What's the most cost-effective way to get B2B leads?

The most cost-effective way to get B2B leads is to build a lead generation engine that funds itself. You put the infrastructure down once, the leads come in, the leads become clients, and the revenue from those clients pays for the next channel you build. That is what makes it cheap. Not the price of any individual lead.

What people usually mean when they ask for cost-effective leads

They mean: what's the cheapest route to one lead?

Buy a list. Run cold email at volume. Pay per click. Hire someone offshore to send connection requests. Every one of these has a defensible price tag, and every one of them will produce something you can put in a spreadsheet and call a lead.

The problem isn't the maths. The problem is that the leads are rubbish.

They didn't ask to hear from you. They don't know who you are. They're not in the market. A few might convert, but the vast majority don’t. So you buy again next month. And the month after. You're renting your pipeline. The rent never stops and you never own anything. Stop paying and the leads stop the same week. Two years in you've spent a fortune and you're exactly where you started.

Cost-effectiveness is a question about six months from now

Ask a better question. Where are your leads coming from in six months? And what's paying for them?

If the answer is "the same place, and I am", you haven't built anything. You've bought your way through another half year.

The businesses that get this right are the ones where the answer changes. In six months their leads come from work they did today, and that work is paid for by clients who arrived because of work they did six months before that. The engine funds its own construction.

That's the argument. Cost-effectiveness isn't about this month's spend. It's about whether what you're spending it on still exists next year.

How a self-funding lead gen engine works

The mechanism is not complicated.

You build the foundations. You launch one channel, properly, and get it running before you touch the next one. That channel produces leads. Those leads become clients. Those clients pay you. That revenue funds the next channel, which produces more leads, which become more clients.

The first stretch is the hard part, because you're paying for it out of whatever you've got. But once the first channel is converting, you're no longer funding growth from reserves. You're funding it from the thing it produced.

Then it compounds. Work you did months ago keeps delivering. A video published in January pulls in strangers in July. A blog post that ranked in March is still ranking. You aren't starting from zero every month, which is exactly what buying leads makes you do.

It also puts distance between you and your competitors that they can't close quickly. If it takes three months of consistent work to get a channel producing, then a competitor who starts today is three months behind you. They can't buy their way past that. While you're building it, it looks to them like you're wasting your time. Once you've built it, it's too late for them to catch up.

What 43 qualified leads in three months actually looks like

I'll give you mine.

I only call someone a lead if they want to work with me and they can work with me. They have to want it, and they have to meet my criteria, and my criteria are strict. Not a form fill. Not a download. Not someone who watched a video. Someone who is in the market for what I do and who I'd actually take on.

On that definition: 43 leads in three and a half months. 20 of them became clients.

That's a conversion rate that looks implausible until you know the definition. It's high because the engine does the qualifying before I ever speak to anyone. By the time someone reaches me, they've read something, watched something, worked out what I do and decided they want it. The filtering happened upstream.

Your criteria will be different from mine. The definition isn't the point. The principle is: build the thing that qualifies people before they arrive. 

I'm also two months into building this for a client. They're on 12 leads. That's small. It's early. But it's an engine that's running, and it wasn't running before, and in six months it will be producing on its own.

This is The AI Edit Method. 

Buy leads and you buy them again

If you need a lead this week, buy one. That's the cheapest way to get a lead this week and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. You won’t get a qualified lead. They probably won’t convert. But you’ll have a lead.

If you want leads for the next decade, build the engine. It costs more this month and almost nothing by year two, because by then it's paying for itself.

Build the engine and you build it once.

By Heather Baker. Founder of the AI Edit and the Humans in the Loop.