What we learned from running 100+ cross-channel lead generation campaigns

B2B buyers don’t always follow the sequence you planned for them. They bounce around. They ghost you on LinkedIn, download a case study three months later, then appear at your trade show booth, having forgotten your name.

The problem is that cross-channel lead generation requires leads to move linearly. It can’t handle the reality of the buyer’s journey. What you end up with is missed opportunities, good leads falling through the cracks, and dead-end calls frustrating your sales team.

You have to continue the conversation with customers when you meet them again, wherever they are in the scheme of things. Only omnichannel marketing can do that — a system where every channel (LinkedIn, email, calling, trade shows, etc.) knows what every other channel is doing. That’s a much more complicated system. One that must be tailored to your company’s unique situation.

Before you begin putting such a system together, you need insights into what works and what doesn’t. In this article, we share data-backed lessons from over 100 lead generation campaigns meant for:

• B2B companies in manufacturing, healthcare, and logistics
• Sales cycles that stretch 6–18 months
• Engaging buying committees with multiple decision-makers

Lesson 1: Most B2B companies are confused about how to connect channels in a campaign

If you still can’t wrap your head around these different channel strategies, here’s a post on multichannel versus omnichannel marketing.

Nine out of 10 times, we audit a client and find they’re running multichannel — separate campaigns on different platforms. They think they’re coordinated because they’re using email and LinkedIn and trade shows. But conversations across different channels don’t connect with each other.

Three common mistakes that stop an interconnected cross-channel campaign from happening.

Mistake #1: Sales and marketing aren’t aligned

Do you have a single document that both sales and marketing teams use for their ideal customer profile and personas? Most of our clients don’t.

Marketing might have created one, but sales doesn’t know it exists. Or it’s the other way around.

The disconnect in your conversations with potential clients begins before you even start reaching out — it requires alignment between your sales and marketing teams.

Mistake #2: Your website doesn’t match what you’re saying in outreach

If you tell a client you can help them and your marketing offer is meant for them, then they expect it to be for their industry. Yet, most prospects don’t see industry-specific landing pages when they visit your site after clicking your ad or opening your email.

They land on generic messaging. They have to hunt around to find out if you even work with companies in their industry.

Here’s what that looks like from the customer’s point of view: I needed project management software for my sales agency. I visited a site. I didn’t see “sales agencies” anywhere on their list of industries served, so I assumed they don’t work with agencies like mine and I left.

If you don’t show that you work with their specific industry, they’re not going to waste time exploring your site.

Mistake #3: Chase fresh leads forever

Here’s how most B2B companies still do lead generation:

1. Take 1,000 companies
2. Reach out to them via email and LinkedIn
3. Convert 0.5%–1%
4. Move on to the next 1,000 companies

That’s the multichannel approach. It assumes you have unlimited fresh leads to chase. It also ignores the fact that you’re barely getting anything from each list you touch.

For example, our investment platform client was working with vendors who achieved only a 3% lead-to-conversion rate using this exact approach. When we shifted to cycling through the same high-quality accounts with coordinated touchpoints, their conversion rate jumped to 9%.

Stop chasing new lists. Start getting more out of the companies you have already contacted.

You do that by cycling through the same leads multiple times. Nurture them across every channel they use. Don’t run a sequence once and move on. Stay present wherever they might engage — email, LinkedIn, ads, content, and events. It may feel like you’re hounding them, but the truth is, they don’t even remember you. Stay with them for as long as it takes.

This approach shifts your entire mindset and focuses on lead generation. You go from "how many new leads can we add" to "how many opportunities can we create from this same list of companies."

That’s what we call penetration at the account level. It’s how you actually build a pipeline. When we applied this strategy for an investment platform, we increased their monthly outreach from 1,500 startups to 3,500 startups — but more importantly, we stayed engaged with those accounts across multiple channels. The result: 346 appointments booked over 15 months and a 125% ROI.

Lesson 2: Map and nurture the entire buying committee simultaneously, not just your ICP

An ICP that reads “manufacturing companies, $50M+ revenue” is useless.

You don’t sell to companies. You sell to committees. And every person on that committee cares about completely different things.

