Lead Generation: A Beginner’s Guide to Generating Business Leads In 2025

Have you ever noticed that some sales teams call you at the worst time of the day? They call you when you have time with your family or dinner with your loved ones.

Sometimes, they get lucky and get some sales from someone, but that’s not the case forever. This kind of cold calling process is gone as everyone has started noticing these boring tactics to get noticed by their potential customers.

I’m here to guide you on how to get qualified leads and get your target audience without being blocked by the so-called Lead Generation methods.

Ready to learn more about lead generation strategies? Let’s dive into it.

What is a Lead?

A lead is simply a person or a company who showed interest in our product or service. But they are not yet ready to make a purchase.

Do not get confused between the potential leads and prospects. A Lead is someone who shows an interest in our services or product, and the prospect must be qualified through some channels to become a prospect. 

There are four main types of lead based on their level of interest:

1. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL): These leads have shown interest in your product or services by attending your webinar, downloading a copy of a document, or filling out a contact form. They are more likely to become your customers or clients than simple contacts.

2. Sales Qualified Leads (SQL): These leads have been qualified by the sales team, who identified them as an Ideal customer based on their demographics and data. They are one step behind in purchasing your product or services.

3. Product Qualified Leads (PQL): These leads used your products before, mostly a free trial & also showed some interest in your paid subscription, which is identified by the experts of the sales team who qualified them as loyal customers in the future.

4. Service Qualified Leads (SQL): These leads showed an interest in your company product or services by getting a guideline/consultation or requesting additional information.

However, the question arises: How can we convert leads into customers? Well, we will cover everything regarding lead generation and prospecting, but for now, let’s see how to build momentum for lead generation.

Lead Generation Defined

Lead generation creates consumer interest in our product or service and converts it into a sale.

You generate leads by capturing visitors through different channels, such as website forms on a landing page. 

It is also a part of inbound marketing, where we generate leads without going to the consumer or leads, such as in cold calls or cold emails. 

Lead generation is the initial sales funnel step that marketing teams design, especially for generating B2B leads to do SAAS Lead Generation.

No time to read? Watch my tutorial on how to do lead generation

Why do you need Lead Generation?

In online business, you either do sales or consultations. But in both cases, you’re doing something to get paid through your company.

And that’s how the lead generation process came in between. So, if you want to feed your business, you need to get paid, and lead generation is one of those processes you need to do to get something in return.

First, you have to analyze whether there is any interest in a particular market or product, and then you can jump into it to get your target customer.

As you can see in the diagram below, the step-by-step process of generating leads from the starting point of an individual’s journey to becoming a customer.

Remember that lead generation doesn’t mean customer service.

How do you Generate high-quality leads for your business?

Generating a high-quality lead is a mixture of step-by-step processes to find your ideal customer profile (ICP), learn about customer journeys, and get business leads using different marketing tactics.

Once you find and qualify your ICP’s data, buying will be easy for your consumer or ideal customer. If you do not have a quality audience or complete contact details of your ICP, your lead generation process will be in the trash in no time.

Lead Generation can be categorized into two major parts.

Inbound Lead Generation

The best example of an inbound lead generation is a blog post. You write SEO-optimized pieces of content, visitors visit your web page, engage with your content, and sometimes fill out the form on the blog post.

Other methods to get high-quality inbound leads are social media platform posts, Content Marketing, and Video creation that convert visitors into leads and leads into high-paying, happy customers.

This is called inbound lead generation. Remember that the inbound lead is one of the most premium leads in the world.
You have to share some valuable insights through your website or social media posts & you will see a flood of high-quality inbound leads coming your way.

Outbound Lead Generation

Outbound lead generation is the process where a business initiates contact with its ideal customers by sending them messages through email marketing, social media direct messaging, and cold calls.

This type of lead generation aims to inform potential customers and make them aware of the service of the products you are selling.

But, good marketing is not to market at all. You must be very intelligent while making contact with your potential customers. If they hate it, they will never want to listen to you despite your good product or service.

Cold email campaigns are considered one of the cheapest outbound lead generation processes, involving hard work, smart tactics, tools, human and AI power, and much more. And the results are also considered the best and most beneficial.

