How to get B2B sales leads: Our SQLs generation framework

At Belkins, we speak to sales and marketing teams stuck in a loop. Marketing delivers MQLs (marketing-qualified leads), but sales can’t close them, and both sides point fingers. Sales blames marketing for poor-fit leads. Marketing blames sales for poor follow-up.

Here’s the truth: hitting MQL goals won’t mean much if your pipeline lacks sales-qualified leads (SQLs) who are ready for conversation. That’s where alignment matters. When sales and marketing are in sync, your lead generation strategy produces results.

In this guide, I’ll walk you through our SQL generation framework, which bridges the gap between sales and marketing. It’s how we turn B2B leads into high-quality, revenue-ready opportunities for ourselves and our clients.

Belkins’ 10-step process for generating SQLs

Our SQL generation framework undergoes consistent optimization. We've used it to schedule 200,000+ appointments for 1,000+ clients across 50+ industries in the last 7 years. Currently, our process comprises 10 steps.

Align your sales and marketing teams

Ideally, your sales and marketing teams should target the same accounts. But according to a 2025 LinkedIn study, the average targeting overlap between sales and marketing in B2B companies is just 23%. 

Also, Influ2’s 2025 State of Sales & Marketing Alignment Report found 53% of B2B sales teams follow up on fewer than 35% of marketing-generated leads. This data suggests a broken hand-off process and sales’ distrust of marketing’s leads. Just in the U.S., this misalignment makes companies waste $1 trillion annually. Conversely, organizations with strong alignment generate 208% more revenue. 

We broke down our approach for aligning sales and marketing teams in a separate article, but here are the key factors for getting both teams to work in sync:

Ensure a shared ICP definition and qualification criteria. Your sales and marketing teams should have identical definitions of your ideal customer. 

This aligns your targeting and empowers marketing to filter and supply only high-intent leads to sales. This may seem obvious, but only 11% of companies have sales and marketing teams aligned on ICP definition, according to Influ2’s study.

Define each team's goals and responsibilities. Clear ownership of deliverables eliminates finger-pointing and drives accountability. Each team’s goals must also align with generating revenue.

Our co-founder, Michael Maximoff, once erred by tasking just marketing with generating awareness and MQLs. This resulted in missed revenue targets. But as marketing and business development became increasingly responsible for pipeline generation, the game changed. Today, they generate 99% of our qualified SQLs, allowing our sales team to focus on closing, not sourcing.

Establish a culture of regular communication and knowledge sharing. “One month of non-communication can lead to misalignment,” says Brian Hicks, our VP of Sales. At Belkins, our sales and marketing teams meet weekly. These meetings help us create a tight feedback loop that drives continuous improvement.

The sales team might share patterns they've noticed based on conversations with prospects, e.g., how to distinguish low-intent from high-intent leads. Marketing can then use those insights to refine the lead scoring model. Sales might also suggest content ideas based on common prospect pain points or frequently asked questions, helping marketing create more relevant content.

Define your ICP and buyer personas

Many brands still fall flat when defining their ICPs. A classic example is this cold email I received a while back.

Looking at the website of the Sales Operations Analyst, I knew there was zero chance I’d become a customer. Plus, I don't have sales reps — meaning this email missed the mark. This analyst would waste time if they pursued others like me. 

Such misfires stem from targeting companies based exclusively on demographic data (e.g., industry, company size, and revenue), but that’s surface-level. Sophisticated ICPs go beyond demographics, incorporating:

• Psychographic data, which includes pain points, challenges, goals, and aspirations.
• Behavioral signals such as buying triggers, urgency, and intent data.

Another common mistake is defining ICP based on assumptions instead of data. Using your gut feeling to define your ICP is understandable (to some extent) for new-to-market products. Established companies, however, should rely on win/loss reports and existing customer data.

Start by identifying your best customers — those with high ACV, regular renewals, and obvious satisfaction. Then, look for common traits like industry, team size, revenue, funding, etc. Next, interview top-fit customers to go deeper. Ask:

• How did you first learn about our company?
• What challenges led you to seek a solution?
• What events created the urgency to address this problem?
• What concerns have internal stakeholders raised?
• What benefits have you experienced from our solution? Please share specific examples.
• How do you measure the ROI of our tool (or service)?
• How does your team use our tool?