Why targeting one persona kills your deals

Here’s what actually happened to us:

We had a client selling sustainability software, which was used by people in the following company roles: 

1. Sustainability leaders
2. Sustainability advocates
3. Procurement team
4. Finance team

We started by creating content for sustainability leaders. That’s who we thought made the decisions. But the others were also involved. We asked ourselves if we had content that addressed their concerns. We wondered if we were running webinars about their specific problems and if we were nurturing those leaders.

Why? Because we learned that any key decision-maker that you ignore becomes your biggest objection inside the company. Different decision-makers mean you need to build different personas.

How to orchestrate campaigns for multiple personas

You need to align three things:

1. Updated persona documents with specific details about each role
2. Industry-specific landing pages that cater to the correct personas, so when prospects visit your site, they immediately see that you work with their industry and understand their roles
3. A content calendar aligned with the messages you want each persona to hear

Next, use LinkedIn profiles that focus on specific personas. For instance, your CTO’s LinkedIn could be designed to speak to other CTOs. Personalize all outreach messaging — email copy and call scripts — for each role.

Sometimes we’ll run one webinar for the marketing personas, and a completely separate webinar for the sales personas. It depends on how many different roles we’re targeting.

For example, we worked with Terrascope, a sustainability SaaS platform. We mapped out four personas in their buying committee:

1. CSO
2. Sustainability Manager
3. Sourcing Manager
4. CFO

Each one had different pain points and authority. We built detailed persona docs covering their responsibilities, KPIs, and challenges, then created separate messaging for each role. 

The CSO got content about strategic visibility, while the CFO received messages about financial risk mitigation. We ran persona-specific webinars, sent tailored case studies, and personalized everything from email copy to demo flows. 

The result was 16 sales-ready meetings in Q3, double the previous quarter. Additionally, when the conversations started, the prospects already understood why they were talking to us.

Lesson 3: Offline touchpoints must be integrated months before the event

When you start building your attendee list three weeks before a conference, you’ve already lost.

Why your trade show leads die in your CRM

Here’s what we see all the time.

The company signs up for a conference. Three weeks before the event, someone starts scrambling to build a list of people who might attend. They blast out cold emails: “We’ll be at the conference. Let’s meet up.”

Response rates are maybe 2–3%.

Then they spend $500+ per conversation at the booth. They scan badges, shake hands, and promise to follow up. Those leads go into the CRM and get dumped into a generic nurture sequence that doesn’t note that they just met in person.

Two weeks later, that person gets an email with a subject line like “Thought you’d find this interesting.” There’s no mention of the trade show. No reference to what was talked about at the booth. Just another cold email.

They delete it. The $500 conversation was wasted.

How to integrate trade shows six months before the event

Here’s how we build trade show campaigns now.

Start six months before the conference. Build your list of companies that fit your ICP. You don’t have the attendee list yet — that’s fine. Build your list based on:

• Companies in the geographic area (like manufacturing companies in the Dallas area, if it’s a conference in that city)
• Companies that have attended this conference in previous years
• Companies that fit your ICP and would likely benefit from attending

Then you nurture them for six months with email, LinkedIn, and ads. You establish awareness. You get them familiar with your brand, your messaging, and what you actually do.

By the time you reach out about the conference, they already know who you are.

Now your message isn’t cold anymore: "Hey, are you planning to come to the manufacturing conference in Dallas next month? We’d love to meet up while we’re both there."

That message hits completely differently when they’ve been seeing your content for months. Your conversion rate jumps. 

For instance, when we helped Disability Solutions build their LinkedIn presence before industry events, their connection acceptance rate increased by 70% because prospects already recognized their executive director from his thought leadership content.

How to approach offline events

You need to think about conferences as one of the later stages in your journey with a prospect — not the beginning.

If you treat trade shows as the start of a relationship, you’re burning money. If you treat them as a milestone in a relationship you’ve already been building for months, they become one of your highest-converting channels.

Lesson 4: Your CRM is either your source of truth or your data graveyard

Most of the outreach tools we see teams using aren’t connected to their CRM.

They’re used as separate platforms. That’s why the touchpoints you’re creating with prospects — all the outreach and engagement — can’t be tracked back to your CRM. And if you can’t track them, you can’t create personalized journeys that actually build on previous interactions.

The gap that kills everything: LinkedIn

Email tools integrated with your CRM are just fine. You can see which emails you sent, who opened them, and who clicked. Some calling tools, like Nooks, also integrate, so you can see your calls logged in the CRM.

