Has the lead generation industry lost sight of what it’s supposed to achieve?

I’ve just spent half an hour scrolling through LinkedIn, and because of the industry I work in, my feed is inevitably full of people talking about lead generation, outbound sales and the latest ways to fill your pipeline.

A few posts caught my attention this morning, although probably not for the reasons their authors intended.

One was discussing the problem of prospects not turning up for meetings. Another was demonstrating a typical SDR cold calling script where, after a brief introduction, the second question was effectively, “Can I have 15 minutes next week to take you through our solution?”

No attempt to understand the business, establish whether there’s a need or even find out whether the person on the other end of the phone is remotely interested. Just get the meeting booked.

Then there were the inevitable promises of 25 qualified leads a week through automated cold email campaigns.

You know the emails I’m talking about. Plain text, no branding, no links, barely a signature and an opening sentence that makes it painfully obvious an AI tool has found some random fact about you or your business and attempted to turn it into a personal connection.

“I noticed you’ve been at Shortlist for 15 years. Congratulations on your incredible journey!”

Followed immediately by a pitch for something completely irrelevant.

We’re all receiving them, increasingly frequently, and I suspect most of us are getting pretty fed up with them.

Yet, apparently, this is the future of lead generation.

I can understand the attraction

Times are tough for a lot of businesses. Sales targets haven’t disappeared, budgets are under pressure and sales and marketing leaders are being asked to deliver more with less.

So when someone promises a predictable stream of qualified leads for a relatively small monthly investment, it’s understandably appealing.

Who wouldn’t want 25 new opportunities landing in their diary every week?

The problem is that generating a meeting and generating a genuine sales opportunity are two very different things.

If your SDR is measured purely on the number of meetings booked, it’s hardly surprising that qualification becomes an inconvenience. If your outbound agency is promising a fixed number of leads every month, the pressure is on to deliver the number, regardless of whether those leads have any realistic prospect of becoming customers.

And if your entire model is built around sending thousands of automated emails at the lowest possible cost, then relevance, research and meaningful engagement become expensive luxuries.

It’s easy to see how we got here, but I’m not convinced it’s doing our industry, or the businesses paying for these services, any favours.

Would you respond to your own outreach?

This is the question I wish more people in our industry would ask themselves.

Think about the last unsolicited email you received. Did you reply? Did you appreciate the artificial personalisation? Did the fact that someone had noticed your latest LinkedIn post make you more inclined to book a meeting?

Or did you delete it, just like the previous twenty?

Now think about the last cold call you received. If someone introduced themselves and immediately asked for 15 minutes in your diary to demonstrate their product, would you agree?

Probably not.

So why do we think our prospects will behave any differently?

We’re all buyers of something. We all have limited time, competing priorities and plenty of people trying to sell us things. Yet somehow, when we put our sales hats on, we seem to forget everything we know about how we personally make purchasing decisions.

We start treating people as names in a database, email addresses to be contacted and appointments to be secured, rather than individuals running businesses with genuine challenges, priorities and pressures.

We’ve become obsessed with the wrong numbers

I regularly see lead generation companies talking about the number of emails they send, calls they make, LinkedIn connections they generate and meetings they book.

These are all useful operational measures, but none of them tells you whether you’re actually generating business.

A diary full of meetings with people who have no need, no budget, no authority or no intention of buying isn’t a successful lead generation campaign. It’s an expensive way of keeping your sales team busy.

And when those prospects don’t turn up, perhaps the first question shouldn’t be how to improve meeting attendance. Perhaps it should be why they agreed to the meeting in the first place.

Did they understand the purpose? Was there a genuine reason to talk? Had the SDR uncovered a problem worth exploring? Or was the prospect simply trying to end an uncomfortable conversation?

I’m not suggesting every prospect needs an immediate project or an approved budget before they’re worth speaking to. Quite the opposite.

In many B2B markets, the majority of your potential customers won’t be actively buying at any given moment. That doesn’t make them irrelevant. It means you need to understand where they are in their buying journey and communicate accordingly.