On the other hand, cold email is the hardest thing in outbound lead generation because most business owners or sales developers don’t know what time to call & how to talk over calls properly. But once you master this, you will become someone who can close clients on calls just like a piece of cake.

Now that you know what lead generation is and why it is important, let’s discuss how to generate leads and convert them into high-paying clients through various channels and processes.

Note that I have completed all the processes and campaigns below, and everything I will teach you here is based on personal experience.

Lead Generation Marketing Strategies

1 – SEO & Inbound Marketing

SEO and Inbound are my favourite types of marketing campaigns because 60% of my leads generate revenue through these channels.

Writing valuable content about the industry you will cover and see the magic. People love reading case studies, blogs, and success stories on social media before purchasing. 

If you’re consistent about posting relevant content on these channels, there is a 100% guarantee that your content will blow up, and you will get tons of leads. 

Ensure you write human content and do not use content generation tools because these AI tools are not worth your time. They produce generic content irrelevant to your audience because they visit your blog or social media to get out of a situation they are facing.

If you focus on information and customer base guides, you are a hero to your ideal customers.

SEO and organic lead generation are cost-effective ways to get high-ticket clients for your business.

Search engine optimization techniques can help you promote your lead magnets or lead generation content for free and get high-ticket clients without spending a dime on Paid Ads such as Facebook or Google Ads.

As I told you earlier, inbound lead generation is one of the premium leads in the world, and by using organic content, you can win in this race & stay at the top for longer.

Inbound Lead Generation Funnel?

As I discussed above about organic content, the lead generation funnel directly relates to these marketing terms.

What we do here is to create a content-based funnel to attract high-quality leads, provide them with enough knowledge and free trials, give them no reason to leave the web page or blog post, and show them a form to fill out to get more details about your PREMIUM product or consultation.

The simplest and most demanding funnel example is to create a subscription-based product and offer a 7-day free trial with some locked features. And if someone wants to get all the features, they must pay a subscription fee.

That’s one of the examples of a funnel. You can create your own according to customer needs or your industry demand.

Top of the funnel (TOFU)

The Top of the Funnel (TOFU) starts when your audience first sees your content and knows about you for the first time. This stage is the attraction stage, where you attract your audience through different marketing channels such as:

• Blogs
• Social media posts
• Podcasts
• Video content

Remember that this stage is the awareness stage, and here, you have to guide your audience so they can move to the second stage, which is more important for your business.

Middle of the funnel (MOFU)

Your visitors are ready to convert into paying leads in the middle of the funnel. It means that some visitors want to know more about your brand or service and are prepared to explore more options before becoming satisfied customers.

Find your ICP’s pain point and create content for those so they can get their hands out of the situation they are currently facing. This way, they will become more familiar with you and be ready to know more about the product or services you’re offering.

You can create various types of content here, such as:

• EBooks
• Webinars
• Newsletter
• Tools

You don’t have to create all these types of content. You can choose based on your audience’s interest and their presence on the platform.

Bottom of the funnel (BOFU)

It is the ideal stage to convert your leads into clients and customers. You can also convert your current customers into more purchases, such as an upgrade to their current subscription. 

You have succeeded in your journey, from finding leads to knowing about them. It’s time to sell. You can sell anything, but the best way is to sell your most premium product or package as they are ready to buy it from you.

The types of content you can create here are:

• Case Studies 
• Comparisons
• Demos
• Reviews

2 – LinkedIn Outreach Campaigns

I have been posting on LinkedIn for the past year, and I generated more than 2200 leads in less than 3 months. LinkedIn can get high-ticket leads and clients for me, and it will also work for you.

There are two ways to generate leads through LinkedIn: Inbound leads and Outbound leads. Since we discussed the inbound lead generation process in the SEO & Inbound Marketing module, I won’t repeat that because the process is the same, and you can write inbound content to get some hot leads on LinkedIn.

Getting sales leads on LinkedIn is super easy. You must define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and find those leads using the LinkedIn search bar. In my case, I am going with the “Real Estate” to see the real estate sales leads and profiles to reach.

As you can see in the picture above, 50,000 leads are waiting for you to reach. But this is not the time. We need to do some homework before jumping into the sales process.