But LinkedIn doesn’t have direct integration with HubSpot or Salesforce.

Most companies run their entire LinkedIn outreach completely blind to their CRM. Connection requests, messages, profile views, and post engagement — none of it syncs to the platform and pipeline your sales team works with.

We built a custom integration between LinkedIn and HubSpot for our clients. Now all the LinkedIn activity syncs automatically:

• Connection requests you sent
• Connections they accepted
• Messages you sent
• Responses they sent back

We can see a complete breakdown of every single touchpoint across every channel, measure which channels are getting engagement, and use that to decide what to do next.

For the investment platform client, this integration revealed that their Food & Beverage prospects showed strong LinkedIn engagement, while Biotech prospects responded better to email. Without that visibility, they would have wasted resources on the wrong channel for each segment.

What your CRM should do

Your CRM shouldn’t just store contacts. It needs to be your source of truth, the operating system that powers your entire lead generation strategy. 

Here’s what it must handle:

• Track lead sources accurately: Every lead should be tagged with a source, whether it be paid ads, organic SEO, website forms, LinkedIn, referrals, etc. You need to know which channels are actually working.
• Integrate everything: Connect your website forms, LinkedIn lead generation forms, social networks, and any other touchpoint directly into your CRM. No manual uploads. No spreadsheets.
• Use proper lead stages: Tag leads based on their status: lead vs. MQL vs. SQL vs. opportunity.
• Assign and route leads systematically: Define what happens when a lead goes cold or gets disqualified. Connect this to automated workflows so nothing falls through the cracks.
• Enrich and score automatically: Your CRM should automatically enrich contact data as leads engage with your content. Set up lead scoring based on behavior such as email opens, page visits, content downloads, and demo requests.
• Eliminate manual work: Automate data entry, lead routing, follow-up sequences, and status updates. Your team should be talking to prospects, not copying and pasting information. 

When we optimized HubSpot for Black Hills AI, we helped them cut time spent on manual CRM tasks from 4–5 hours daily to around 2 hours—saving 15–20 hours per week that their team could spend on actual sales conversations.

Lesson 5: The “marketing-to-sales handoff” is where your pipeline dies

Marketing generates a lead. They mark it as “MQL” in the CRM and assign it to a sales rep. The rep gets a notification. Maybe they call the lead. Maybe they don’t. Maybe the lead was never actually qualified in the first place. Maybe they were qualified, but three days passed and now they’ve gone cold.

Either way, all the context dies at the handoff. Sales doesn’t know what marketing promised in the emails. Marketing doesn’t know what the sales rep said on the call. The potential client experiences the whole thing as a disjointed mess.

Replace handoffs with feedback loops

Your sales and marketing teams need to work with the same data, in real time. When a sales rep updates a lead’s status in the CRM, that should automatically trigger changes in marketing (e.g., remove them from certain ad audiences and shift them to a different email sequence). When a lead downloads a whitepaper, the sales rep should get an instant notification that includes what they downloaded.

It’s one team working in one system.

What breaks this system

Hand-offs fail because:

• You’re using different systems: Your sales team lives in Salesforce. Your marketing team lives in HubSpot. The two systems don’t talk to each other.
• IT created compliance rules that break your marketing automation: Your IT department built permission and compliance rules that block your marketing automation from actually functioning the way it needs to.
• Sales and marketing aren’t aligned: Your sales team and marketing team have completely different goals, different definitions of what “qualified” even means, and different incentive structures.

Technical integration is actually the easier problem to solve. The cultural alignment between sales and marketing is the hard part.

Lesson 6: Your buyer controls the journey, not your campaign calendar

Cross-channel marketing is a sequence you planned. But your B2B buyers are unpredictable.

What actually works is building a system that accounts for this. You stop trying to blast people through your funnel. You start having one continuous conversation that stays consistent, no matter where they engage with you.

What a healthy ongoing conversation looks like

A prospect has a sales call with your rep about Scope 3 emissions tracking. The next day, they visit your website and see a personalized banner at the top: “Continuing our conversation about Scope 3 tracking.”

They get a follow-up email from the rep that references the specific pain points they discussed on yesterday’s call. Then they see a LinkedIn ad in their feed featuring a case study from a company in their same industry solving the exact problem they mentioned.

