What should be inside a B2B lead generation course?

There are a lot of B2B lead generation courses out there. Most of them are teaching something pretty narrow and likely to only be effective for a small audience.

So before you invest in one, it is worth understanding what the perfect b2b lead generation course should contain. I’ve been generating B2B leads since 2004, and here’s what needs to be in any B2B lead gen training course:

1. B2B lead gen training starts with understanding.

Lead generation has changed. Your industry has changed. Your audience has changed. And all of it will keep changing. Lead gen is harder now than it was, and understanding why is not optional background reading. It is foundational.

The next part of that understanding is about you and your business. A course should get you to audit where you are now, honestly, before it tells you where to go.

2. Strategy should be designed before a single channel goes live

Designing and building the lead gen strategy comes next. Before anything is switched on, before a channel is chosen, before a single piece of content is published.

And what do we mean by strategy? Well, we mean knowing who you are for, why they should care, how you’re not like your competitors, making it easy for them to say yes, working out where you can find them and developing ways to catch their attention.

If a course has you running outreach activity in week one, it is teaching you a tactic. That might work. If it does it won’t work for long.

3. The course should teach you how to choose lead gen channels

Every lead gen channel has pros and cons, and they are different for every business. What suits a consultancy selling six figure engagements is not what suits someone selling a product at volume.

A good b2b lead gen course covers the trade-offs and gives you a way to identify which channels will work best for your particular business. It should not jump in to teaching you about LinkedIn or YouTube. It should equip you with the knowledge and skills to work out where to start.

4. It should show you how to run the day to day of led gen

Lead generation is hard. Not intellectually hard (well sometimes it is, but that’s a good thing), hard to sustain. Most strategies fail because they stop, not because they were wrong.

So a course should equip you with systems and processes and tools that help you run the day to day of lead gen. How to measure. How to build feedback loops and respond to what they tell you. How to know what to do when. A view of the whole thing from a thousand feet, and a list of what to do today.

It should also cover keeping the activity fresh. Your audience will tire of what you are doing long before you do, and adapting to that is part of running an engine.

5. It should not end when the course ends

If the ground keeps shifting, a course that finishes when the last module finishes has an expiry date built into it.

Look for something ongoing. A way to stay on top of the major changes after you have finished, so the strategy you built does not quietly go out of date.

What is usually missing from lead gen training

I’ve taken loads of lead gen courses and read loads of books. What is missing is the strategy.

Most B2B lead generation courses focus on one tactic. LinkedIn. Cold email. SEO. Paid ads. Those courses can be genuinely valuable, and I am not dismissing them. But they are valuable once the strategy is in place. Not before.

Learn the tactic without the strategy and you have a skill with nowhere to put it. You will run it well, and you still will not know whether it was the right thing to be running.

That is why our B2B lead generation training is built the way it is.

By Heather Baker. Famous for building lead gen engines.