How to build a B2B customer acquisition strategy that actually converts

CMOs are feeling the pressure.

Revenue is lagging behind projections; finding qualified opportunities to close high-stakes deals is getting harder. Meanwhile, marketing, sales, and customer success are pointing fingers, refusing to take accountability for the disappointing numbers. 

Overall, conversions and customer trust are at an all-time low. 

Of course, you’ve tried the customer acquisition strategies you read online: cold calls, email outreach, SEO, you name it.

But the results fell short of expectations. And now you have more questions than answers.

What channels attract your best-fit customers? How do you acquire more customers without increasing your customer acquisition cost (CAC)? How do you create personalized experiences — the kind that drives revenue growth?

To move forward, alignment is key.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to build a B2B customer acquisition strategy that actually converts. Afterward, we’ll discuss our tactics in each channel and common pitfalls to watch out for.

3 steps to build a high-converting B2B customer acquisition strategy

Before choosing your acquisition channels, everyone in marketing, sales, and customer success should be on the same page regarding who makes up your best customers today.

These steps ensure a strong start.

1. Align all customer-facing departments

Poor team alignment causes silos, leading to inconsistent messaging and disconnected experiences across channels.

In the long run, these issues damage credibility, trust, and opportunities for conversions.

To overcome these hurdles, gather all stakeholders from marketing, sales, and customer success (or delivery) to determine shared goals and KPIs.

💡 Case in point: At Belkins, our departments share at least one common business goal.

Marketing and sales teams have weekly calls to ensure accountability; both are tasked with driving conversions and new revenue numbers. Every month or quarter, they’d gather in long meetings to analyze and identify gaps in the whole funnel.

This cross-functional collaboration creates a feedback loop with marketing at its core.

Our marketing and delivery teams also collaborate in the same way.

Since delivery’s main KPI, monthly recurring revenue, depends on the quality of clients coming into the sales pipeline, it works closely with marketing to communicate the target customer profile and the required number of customers.

If targets can’t be met, marketing would challenge the delivery team to make the most of its current customer base — like increasing the customer lifetime value.

2. Bring your ICP and buyer persona up to code

Your ideal customer profile (ICP) is the foundation of everything. Fail to create an accurate one, and your customer acquisition strategy is doomed before its launch.

Update it yearly with your buyer persona to keep pace with evolving customer behavior and market changes.

This involves identifying your most profitable customer segments and their common attributes (e.g., industry, company size, revenue) from your CRM and revenue attribution tools.

Tweak your ICP based on the insights gathered.

Next, flesh out every key player in the buying committee in your buyer persona. Use tools like SparkToro or participate in communities to learn about their content habits and sources of influence. To identify their jobs-to-be-done (JTBD), goals, and challenges, use surveys and interviews.

After finalizing your ICP and buyer persona, map out the stages and touchpoints across the customer journey, paying attention to your customers’ buying triggers and emotional experience changes.

Finally, store these internal assets in a single source of truth (e.g., digital management suite) to keep everyone in sync and maintain brand consistency across channels.

3. Determine your chosen channels

Your buyer persona determines your acquisition channels.

💡 Case in point: Since our B2B customers use various channels, we’ve adopted an allbound acquisition strategy encompassing channels like intent-based calls, SEO, and reactivation emails.

These are nothing new.

But what sets our strategy apart is we interconnect them through our tailored omnichannel strategies. Since implementing it in our agency, we’ve delivered 100-400+ qualified appointments yearly. 

5 B2B customer acquisition channels (and the tactics in each to increase conversions)

Your buyer persona identifies where your prospects are most active. To give you a better idea, here are the channels we’ve observed working for our agency, clients, and companies out in the wild.

1. Intent-based calling

Despite its intrusive nature, cold calling is still very effective in traditional industries. In our experience working with these clients, we’ve seen it generate hundreds of appointments.

However, if you’re not seeing ideal results in your industry, consider intent-based calling.

Rather than calling folks you haven’t established rapport with, you’re targeting leads who’ve shown interest in your products or services. 

Buyers who interact with your brand are more likely to respond positively. When Belkins added intent-based calling to its outreach campaigns, explains our CMO, conversions went up by almost 50%.