Define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) using the LinkedIn search filters. I will personally target my 2nd-degree connections because they are attached to my 1st-degree connections, which is my plus point.

The location is very important to filter because you shouldn’t target multiple countries simultaneously. 

There is no rocket science. You must do LinkedIn cold outreach using one of two methods: Manual & Using a tool. 

You should manually do LinkedIn outreach to generate leads and get to know each other. You can understand whether the person you’re approaching can be an ideal customer.

You can start the automated messages and follow-up campaigns using Dripfy. Dripify is a LinkedIn automated & prospecting tool, and it can help you to get rid of the manual tasks that require time & effort.

If you’re running an automated messages campaign, the messages you should send per hour should not exceed 10 because your LinkedIn profile could be banned from doing spam around the platform.

3 – Cold Email Outreach

Cold email outreach is one of my favorites and on top of outbound marketing. I have been doing cold email marketing since 2016, generating over $15M in client sales revenue. You need to know your prospect’s email address, and you can perform an outreach campaign using what you have in your bucket.

I’ve written a detailed article on Cold Outreach, which you can check to see if you want to fill your sales pipeline with many ideal clients. The cold email process is not easy, but after reading this detailed guide, you can do cold email outreach like a kid’s play.

There are tons of software and platforms that you can use to leverage cold email outreach, but my favorite and best cold email outreach platform of the century is Instant.

Instantly is a brilliant sales engaging platform that can help you to find contact & close your ideal clients with minimal effort and resources. 

Are you in the products or services business? Instantly got you covered. Instantly offers a free 14-day trial so you can explore the platform to learn more about this platform.

4 – PPC Lead Generation Campaigns

If you have resources and can bear the cost, then PPC or Paid Ads are your best lead generation strategy. With just a little spending, you can get your dream customers’ leads and then nurture them through different outreach methods.

PPC will put your lead magnet in front of your ideal customers, and then your content strategy or offer will help you close the client. 

If you want to decrease the rate of cost per lead for your ads, make sure your ads show positive & helpful meaning so that more potential customers can click on your ads and do some live chat with you.

You need to collect the contact information of your ICP before doing any marketing stunt. After collecting contact information, you can contact your ICP to get them onboard.

The more you help your ICP, the better the conversion rate you will get for your ads. Always try to use a proper call-to-action button in your ads so that you won’t let any leads get out of your funnel.

The two best platforms to run PPC ads for lead generation & lead sourcing are Facebook Ads & Google Ads. 

Use capture forms for lead collections for your business or brand. Stick around these platforms as long as you want if you are looking for the best leads for your business.

Tip: You can use current or old customer stories to motivate new customers through ads such as a case study or a success story.

Every lead generation process differs from others; You must carry one platform at a time to save a lot of energy, capital, and resources by focusing on your most important campaign objective.

TikTok, Snapchat, and Pinterest are not yet crowded marketplaces in which to run lead-generation ads. You can also explore these channels if you want to explore more in the client acquisition industry.

Case study ads are my favorite ad style, producing more than 23% of my total leads. I offer people the opportunity to read about my recent case studies, and that’s how I generate leads with a higher purchasing decision.

If you want to see some of the best-performing ads before you create your own, then Facebook Ad Library is a powerful tool that you can utilize to get running ad details.

For Google ads, I use SpyFu to get detailed insights about my competitors from head to tail.

And that’s how you can leverage the paid ads or PPC to get high-quality inbound leads for your or your client’s business in 2025.

5 – Lead Magnet Campaigns

Offering a lead magnet is another type of lead generation technique that you can use to generate high-intent and high-quality leads for your business.

Many B2B companies offer free trials or a short-span service as a lead magnet to generate leads. It is part of a sales process that they perform for free at the start by providing free stuff such as an eBook, a short course, or a guide.

In the same way, by providing these free stuff, you can acquire their name, phone number, and email address so that you can reach out to them in the future with your premium offers or consultation.

You can’t send them direct mail because it is against the sender’s software or platform policy. You must have permission to email them; otherwise, your email will be blocked or in the spam folder.

Some cold outreach software, such as Lemlist & Instantly, offer unlimited cold emails to anyone as they are designed in such a way.

6 – Influencer & Partnership Marketing

Do you want to know about an idea that is underrated yet? Partnership with the influencers for a lead generation strategy on a 50/50 basis. 

