B2B Lead Generation Trends for 2024

Posted On November 21, 2023

What is lead generation?

Lead generation is defined as the process of generating a consumer’s interest in an organization’s product or service with the ultimate goal of turning that interest into a sale. In many companies, lead generation is a critical part of the sales process. To meet business plans, quotas, and company objectives, lead generation provides sales and marketing support in building a pipeline of leads.

What shapes the lead generation trends in B2B in 2024?

Many things happened in 2023, impacting B2B lead generation trends globally. Though the market is tight, look at the possibilities you can pursue instead of reducing or freezing your sales efforts.

• Shorter planning horizon: buyers crave instant results. Without proof of short-term productivity gains from a purchase, a promise of long-term revenue growth is insufficient.
• The “buyers’ market”: Very few people knock at the seller’s door in today’s era. The time has come for sellers to approach their prospects. To help customers in hard times, sellers need to find the best ways by first listening to them.
• Emphasis on personal relations: Trust becomes a significant factor that brings new business when sellers and buyers have a strong relationship.

B2B lead generation trends to be followed in 2024:

Here are the trends that will shape your lead generation next year:

Account-based marketing (ABM): In 2023, for countless companies, the decision to switch to account-based marketing (ABM) became a pivot. To let you focus on handpicked accounts, ABM aligns marketers and sales departments. Buying decisions are made by buying groups of up to 10 people in the B2B space. But when marketers send one person-based Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), sales representatives, at the start of the conversation, have to do a lot of extra digging that risks losing the lead’s interest. Marketing Qualified Accounts (MQAs) provides the sales team with a complete picture of a sales-ready accounts, offering insights into group intent and intel on all involved decision-makers. In this way, work can be prioritized and be done effectively.

Intent-based lead generation: Intent in lead generation is a combination of certain signs and behaviors that show a high probability of the company being in an active buying cycle and considering your product.

These signals can be:

• Clicks on a social media advertisement
• Multiple people from a company are visiting your website.
• Regular and continued visits to your website
• Increased time spent on your website
• Newsletter subscribers’ behavior

Marketers should collect data on these behaviors, analyze them, and then target each lead with the most relevant messaging at the right moment in the right place.

De-fluffed messaging: The marketing fluff was doomed the second venture capitalists started counting their dollars in mid-2022. From the C-levels, when it comes to positioning and pitches, “No BS, please”, throughout 2023 has been a unison requirement.

No B2B decision-maker will fall for the word salad in 2024, however exquisite. Leave the “cutting-edge solution that streamlines processes and increases the bottom line” at the door.

Hone your proposition:

These guidelines for email writing will apply to all kinds of lead generation materials in 2024:

• Conversational
• No corporate jargon
• Natural
• Not overly casual
• Write more about prospects, not yourself.

On a daily basis, purchasing officers get heaps of sales prospects. Give them the actual value and results you can bring immediately. Be clear and specific about why they need you, what they get, and why you’re the right choice.

• Resonate with your audience: As inbound funnels slow down and organizations put more pressure on outbound, there will be noise in the inboxes in 2024.
• Motivate prospects to talk about their needs and wants: How can you do this? Talk about their needs and wants yourself.

Deep engagement with customers: It is essential to deepen relationships with current clients and discover possibilities of upsells, referrals, and meaningful network growth for B2B sales lead generation, as in 2024, decisions will likely slow down and require more deliberation and justification.

Here’s how you can take care of customer loyalty, a huge asset to companies during a recession:

• Embrace collaborative growth: Collaborative growth is about leveraging your network and your community to build meaningful relationships with potential clients. You can build pipelines and close deals through such collaboration. Collaborative growth starts by pulling in potential customers from outside organizations, creating opportunities that were otherwise unavailable.
• Keep your best representatives close: If your company has to do layoffs this year, be careful that you do not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater; we mean your best sales representatives with your precious clients.
• Amp up your sales training: While being extra serving and caring with the existing ones in recession times, your sales representatives need to be proactive with the new clients.
• Align your sales and marketing: Ensure all your employees listen to customers’ wishes and turn them into business opportunities. Few things are as beneficial for building brand reputation as being helpful to customers during hard times.

B2B content that feels B2C: This lead generation trend has been lurking around. B2B communication was mostly bland and very business-focused until recently.

• Add emotion to your communication: B2B buyers are young-ish people who are tired of seeing numbers and thinking of rationale all day. Address the human behind the fancy job title, be fun and relatable, show that you genuinely understand what they want, and get yourself an interested prospect.
• Invest in business influencers: People will likely buy the products tried and recommended by an industry expert or a well-known successful business owner. Luckily, working with macro- and micro-influencers has been around for a while in B2C, and there’s not much difference when applying this approach to B2B.

Qualities you’d want to see in B2B lead generation influencers:

1. Audience relevance
2. Perceived trustworthiness by the audience
3. Profound subject-matter knowledge
4. Alignment of values with your brand
5. Active presence on at least one platform
6. Content creation prowess

• Double down on thought leadership content: Thought leadership is a key strategy for developing the lead generation business during the recession. Online events effectively generate an audience of qualified prospects and shorten the sales cycle. When you are making your thought leadership content, make sure it looks up-to-date and is created with the new platforms in mind.