Here’s our recommendation to increase your odds of success:

• Personalize the call based on past interactions from your outreach campaign. If a prospective client, for instance, hinted at a business priority on LinkedIn, bring it up on the call. Find out what’s happening in their business and what’s holding them back from buying today.
• Integrate your tech stack. You need, at the very least, a CRM, marketing automation, communication tool, and data analytics platform. Having all customer data in 1 place gives your sales development representatives (SDRs) a complete picture of every buyer. This helps them pitch (with context!) at the right time and create a delightful experience.
• Measure and optimize based on response and engagement levels. For example, if you’re seeing a rising trend of a specific objection from a customer segment, work that into your call script and adapt accordingly.

2. Reactivation emails

Customer acquisition isn't just about finding new customers.

It’s also reactivating past clients who churned.

At Belkins, we’re no strangers to churn. In fact, it’s not unusual for our agency to have clients seeking alternatives after a year of partnership. Yet, time after time, most come back after trying other vendors.

According to our CMO, this occurs within 3 to 6 months.

The key to successful reactivation, emphasizes Lee, is an ongoing dialogue with lost customers. 

This perspective shows just how important full-cycle marketing is. By building a long-term relationship with customers all the way to the post-purchase stage, you show initiative in empowering customers for life.

The next time you reactivate a churned client, lead with value. Offer to review their accounts or schedule a call to strategize how to achieve their goals.

Alternatively, try Banzai’s approach: Send a reactivation email sequence.

For the software company, cyclical churn is a recurring pattern. Customers would leave when they no longer run webinars but frequently return when they’re ready to host sessions again.

After the engineering team improved the features in its product road map, the customer marketing manager would reach out to churned users, briefly walking them through the new tools. 

3. Referrals

Despite its popularity, many users don’t fully leverage LinkedIn for referrals.

But what do they do instead?

They periodically ask friends and family for referrals.

While this is an acceptable strategy, they’re overlooking LinkedIn’s massive potential for expanding their referral network.

Another way to generate referrals far and wide is through a referral program. Note how Banzai offers clients a $125 gift card for every new customer they refer.

To build momentum, Banzai promotes its referral program across multiple customer touchpoints: emails, in-app messages, conversations with customer success managers, support calls, and value-recognized milestones (e.g., users who just hosted their first event or hit their 1-year anniversary as customers).

4. Cold emails

Cold emailing is a frequently misunderstood channel.

In the wrong hands, it can lead to hectic and random messages, disrupting the prospect’s journey and creating an annoying buying experience right from the start.

Recent Google and Yahoo policies haven’t helped either. Mass emails often land in spam folders.

Plus, when we analyzed our clients’ cold email response rates in 2024, we discovered the average response rate dropped from 7% to 5.1% in just a year.

In other words, cold email as a single channel has stopped working as it used to.

But hold your horses. That’s not to say you should scrap your cold email sequence completely. After all, cold emails have proven successful at our agency. We’ve achieved 99-100% of deliverability over the years.

Our take? You need to approach it differently, like:

• Merging it with other channels. Combining cold email with LinkedIn outreach and intent-based calling, for instance, improves your odds of reaching prospective customers at the right place and time.
• Personalizing it based on intent signals. Addressing prospects by their first name and sharing cookie-cutter solutions don’t cut it anymore. To capture their attention, personalize your emails based on intent data and behavioral insights. For example, if a prospective customer clicks through a remarketing ad for a construction-specific solution, follow up with a webinar that discusses current issues impacting the construction and development industry. This will kickstart the conversation. 
• Reaching out to more than 1 recipient. Targeting more prospects from 1 company boosts the likelihood of reaching a decision-maker. Remember to tweak your messaging and offering for each persona.

Continuously improve through A/B testing.

For example, if you notice a higher response rate for a specific customer segment, double down on it with more precise messaging.

5. SEO

Classic SEO tactics — improving on-page SEO and fixing site architectural issues that come to mind — rarely impact the bottom line.

If you want to convert site traffic to high-fit leads, according to Zatiychuk, consider:

(a) Ranking for high-intent keywords

Long-tail queries generate less traffic but have a higher conversion rate.

Why? Because buyers performing these searches are at the bottom of the funnel (BoFu); they’re actively looking for solutions.

In Belkins’ case, these keywords include “agency” and “services” (e.g., best lead generation agencies, appointment setting services). Prioritize ranking these queries to boost conversions.

After exhausting these BoFu search queries, branch out to the top of the funnel (ToFu) keywords. These supportive pieces help build backlinks. If they’re thought leadership articles, they might even help you build your brand and differentiate from competitors.

