B2b Lead generation

7 Hard B2B Lead Generation Truths I Learned After 10 Years In Business

John Welch

Owner | IAD Growth

7 Hard B2B Lead Generation Truths I Learned After 10 Years In Business Header Image

In This Post

1. No one is coming to save you

When I first got into lead gen, I saw it as one way that a business can generate new customers. When you look at all the businesses that exist and how they somehow have customers, it's easy to think that referrals and word-of-mouth really can be a viable growth strategy.

In reality, 99% of business owners are constantly stressed about whether they're going to lose an important customer. They have no clear idea of what they can do to intentionally find new business.

This uncertainty creates a constant pressure which translates into stress around hiring, payroll, customer service, and wondering whether their business will even exist in 6 months.

This feeling is just accepted as "the price you pay" for running a business, but it's not a requirement. You don't have to feel this way. You just have to accept that no one is coming to save you.

Your customers, business relationships, and the market itself do not care if you exist or not for the most part. You can't rely on referrals or introductions to sustain a real business and grow it to any kind of meaningful size.

What happens to most business owners is that they do great work for a few customers and those customers make some introductions for them.

They end up with enough work to make a couple of hires and they think that they will continue to have new customers just show up.

This is what happened to me.

Eventually I had to realize that a referral might show up now and then, but it's impossible to sustain a business without a repeatable and reliable process for finding new customers.

You're the only one who can do this for your business, no one else will.

2. Starting is the 2nd most important than you can do

People love to quote the Chinese proverb "the journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step." In business, we love to talk about motivation, getting started, "just do it."

If you never get started, you won't do anything, so it makes sense. But, getting started is not the most important or the most difficult thing. It's not that hard to do something once. It's not that difficult to do something for the first time.

When it comes to B2B lead generation, the most important thing that you can do is not stop. It's not that hard to give lead gen a shot. It's very hard to keep spending money and keep spending time, especially if you're not seeing results and have no idea if you're going to.

Consistency is the bedrock of lead generation. It takes energy and drive to get started, but it takes consistency and commitment to keep going. Rome wasn't built in a day and neither will your lead generation channels.

3. No one owes you anything

When I was first getting into lead generation I used to get really annoyed or angry when I didn't get responses or when potential customers would tell me they didn't want to talk.

I couldn't believe they weren't willing to talk to me and see if I could help them. See, at this point, I was suffering from a malady that afflicts all lead generation beginners. I call it "imspecialitis." This is a sickness that makes us think everyone else cares about what we do as much as we do.

This is how we all feel about ourselves and our own businesses. Your potential customers feel that way about their business. They don't feel that way about yours. In lead generation, we have to earn the relationship with our customers.

We do that by understanding that our only purpose is to solve their problems. They don't owe us anything for showing up. They don't owe us anything, ever. Our purpose is to exchange our services for their money. We don't owe them work, they don't owe us money, time, or anything else.

The faster you can allow this mindset to become second nature for you, the faster you'll be able to find lead generation success. When you approach your potential customers with the understanding that they owe you absolutely nothing, you'll be able to sound more professional, more detached, and speak more clearly. These are all the things that allow potential customers to understand what you do and evaluate if they want to work with you.

4. It takes so much longer than you think

I still remember when I started my first business in 2015. I thought getting customers was the easy part. I thought doing the work was the hard part. I had no idea I had it completely backwards.

There are no shortage of companies doing what you do. Even if you think you're alone in the market, you're not. True innovation is rare enough that you can stop wondering if you're the only one doing it. If you've seen there's a problem to solve, someone else has too.

This is why it takes so much longer than you think it's going to. Everyone starts lead generation believing that the first person they email is going to respond back "Yes! Thank you! I'm so glad you reached out, I need this!" They're typically shocked when the only response is crickets.

I hear this all the time "everyone has this problem."

After a decade in lead generation, I can safely say, no, they don't. While it may appear that way on the surface, problems are unique to indivdiuals and individuals are all different. Some may agree with you that it's a problem but not think it's important. Some may not think it's a problem at all. Some may agree it's a problem and have already fixed it. Some may agree it's a problem and are already working with a company that does the same thing yours does.

This is why it takes time. You have to find the people who agree with you about the problem and who haven't already fixed it or don't think their current partner is getting the job done. This is not nearly as many people as you think. And, you have to get to them through channels where a bunch of other companies that look and sound just like yours are already contacting them.

You can't force lead generation. You can't speed it up. It's just hard. Like losing weight or building muscle. The only answer is slow, consistent progress. There's no shortcut for lead generation.

Here's how I explain it. Whatever amount of time you think it's going to take, move up a unit of measurement.

For example, if you think it's going to take a day, give it a week. If you think it's going to take a week, give it a month. If you think it's going to take a month, give it a year.