Influencers promote many brand products, and if you have a business offering a product or service, then influencer marketing is the best way to do business.

Not so many people are doing influencer marketing for lead generation, but as you’re here, please start this as soon as possible because I can assure you that it will work amazingly shortly.

These influencers have good social proof, which you can utilize to generate high-quality leads for your business or your client’s work.

These influencers will show the product demos or a service trial to their audience, and it will generate leads and sales for you. 

Does it sound wild? I started this technique a few months ago, and till now, I have observed more than eight influencers with high social selling ratios on their social platforms. 

So, if you’re still thinking of starting your lead generation business or a lead generation agency in 2025, this is the right time to dive into it.

This way, you can generate high-quality B2B leads as well because many businesses purchase from other businesses whenever they run out of the team or resources they have. 

And this won’t be even the cold leads because influencers’ audience knows about their ideal.

In influencers or partnership marketing, the marketing efforts will be near zero because, as earlier described, these influencers have plenty of die-hard fans, which you both can utilize for business purposes.

7 – Chatbot & Messenger Marketing

Many B2B companies build AI-based chatbots to help their customers and businesses regarding a specific thing. Generating leads through it was never easy, but thanks to Manychat, who made chat marketing easy.

Chat marketing and AI bots help businesses generate highly relevant leads, which they can utilize later to get high-ticket customers.

And guess what? It is cheap and requires less time to customize fully according to your needs. 

So, what’s your plan for chatbot marketing for lead generation? Let me know, as I want to hear your thoughts.

8 – Affiliate Lead Generation

It might be new to you, but I have already succeeded in affiliate lead generation. I generated over 500 leads last month and spent nothing because I utilized this underrated technique to find potential clients.

I created a page on my web blog, called every affiliate marketer who can relate to my industry and invited them to do affiliate marketing for my consultation-based business.

And guess what? I got 100+ leads in the first week and 500+ in a month. I did nothing, but my affiliate marketer worked on his free hours and generated sales & revenue for both of us.

So, if I can do it, you can do it too! You need a spark to start your lead generation business in 2025.

If you keep using every marketing strategy to generate leads, I’m sure you will soon find your buyer persona, someone who wants to purchase your service or product.

If you’re an absolute beginner, you can add your friends or circle members to this business, as this requires no investment or capital. Just slightly hard work, patience, and faith in you. I am sure that this definitive guide on lead generation is for you because it has everything you need to start your lead generation business.

This guide is not only for the B2B market, but you can utilize these techniques in B2C Lead Generation work, and it will help you to sell your product or service directly to consumers. 

The B2B demand is increasing, but we can not ignore B2C as many consumers want to purchase from a real business. So, you can be that business for your Ideal customers.

The B2B buying process is a little longer because it has many factors involved, but B2C requires trust & a good marketing technique. I prefer to go after the B2B audiences because they are more mature and aged than the B2C marketplace. But I always do the math, go with both, and find my meal in both markets.

So, I discussed the top 8 and the best ways to generate leads. Now, it’s time to see how to measure the lead’s quality so you don’t have to carry trash contacts and irrelevant data in your contact database.

But before that, let’s rewind how you can capture the best leads for your business.

Lead Generation Ideas Checklist:

• Use SEO techniques to generate leads from search engines like Google & Bing.
• Use Outbound or Outreach methods to meet your leads and capture them for you.
• Use Email marketing techniques to send cold emails and generate quality leads.
• Use FB or Search Ads to get your business relevant, high-quality leads.
• Use Lead Magnets to promote your premium product or service with a FREE guide.
• Use the Influencer’s power & fan following to generate high-quality leads and sales.
• Use Chatbot & messenger marketing techniques to get relevant leads and sales.
• Use affiliates to perform lead generation and sales processes for you on partnerships.

How to qualify leads

Now, you have captured high-quality leads. But you don’t know whether your leads have potential or not. Today, we will learn how to measure the leads we generate using different resources and platforms.

Out of 100, only 53% of leads have the potential to get closed. It means that 47% of our leads are useless to us because they don’t match our needs or because the leads are not interested in doing business with us.

However, the question remains: How do we know which lead is qualified?

