How to learn B2B lead generation

You don't learn B2B lead generation once and then have it.

It's an ongoing process. You understand how lead generation works and how it's changed. You apply it to your own business. You tweak it, you update it, you improve it, and you keep moving forward. The market shifts, your audience shifts, and what you know has to shift with them.

That's worth knowing before you spend money on training, because most of what's available is built on the opposite assumption.

Where B2B lead generation is currently taught

There's no shortage of options.

Accredited bodies like the Chartered Institute of Marketing run courses. Platforms like Udemy have plenty of them. There are people teaching it on YouTube for free, some of them well. And there are vendors like HubSpot and Moz, who teach lead generation as part of selling their software.

But most B2B lead generation training teaches tactics

Look across those options and you'll notice how similar the subject matter is.

How to run LinkedIn. How to write cold email. How to build a nurture sequence. How to capture leads on your website. How to score them once you have them. How to use a particular platform to do all of the above.

Those are tactics. That isn't a criticism of them, it's just what they are.

Tactics only pay off when they sit inside a lead gen strategy

A tactic done well inside a strategy is genuinely valuable. The same tactic done well outside one is busy work.

If you don't know who your best customer is, what your offer needs to be, which channels suit your business or how you'll know whether any of it is working, then learning to run LinkedIn brilliantly gets you a well-run LinkedIn account. It doesn't get you leads, and worse, it doesn't tell you whether LinkedIn was the right place to spend your time in the first place.

People learn the tactic, run it properly, get nothing, and conclude the tactic doesn't work.

Almost nobody teaches lead gen strategy

This is the thing that's missing across nearly all of it.

Lead gen strategy is the harder thing to teach. It's specific to your business, it takes longer than a day in a workshop, and it doesn't package neatly into a lesson you can film once and sell forever. So it mostly doesn't get taught, and the tactics fill the space instead.

How to learn B2B lead generation properly

Learn the strategy first. All of it, before you switch anything on.

Then learn the tactics you actually need, which you'll only know once the strategy tells you which channels suit your business.

Apply it to your own business while you're learning, not afterwards. A strategy you designed for a hypothetical company teaches you very little.

And plan for it to continue. Whatever you learn will need updating, because lead generation keeps changing and so does your market. Any training that treats itself as the finish line is selling you something that expires.

That's the order our B2B lead generation training follows, and the reason it's built that way.

By Heather Baker. Famous builder of b2b lead gen engines.