Someone who might need your services in six months can be a valuable prospect, provided you recognise that they aren’t a sales opportunity today.

That’s where I think much of the current lead generation model falls down. Everything is geared towards securing an immediate appointment, even when the timing is completely wrong.

Technology has changed. People haven’t changed quite as much.

I’m certainly not against technology or AI. We use both extensively at Shortlist, and some of the developments over the last few years have fundamentally improved how we identify, understand and engage with potential customers.

We have access to better data, buying signals, intent information, website visitor intelligence and automation than ever before.

Used properly, these tools allow us to be more relevant, more timely and more informed in our conversations.

But there’s a big difference between using technology to improve your understanding of a prospect and using it simply to contact more people.

AI can help you research a company, identify potential challenges and recognise when something has changed that might create a need for your services.

What it can’t do is make an irrelevant proposition relevant simply by inserting a personalised opening sentence.

And automation doesn’t make poor messaging better. It just means more people receive it.

I sometimes wonder whether, in our excitement about everything technology can do, we’ve forgotten to ask whether we should actually be doing it.

The fundamentals of successful lead generation haven’t changed

I’ve worked in B2B lead generation for 28 years, and while the tools, channels and techniques have changed enormously, the fundamentals really haven’t.

Successful lead generation is still about communicating the right information to the right people, in the right way, at the right time.

That sounds incredibly simple, but doing it consistently takes a lot more thought and effort than sending a few thousand emails or asking everyone you speak to for a meeting.

It means understanding your market, knowing which organisations are genuinely a good fit for your proposition and identifying the people who influence purchasing decisions.

It means understanding the problems your customers face, what triggers them to consider change and why they might choose to do nothing.

It means using different channels intelligently. Sometimes an email is appropriate, sometimes a phone call, sometimes LinkedIn, and often a combination of all three over an extended period.

It means recognising that not everybody is ready to buy today, and having a sensible way of maintaining contact until circumstances change.

And importantly, it means having people who can hold proper business conversations, ask intelligent questions, listen to the answers and recognise whether there’s a genuine opportunity worth pursuing.

None of this is particularly revolutionary. In fact, it’s what good sales and marketing teams have been doing for decades.

Technology should make us better at it, not encourage us to abandon it.

Maybe we need to rethink what success looks like

I appreciate why businesses want quick results. When you’ve got a revenue target to hit, being told to invest in building relationships and nurturing prospects over time isn’t necessarily what you want to hear.

But the reality is that most complex B2B purchasing decisions don’t happen because someone received a clever email and agreed to a 15-minute demonstration.

They happen because there’s a business problem, a reason to address it, an appropriate solution and sufficient confidence in the organisation providing it.

Our job in lead generation is to help create and identify those opportunities, not manufacture the appearance of demand where none exists.

That requires patience, consistency and a willingness to measure success beyond the number of meetings in someone’s diary.

It also requires accepting that sometimes the most valuable outcome of a conversation is understanding that a prospect isn’t ready to buy, discovering when that might change and making sure you’re there when it does.

So where does that leave the lead generation industry?

I don’t think the answer is less outbound activity, abandoning cold email or going back to the way we worked 20 years ago.

I think it’s about being more thoughtful with the tools we now have available and remembering what we’re actually being paid to achieve.

If AI helps us understand our prospects better, fantastic. If automation helps us maintain meaningful contact with a larger market, even better. And if an SDR can uncover a genuine business need through a well-researched, intelligent conversation, that’s exactly where human interaction adds value.

But if all we’re doing is finding cheaper ways to send more messages, make more calls and fill more diaries with people who have little intention of buying, I’m not sure we’re making progress.

We’re just creating more noise.

And perhaps that’s the biggest irony of all. At a time when we have more information about our prospects than ever before, we’re often communicating with them as though we know less.

The future of lead generation shouldn’t be about how many people we can reach. It should be about how many of those people we can genuinely help, and how effectively we turn that understanding into business.

Because ultimately, our clients don’t need more leads for the sake of it.

They need more customers.