion rates. Here’s how to implement an effective system:

Lead Qualification Criteria:

• Budget: Does the prospect have the financial resources for your solution?
• Authority: Are you speaking with decision-makers or influencers?
• Need: Does the prospect have a clear pain point your product solves?
• Timeline: When does the prospect plan to make a purchasing decision?

Lead Scoring Methods:

• Assign point values to different behaviors (email opens, content downloads, demo requests)
• Weight demographic factors (company size, industry, role)
• Track engagement levels across multiple touchpoints
• Use negative scoring to identify disqualified leads

Lead Generation Tools and Technology

Leveraging the right technology stack can significantly improve your lead generation efficiency:

Essential Tools:

• CRM Systems: Salesforce, HubSpot for lead management and tracking
• Marketing Automation: Marketo, Pardot for nurturing campaigns
• Analytics Platforms: Google Analytics, Revenue Grid for performance tracking
• Social Media Tools: LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Hootsuite for social selling
• Email Tools: Outreach, SalesLoft for personalized outreach at scale

Let your leads generate your next sales cycle

Optimizing your lead generation and the sales funnel is well worth the time and effort required to do it well. It allows you to take a long term view of your business, moving you beyond a linear view of one cycle of success. Take your time, focus on using data, and always be ready to adapt to changing circumstances.

Summary and Next Steps

You’ve learned five proven techniques for sales lead generation:

1. Create high-value offers that attract qualified prospects
2. Build strategic social media presence across key platforms
3. Implement structured follow-up sequences
4. Develop a strong referral network
5. Track and analyze performance metrics

The key to success is implementing these techniques systematically and measuring results consistently. Start with one or two techniques, master them, then expand your approach.

Ready to accelerate your lead generation?

See how Revenue Grid helps B2B SaaS teams convert more leads, faster with automated lead capture, Salesforce integration, and AI-driven insights.

Book a Demo

How Revenue Grid Stands Apart:

• Complete Salesforce integration with real-time data sync
• AI-driven lead scoring and insights
• Automated lead capture from all sources
• Advanced analytics and reporting
• Proven ROI for enterprise sales teams

If you’re looking to improve as a sales professional, this is the perfect time to study our other articles on the sales industry.

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