(b) Sharing valuable knowledge not found elsewhere

Basic information (a.k.a. mirage content) doesn’t convert, especially if you sell to advanced buyers like IT developers and C-suite executives.

To convert them to customers, you need to demonstrate in-depth knowledge and your “earned secrets” — it’s 1 of the most effective ways to establish yourself as a trusted authority in your field.

There are two ways to create advanced content. Either hire a practitioner with writing experience in your field or a writer who can interview subject-matter experts and transform their insights into quality content.

At Belkins, we only hire writers with a proven track record in marketing and sales writing.

(c) Investing more in top performers

Finally, update your most valuable pieces at least every 12 months.

That should maintain or improve your rankings on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Don’t know where to begin? You can’t go wrong with these updates:

• Check your post fulfills the search intent. If it doesn’t, edit or rewrite it from scratch.
• Replace older statistics with new ones (note: statistics shouldn’t be older than 3 years). If you can’t find a suitable statistic, back up your statements with an expert’s quote, your personal experience, or a real-world example.
• Highlight current strategies, and remove outdated ones that no longer work in today’s market.
• Improve user’s experience (e.g., implement BLUF principle, add more visual breaks, add a table of contents in long-form articles for better navigation).
• Build more internal links to establish relationships between similar content.
• Add backlinks from relevant and reputable sites.

5 common mistakes to avoid in your B2B customer acquisition strategy

Steer clear of these traps, and you’ll stand a much higher chance of converting your leads into customers.

1. Targeting the wrong prospects

If your ICP is inaccurate, your customer acquisition strategy has failed.

Try out a range of messages tailored to specific titles and departments. In each iteration, aim for more precise messaging. Your open and reply rates will indicate if you’ve landed on the right ICP.

When Belkins implemented this approach to drive new clients for Driveline, it resulted in an open rate exceeding 50% and a 9% reply rate. The campaigns, combined with past client outreach, generated $4.9 million in revenue. 

2. Capturing demand from the bottom of the funnel

It’s nearly impossible to win over prospects who’ve explored their options and made up their minds.

“They’ve done the research and know what they want,” says Lee. “You can’t negotiate. This customer has already decided — and you have to serve it.”

Your best move is to target prospects from the top or middle of the funnel. Engaging buyers early makes selling your idea much easier.

3. Misaligning your acquisition channels

Imagine a high-stakes account you’ve been nurturing sees a jarringly different message on your LinkedIn and WhatsApp outreach.

It’s a surefire way to confuse them and damage your credibility.

To prevent a fragmented customer journey, align your acquisition channels for a cohesive experience (e.g., coordinate your email follow-ups and ad campaigns).

In a recent omnichannel outreach webinar, we discovered interconnecting these channels to create a consistent buyer journey drove 20% lower CAC and 15% higher annual contract value (ACV). 

4. Over-relying on traffic volume

Traffic is useless if it doesn’t drive conversions.

Measure metrics that impact the bottom line, like the number of leads and trial-to-conversion rate.

Since focusing on these outcome-based metrics, Belkins sees 3x more qualified leads than 2 years ago.

5. Pitching too soon in calls

The chances of your SDR understanding a prospect’s company on a first call are slim — so refrain from pitching right away.

What they should do instead, writes Michael Maximoff, cofounder of Belkins, is build up the sales questions by stage in this sequence:

• Qualifying (e.g., “What are your current growth goals?”)
• Rapport-building (e.g., “What will success look like to you?”)
• Business-oriented discovery (e.g., “What’s your budget?”)
• Objection-based (e.g., “Why did previous solutions not work for you?”)
• Sales pitch (e.g., “Great, we’re now ready to launch the proof of concept. Do you see any reason you wouldn’t like to move forward? If not, would [timeline] work for you?”)

This way, you’re not only positioning yourself as a trusted advisor but also a savvy and confident business partner who can help accomplish their goals.

Doing it differently this year to acquire more customers

As you can see here, many classic acquisition strategies technically still work — they just need a different approach.

Take intent-based calling, for instance.

Instead of cold-calling folks you haven’t established rapport with, target prequalified leads who expressed interest in your products or services. It certainly increases your chances of converting them to customers.

And it performs even better when you interconnect it with other acquisition channels.

At Belkins, we deliver around 20 qualified meetings monthly for B2B companies across 50+ industries. We do this through intent-based calling, personalized email outreach, appointment setting, and more via a tailored omnichannel strategy.

Clients report 20% lower CAC and 15% higher ACV using our world-class approach.

Book a call today to get started.