The answer is simple: we use the following matrices to measure a lead’s quality and how powerful the lead can be:

Step #1: Define Your Ideal Lead

Now, you have a list of captured leads that you will use to get connected and sell your service or product. But you have a ton of data and don’t know which one is right for you because one good lead = 1000s of bad leads.

Filter the following details according to your needs to define your ideal lead:

1. Job Title
2. Online behaviour
3. Company Information
4. Demographic data

Based on these 4’s, you can define your lead accurately & in a better way. 

There are many online contact databases with the filters I described earlier. Depending on your needs, you can use one or all and define your ideal lead.

I use Apollo for the contact database. They have more than 20M contacts, the number of leads we need for our business. The Apollo has every feature you need to get started with the lead generation business in 2025 and beyond.

Step #2: Note Down The Information

Now, you have a contact list and decide which industry to join to get clients, customers, and consultation work. It’s time to note down everything you can get, such as phone number, email address, website, employer history, company details, etc.

The more information you have, the better it will be for you to approach them regarding what you offer or sell. Remember not to push yourself too fast that you forget to study your leads.

You should know about their activities, such as what business they do, their problems, what company they get funded from, and how many times they post about their business or personal life on social media.

As I said, the more, the better. You can follow your ICPs and start engaging with them before you send them an email or dial a cold call to discuss business. It will help you a lot.

Step #3: Scoring Your Leads

Now that you have collected your leads’ details, do some homework. Now, it’s time to score your leads so that you can make a pass or fail statement about the leads you just captured by exploring multiple platforms.

Send the leads to your sales team, and they will analyze the lead based on different automation rules and the rule you define in step no. 1.

Most CRMs have these pre-generated rules, which you can utilize, such as Breakcold, Hubspot, and Salesforce. The Hubspot team is super supportive & the dashboard is easy to navigate & understand. Rest, the choice is all yours. I’m not affiliated with any of the tools I mentioned above.

Lead generation is not a one-time task. It’s more about quality than quantity & you should work on your leads as long as your business lives.

Please do not fall into the trap of thinking that it is a one-time job or something like that. You will vanish from the market if you feel like that.

It’s a winning and losing process you should learn on the journey to do business in lead generation or any industry.

Take your lead generation to the next level with these automation tools

There are many automation tools in the market, but few are the best ones I use for my lead and demand generation strategies. Here are my Lead Gen Tool Stack you should know:

Apollo: Lead Generation Tool

Regarding B2B lead generation software, I always choose Apollo to find B2B contacts. This tool helped me in my outbound lead generation efforts. Apollo has sales-ready leads you can use to contact and onboard new clients every time you make an effort.

You can find all types of leads here in the Apollo database, as it is so huge that you can’t even download all leads in a year. These leads are sales-qualified leads that sometimes don’t need to be verified, as you can get the “Verified” filter in the Apollo dashboard.

Instantly: For automated emails

If you perform an online lead generation process, sending a mass of cold emails is time. And here comes the Instantly, my favorite buddy without I can’t even imagine doing cold email outreach on a scale.

You can get 14 days of Instantly product trials, which means you can use Instantly for 14 days without issues. Instantly is my favorite marketing automation tool, and it helped me to get client revenue of up to $15M.

With the help of Instantly, you don’t need to hire a sales representative because everything will be automated once you start creating your campaigns for your business.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator:

I use this tool to find decision-makers in any industry. It helps me to get fresh and updated data as LinkedIn is super-active for business-to-business purposes.

Also, the sales navigator helps me to send direct messages to my Ideal clients, and this is where I love this tool because we don’t need any third-party software to gather all this information and send messages.

Customer.io: Marketing Automation Platform

Another Customer Relationship Management tool that I use is Customer.io. This tool is designed to meet the customer experience and make data-driven decisions based on the data we have from our customers.

Customer.io made it easy for you to have customer interactions, utilize their data for marketing & much more. This tool is a must-have in my tools tech stack, and you can use it depending on how you make things happen for your business.

I love that you can analyze a complete customer profile using this tool.

It is not a social media marketing tool but focuses on sending targeted emails, SMS messages, push notifications, and in-app messages based on customer data.

FAQs about lead generation

What does lead generation involve?