This exercise reveals customers’ pain points, buying triggers, and perceived value. You can then use these to target similar companies and sharpen your messaging, value proposition, and outreach strategy.

Go deep when building buyer personas, too; i.e., a fictional representation of the decision-makers within your target accounts. A popular example is the United Kingdom's King Charles and English singer Ozzy Osbourne, who have identical demographics. But when you consider their lifestyles, values, and personalities, it’s clear their needs are different.

When creating buyer personas, dig deeper by including:

• Key decision-makers such as the economic buyer (e.g., CFO), technical buyer (e.g., CTO), end users, and internal champions.
• Individual goals and pain points tailored to each stakeholder’s role.
• Evaluation criteria, i.e., how each decision-maker assesses and compares solutions.

📚 Related post: How we use clients' ideal customer profiles (ICPs) in lead generation campaigns 

Acquire relevant B2B sales lead generation tools

Many SQL generation challenges can be solved with the right tech stack. For instance, we don’t struggle with the MQL-to-SQL handoff problem that plagues 53% of B2B teams. Our secret? Chili Piper — one of the 12+ sales tools in our tech stack. 

When a prospect fills out the “Book a сall” form on our website, Chili Piper prequalifies them using preset criteria. It then automatically routes the lead to the appropriate sales executive (SE) based on form responses. Companies with over 1,000 employees are routed to more senior SEs. Prospects in certain industries are paired with SEs who specialize in that vertical. It also uses round-robin scheduling to ensure the fair and even distribution of leads among SEs.

You need a tech stack that helps you source and organize leads, assess their sales-readiness, and streamline hand-off to your sales team. Having tested 23+ B2B sales tools over the years, below are five types we recommend:

• CRM software. CRMs support sales lead generation. For example, HubSpot — the CRM we use — lets us enrich prospect profiles through third-party integrations. Other popular CRM options are Salesforce, Pipedrive, and Zoho CRM.
• Lead sourcing & data enrichment tools. LinkedIn Sales Navigator is our go-to for lead sourcing, with access to 1.2 billion profiles and 69 million companies. Still, no lead platform is 100% accurate, so we cross-verify and enrich our lists using Apollo.io and Hunter.io. ZoomInfo and Lusha are also strong alternatives.
• Marketing automation platforms. A marketing platform helps you score leads based on engagement activity like email opens or site visits. It also helps nurture leads with emails based on their behavior and stage in the buyer’s journey. Strong options include HubSpot Marketing Hub, Marketo (Adobe), Pardot (Salesforce), and ActiveCampaign.
• Sales engagement tools. HubSpot Sales Hub works well for inbound-focused businesses with simpler sales processes. If your team prioritizes outbound sales or needs advanced sales engagement features, tools like Outreach.io, Salesloft, or Reply.io can help.
• Website visitor identification tools. These tools reveal the companies — and sometimes individuals — behind anonymous website visits, helping you identify and engage high-intent prospects more effectively. We use Warmly and HubSpot for such tracking.

Maintain a clean, centralized, and consistently updated lead database

A clean database is well-organized, regularly enriched, and free of decayed data. Here’s why it matters: 28% of email addresses become invalid yearly because of job changes, promotions, or layoffs. 

Despite our routine data hygiene, around 10% of our contacts still bounce, and that’s relatively low. As Tetiana Musina, our HubSpot consultant, notes,

Removing invalid contacts ensures you do not:

• Contact nonexistent leads
• Damage your sender's reputation
• Lower your email deliverability
• Get your domain suspended

It's also crucial that your CRM pulls data from every touchpoint. Our HubSpot CRM pulls website visits, ad interactions, social engagements, email opens, LinkedIn messages, and even phone calls, thereby centralizing our data and serving as the single source of truth for all teams. As Michael asserts,

To keep your pipeline clean and centralized, here are three ideas to use:

• Schedule cleaning days. We do monthly/quarterly CRM data maintenance and find that 10–20% of email addresses have gone bad.
• Automate tasks. Use tools like Apollo (for data enrichment) and HubSpot (for lead scoring) to save time.
• Assign ownership. A dedicated pipeline manager (ours is sales ops) ensures data quality and accountability.