While things can sometimes happen faster, it's much better to lower you expectations and be pleasantly surprised. Most business owners quit lead generation because they're angry that things aren't "working."

This is almost always just impatience and unrealistic expectations. Lead generation takes so much more time than you think.

5. You'll never do it right the first time

I used to think that being good at lead generation meant you were able to know exacctly what was going to work so you could do it the first time. It took about 10 years for me to realize that never going to happen.

Experience in lead generation actually teaches you something very different: there's no way to know what's going to work the first time.

This is why testing and optimizing are the only options for lead generation. The number one mistake that business owners and entrepreneurs make in lead generation is going too hard and too fast. This is the root of all lead generation failure.

If you've never run a mile, why would you think you could run a marathon? Surprisingly, this is how entrepreneurs and business owners often treat lead generation. They've never generated a single lead, but they're going to start spending thousands of dollars a month on 5 different lead gen channels.

The ending is the same in both scenarios. You're not ready and you give up long before the finish line. What's worse is that there's a real chance you've hurt yourself in the process.

This is the constant tension between growth and stagnation. Growth has to be given enough investment to actually have a chance to work, but it has to be at a pace that isn't going to hurt the business.

Lead generation needs consistent, quality efforts put towards it week after week, month after month, year after year. But it has to be at a pace that the owner and the business can sustain week after week, month after month, year after year.

Most business owners significantly overestimate how much they will get done in 90 days, but they significantly underestimate how much they can get done in a year.

It will always take time and iteration to make lead generation work. Don't quit just because it didn't work. If it was that easy, no one would struggle with it.

6. What works is boring

I used to spend so much time trying to come up with fancy things to say. I obsessed over individual words. I worried about every tiny detail. I thought that if I just had the right combination of words or the perfect hook, I'd see some crazy response to my lead generation.

The last thing I wanted to admit was that fancy words and clever tactics weren't helping anything. But eventually, I couldn't ignore the data anymore. Whether it was emails, phone calls, LinkedIn posts, website content, you name it. The more I tried to be clever or "sophisticated," the more my potential customers didn't understand anything I was saying or doing.

I thought that I was being lazy by simplifying things or that it meant that there wasn't any real skill involved if it really was that straightforward. That's because I didn't understand the real skills of lead generation.

Most business owners confuse (like I did) exciting and catchy messaging for good lead gen. They think that the skill of lead generation is grabbing attention and convincing potential customers that they need to work with you.

It took me many years to figure out that the skills of lead gen have nothing to do with being fancy or clever. The skills of lead generation are mostly mental. Things like grit, discipline, consistency, and commitment. These are the real work of lead generation.

And they're boring. They're so boring. What works in lead generation is a slow, consistent, day-to-day grind. And that's the most boring thing there is.

Many business owners and entreprenuers never succeed in lead generation because they're still trying to figure out how to make it fun. In reality, it's never going to be fun.

Simple and straightforward will always trump fancy and clever. It's not about saying the "right" thing. It's about saying "something" over and over and over again.

Messaging does matter, but it's much more straightfoward than most think. As long as you are clearly communicating what you actually do and who you do it for, that's all you need. The part that makes it work is the part where you keep doing it, over and over again, for years.

7. Success doesn't feel like anything

I got into lead generation because I thought that generating new business and finding "success" would make me feel great. I chased that high for years until I finally realized it didn't actually exist. When something is really hard to do, we tend to think that it's going to give us some amazing sense of accomplishment or reward when we finally succeed.

Reality can be very different. In many cases succeeding doesn't feel like anything at all. You get a lead and close a deal and realize that you fully expected it to happen, that's why you started in the first place.

Sometimes, the opposite can happen. You finally achieve success and then realize this means you'll have to do that all over again if you want to generate another lead. This can be demoralizing and make you want to give up more than not succeeding does.

These are the paradoxes of growth and progress. We're often chasing feelings that we believe exist. We hang our hopes on the feeling, only to discover that it was never going to feel that way. We imagine what we will experience and then we're disappointed by our own expectations.

These are the things that actually stop businesses from consistently generating leads. Expectations that are too much for reality cause burnout and frustration. Putting all our hopes on the next lead or the next customer creates frustration, fear, and pushes away quality customers who could have been long-term partners for our business.

Success often doesn't feel like anything. Sometimes it actually feels bad. Sometimes success actually hurts. In many cases it's just neutral. You realize that you'd been trying to do something and you did it, it's not as surprising as you thought it was going to be.

Long-term lead generation success requires emotional ambivalence. When you're constantly pinning your hopes and dreams on the next "success" it gets exhausting. You actually have to stop caring in order to keep going.

Success needs to not feel like anything if you want to be able to keep succeeding.

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