The role of lead generation is to find and attract potential customers to our business. The process is not a single step but multiple steps, including a funnel, free guides, and free courses to capture the lead’s contact. 

After the lead-capturing process, you can nurture them, filter them, and even contact them for a complete & qualified lead-generation process.

Lead generation doesn’t mean finding your ideal customer’s contact. It’s a process of many things, such as lead scoring, filtering unverified and incomplete data, and much more.

These lead-generation efforts are combined to deliver the best source you can contact for your business.

Which tools are used for lead generation?

I discussed many tools in this article for lead generation. A few of them are Apollo.io, Instantly, and Woodpecker. These tools can help you, from online advertising to winning a client for your business.

A lead generation tool can help you find contacts, filter irrelevant and relevant data, create funnels, help you make campaigns, and guide you through the process. 

If I had to go with all-in-one, I would use Instantly + Google Workspace because these two tools are the best in the market.

What do lead generation services include?

A lead generation service is a single or combination of multiple services such as lead sourcing, filtering, nurturing, and contacting the ideal prospects for your business.

If you are a business owner, you might need all of them because these small steps are directly connected.

You can offer some extra services as a bonus, such as email writing, sales funnel setup, and lead magnet setup. Remember that a good business owner and service provider always upsells as they know how these sales markets work

What are the biggest obstacles in lead generation?

The biggest challenge in lead generation business is targeting the right audience at the right time.

Let’s assume you are targeting “Real Estate”, and you’re targeting those people who are just interested in watching videos of mansions. Do you think they will buy or sell anything? I don’t think so!

The reason? They are not a real estate dealer or a potential buyer. They are just another person on the internet. 

So, always choose the right audience because it is one of the biggest challenges in lead-generation business.

Another challenge in this business is choosing advertising channels for lead generation. It can be a B2B marketplace, direct contact, email, or even SEO efforts targeting your dream customers.

How can I determine my ideal audience for lead generation?

Identify your ideal audience. Begin with the market research. The more you research your target audience, the better audience list you will have in the end.

So, always try to think outside the box and do some extra research for your ideal and potential customers because it is one of the most important steps you can have in your lead generation business.

Customer loyalty is nothing if you target the wrong audience. Remember, a loyal customer is a person who is highly interested in your service or product. Others are entertainers or viewers who won’t do business with you.

Can you give a strong example of lead generation?

A strong example of lead generation is offering free white papers or an eBook in exchange for a website visitor’s information through a lead magnet or a contact form.

People use a common marketing term to offer a free guide or even a mini-course and exchange information with visitors.

If you have just started your lead gen business, make sure you also have a mini free course or an eBook to get high-quality and relevant leads for your business.

What are the best ways to track lead generation success?

The best way to track a lead generation success is to measure your lead’s data in different forms of analysis, such as website visitors’ analytics, conversion rates, and, most importantly, click-through rate (CTR).

Without these elements, your business will lack many fundamental details, and you will find another failed business in the industry.

How can I enhance my lead generation strategy?

To double your lead generation success, follow every fundamental marketing strategy you need to grow.

This includes:

• Offer them content downloads such as a whitepaper
• Offer a free comprehensive guide in an eBook form
• Offer high-quality content pieces on your website
• Capture landing page visitors to track them daily
• Your target market should be 100% correct
• Create a highly-convert contact form

These factors are crucial and can help you to grow your online business.

Is lead generation a challenging task?

Yes! Lead generation is challenging and can take weeks and months to find and nurture according to your business leads. But, as you come down to this point, you have read from what a lead is to how to generate leads. 

Now, I am pretty sure you can generate high-quality leads using a lead generation funnel, ads on search engines and social media, a dedicated landing page, key insights, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, lead-gen referral programs, and lead magnets, depending on their level of interest.

Final Thoughts:

That’s all for now. I hope you learned how to generate and nurture leads for your business according to your needs. If you are still confused about how to do this, don’t worry! 

That’s a part of life. I was also confused when I was a beginner and started my first online business.

You’ll be fine in no time. Learn from this guide, and do not wait to start your B2B lead generation company in 2025.

If this guide helped you learn about lead-gen business in depth, share it with a friend who also needs to know. Cheers!