What is a lead gen strategy?

What is a lead gen strategy?

A lead gen strategy is the set of deliberate choices a business makes about who to target, what to offer them, where to reach them, and how to measure whether it's working. It is the thinking that happens before the doing.

Most lead gen strategies aren't strategies. They're lists of tactics.

That is the difference between consistently generating leads and hoping the next campaign works. After two decades in B2B lead generation and building the AI Edit around this exact problem, I have never seen a company with a real strategy struggle the way that the ones without one struggle. Those that struggle are almost always running tactics in isolation.

A lead gen strategy is the thinking before the doing

When I talk about strategy, I mean the deliberate choices you make about how to generate leads, and the reasoning that sits behind those choices. Who you're targeting. What you're offering them. Where you're going to reach them. How you'll know if it's working.

Most people would agree with that part. It's the bit that's familiar.

What trips people up is what comes next.

Tactics live inside a strategy. Running LinkedIn ads is a tactic. Sending cold emails is a tactic. Publishing thought leadership on Substack is a tactic. Going to industry events is a tactic. None of those are strategies. They're things you do because your strategy told you to.

When a business confuses one for the other, you can usually spot it within thirty seconds. They'll tell you their lead gen strategy is "doing more on LinkedIn" or "running paid ads in Q3" or "writing more content." Those are activities, not strategies. There's no thinking underneath them. They're not connected to a clear view of who's being targeted, what's being offered, or how anything is being measured.

That's why so many businesses spend money on lead gen and get nothing back.

A strategy is also about what you choose not to do

This is something I learned in business school.

A strategy commits you to a small set of choices to the exclusion of everything else. When you decide who you're targeting, you're also deciding who you're not. When you decide which channels you're going to invest in, you're also deciding which ones you'll leave alone. When you commit to a positioning, you're walking away from the customers who wanted something else.

That commitment is what gives a strategy its power. Without exclusion, you don't have a strategy. You have a wishlist.

This is also why strategy is hard. Saying no to opportunities is uncomfortable. Watching a competitor do well on a channel you've chosen to ignore feels like a mistake, even when it isn't. Most businesses don't fail at strategy because they can't think clearly. They fail because they can't stay disciplined.

London to Paris: a useful way to think about it

The clearest analogy I've found is travel.

Imagine your objective is to get from London to Paris. Paris is the destination. That's not your strategy. That's your goal.

Your strategy is the route you choose to get there. You can fly. You can take the train. You can drive. You can sail. Each one is a legitimate way to reach the destination, and each one excludes the others. You cannot fly and drive at the same time. You commit to one route, and that route's pros and cons are now your pros and cons.

Your tactics are the decisions you make inside the route you chose. If you've committed to flying, your tactics are which airline, what time of day, economy or business, hand luggage or hold. You're not researching petrol stations or buying seasickness tablets, because those questions belong to a different strategy entirely.

Where businesses go wrong is they skip the route choice altogether. They start running LinkedIn ads because someone said LinkedIn was hot. They try cold email because someone else said cold email worked. They book a stand at an event because a colleague suggested it. Each tactic might be fine in isolation. But without a strategy connecting them, you don't end up in Paris. You end up in Brighton, wondering where the day went.

What a lead gen strategy isn't

A few clarifications, because the term gets used loosely.

A lead gen strategy is not a marketing strategy. A marketing strategy is broader. It covers your brand, your customer experience, your retention, your overall position in the market. A lead gen strategy is the slice of that focused specifically on generating qualified leads.

A lead gen strategy is not a campaign. A campaign is a time-bound piece of activity that runs inside a strategy. You can run twenty campaigns a year, all underneath the same strategic choices.

A lead gen strategy is not a channel. LinkedIn is not a strategy. Email is not a strategy. SEO is not a strategy. Those are channels. A strategy might tell you to use them, but the channel itself is not the thinking.

A lead gen strategy is not a tool or a piece of software. No CRM, AI platform, or sales engagement tool is going to hand you a strategy. They support execution. They don't replace thought.

And a lead gen strategy is not a list of tactics with the word "strategy" written at the top of the document.

What changes when you actually have one

When you have a real strategy, four things become true.

You stop being distracted. New tools, new platforms, new tactics arrive every week. With a strategy, you can look at each one and ask: does this fit, or doesn't it? Without one, every new shiny thing pulls you off course.

You become resilient. Algorithms change. Channels saturate. Platforms disappear. When you're committed to a strategy that's broader than any single channel, those shocks stop being existential.

Your results compound. Every campaign, every piece of content, every conversation adds to something. The work you did last quarter makes the work you do this quarter more effective. Without a strategy, every month feels like starting over.

And your brand builds in the background. When you show up consistently for the same people, with the same message, across the same channels, people remember you. They don't always buy immediately. But when they're ready, you're the business they think of.

The choice you're making isn't whether to have a strategy. Every business has one, whether they designed it or stumbled into it. The choice is whether yours is going to be deliberate.

FAQ

How long does it take to build a lead gen strategy?

The strategic thinking can be done in a focused month. Building the systems behind it takes longer. But a strategy is not a one-off project. It's a living thing that you refine as data comes in and as your market shifts. You start with the best version you can articulate today and improve from there. We work through this in our live sessions.

Do small B2B businesses need a lead gen strategy?

More than large ones do. A large business can absorb a few bad months without much consequence. A small business can't. A lead gen strategy is what gives you predictability, and predictability is what separates B2B SMEs that grow from B2B SMEs that survive in fits and starts.

What are the most common lead gen strategy mistakes?

• Confusing tactics for strategy.
• Hopping between channels without committing to any of them.
• Failing to define what a lead actually is, which means you can't measure whether your strategy is working.
• Measuring activity instead of outcomes.
• And treating lead gen as a one-off project rather than a discipline you build over time.