Every single channel remembers every conversation you’ve had with a company representative. The prospect doesn’t have to repeat themself. They don’t feel like they’re talking to five different companies. The whole experience feels seamless.

That’s what actually builds trust during 12-month sales cycles with multiple decision-makers. 

When we built this kind of system for the investment platform, prospects experienced a coordinated journey across email, LinkedIn, and calling. The platform saw its lead response rate increase by 20% because prospects were engaging with consistent messaging across every touchpoint.

Lesson 7: Touchpoints per account is the only metric that really matters

Stop obsessing over these:

• Email open rates
• LinkedIn connection acceptance rates
• Ad impressions

Start tracking these:

• Touchpoints per account: Are you actually hitting 50–60 coordinated touchpoints over the full lifecycle?
• Cross-channel engagement velocity: How fast are your prospects moving between different channels? Are they bouncing around and engaging across multiple channels, or are they stuck in just one?
• Pipeline contribution by touchpoint combination: Which specific combination of channels are actually driving closed deals? For the investment platform client, we tracked that 30% of meetings originated via LinkedIn interactions before email replies — showing us exactly which channel combination drove conversions.
• Amount of time to MQL and then to SQL: How long is it actually taking to move prospects through your stages?
• Cost per opportunity (not cost per lead): What’s the real cost to generate a sales-qualified opportunity that your team actually wants to work with?

Those metrics tell you that your marketing makes sense. It helps you do things like prove ROI to leadership. However, when it comes to predicting pipeline and revenue from a campaign, the number of touchpoints per account across every channel is your north star.

How we took Terrascope from 5 touchpoints to 60+

Terrascope was a sales-driven company. They focused heavily on outbound motion — cold calls, cold emails, and direct sales outreach.

They completely overlooked the marketing side of the customer journey. They lacked educational content, retargeting ads, and webinars. They weren’t invested in the multi-touch nurture that builds trust over a long time period. Before Belkins, their sales team nurtured leads manually, while marketing didn’t nurture at all. Most prospects received only 2–3 touchpoints.

When we integrated marketing into their SDR motion — not replacing the SDRs, but enhancing what they were already doing — we increased touchpoints without making prospects feel overwhelmed because every single touchpoint was coordinated and relevant, not just random noise.

Our sequences were built across every channel with 5–10 steps in each stage:

• LinkedIn: Connection requests, personalized messages, and engaging with their posts
• Email: Persona-specific sequences with articles, case studies, white papers, all tailored to their role (10–15 touchpoints per contact at Stage 1 alone)
• Calling: Intent-based calling (we only called people who had already shown engagement signals like opening emails or clicking links). One in five calls converted to a meeting, and 100% of no-shows were rebooked through follow-up calls.
• Ads: Retargeting what was coordinated with whatever stage the SDR had them in. Ads influenced 70% of booked meetings by touchpoint attribution, with a CTR 2.8x above industry average.
• Content: Webinars, 1-to-1 workshops, downloadable resources
• Social media: Active LinkedIn presence that reinforced the same messaging the SDRs were using

When we implemented this system for Terrascope, here’s what happened quarter by quarter:

• Q1: 22 meetings booked
• Q2: 5 meetings booked (there was an expected dip while we re-launched the strategy)
• Q3: 16 meetings booked, with a 30% drop in cost per opportunity
• Q4: (Ongoing at the time of writing this article) projected 25 meetings based on current trajectory

The increase wasn’t because we added new channels that they weren’t using before. The increase was because we dramatically increased the number of coordinated touchpoints across the channels they already had.

That’s the key insight. More channels don’t generate more pipeline. More coordinated touchpoints generate more pipeline.

And you can’t coordinate touchpoints at that level without building a system where everyone using one channel knows what others are doing in all channels in real time.

Start building your lead generation system

If there’s one thing we learned, it’s that success isn’t about using more channels. It’s about integrating the channels you’re already using into an omnichannel lead generation system.

Most of your competitors are still relying on disconnected multichannel campaigns. Some of them have figured out cross-channel sequences. But the B2B companies with predictable pipelines in manufacturing, healthcare, and logistics — the ones consistently hitting their quarterly targets — their marketing and sales systems know what is happening in every channel in real time. And they probably started building those systems just last year.

If you’re ready to start a conversation about building your system, give us a call at +1 302-803-5506 or send us a message.