📚 Related post: B2B sales pipeline management process and best practices 

Qualify your leads to ensure sales readiness

Not every contact in your total addressable market (TAM) is ready to buy. Some are early-stage opportunities, showing mild interest and better suited for nurturing. Others are late-stage, actively researching, and close to a decision. Most aren’t in-market at all.

Lead qualification helps you tell them apart. It lets your team prioritize high-intent leads for sales and route low-intent and out-of-market leads to nurture campaigns. To do this, you need:

1. A structured lead scoring system
2. A lead qualification framework

Understanding lead scoring models

Lead scoring involves assigning numerical values to prospects to gauge their sales readiness. At Belkins, we use two scoring categories:

• External. Scores are based on the lead source and how well a prospect’s demographics match our ICP.
• Internal. Scores are based on engagement signals like website visits, social media activity, email clicks, and webinar attendance.

Our scoring scale ranges from -10 to 10. A score of -10 is a poor fit, while 9 or 10 means it's a high-quality prospect. Lead scores of 3 or higher are flagged as SQLs and passed to our sales team. 

📚 Related post: Using lead scoring to identify sales-ready leads in B2B

Popular sales qualification frameworks for sales teams

Any qualification done before speaking with a prospect is, at best, an educated guess. That’s why sales qualification frameworks exist — they guide discovery conversations and help reps assess a prospect’s true readiness to buy. One of the most well-known frameworks is BANT, which focuses on asking questions about these four areas:

• Budget. Can the prospect afford your product or service?
• Authority. Is your contact a decision-maker or involved in the buying process?
• Need. Does your solution solve a pressing pain point?
• Timeline. When do they plan to make a purchase?

BANT is sometimes considered outdated, but it’s still effective, especially in simpler sales cycles and when applied with flexibility. In fact, it closely mirrors our approach: our “Book a call” form captures key details like the prospect’s industry, company size, and budget. We then verify fit using Chili Piper’s Concierge and manual BDR research.

It’s a straightforward system, but it ensures our SEs only take discovery calls with prospects who likely meet the budget, authority, and need criteria. The discovery call becomes a chance to confirm those assumptions and evaluate the buyer’s pain points. Other qualification frameworks include:

• MEDDIC (Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, Champion). Ideal for complex B2B deals.
• CHAMP (Challenges, Authority, Money, Prioritization). A problem-first approach that emphasizes understanding the buyer’s pain before considering budget or authority.

📚 Related post: How to qualify sales appointments in B2B: Belkins’ best practices 

Leverage intent-based marketing and sales

Intent data refers to online behavior that signals a prospect’s likelihood to buy. This includes:

• Repeat visits to high-intent website pages like your pricing page
• Visits to social media conversations related to the problem you solve
• Curated signals from platforms like 6sense and G2 

With intent data, you can identify in-market, sales-ready leads and score them accurately. For example, if three people from the same company visit your pricing page, they’re likely part of a buying committee. A timely and personalized outreach at this stage can boost your conversion rate.

Buyer intent data is also crucial because much of the B2B buyer’s journey now happens in the dark. According to 6sense’s 2023 B2B Buyer Experience Report, 78% of buyers define their needs before ever speaking to a vendor (or, in many cases, filling out a form), and 84% buy from the first seller they engage with.

The takeaway? If you wait for form fills before engaging prospects, you’re already behind. Tools like 6sense and RB2B help you identify and reach in-market prospects early, thus giving you an edge in influencing their decision. Below are three tips for using intent data:

• Prioritize your signals. Not all intent triggers are equal. General signals like job changes or funding news are weaker than high-intent actions like engagement with your social media posts, visits to your demo, pricing, or terms pages. Rank signals by importance so your team focuses on the hottest prospects.
• Skip the obvious. Avoid starting outreach with hooks like, “I saw you visited our site.” First, it’s a weak opener. Second, you risk creeping out your prospect.
  Instead, use intent data as a starting point for further research. Analyze their behavior, find context, and craft a personalized message that speaks to their needs. Intent data isn’t an excuse to cut corners. It’s your cue to go all in.
• Prioritize duplicate leads. 6sense’s Head of Research & Thought Leadership, Kerry Cunningham, says sales teams often dismiss multiple leads from the same account because they view them as redundant.
  Kerry explains that when two or more people from a company fill out a form and become MQLs, it’s a strong buying signal — multiple stakeholders are engaging, despite a full awareness that it’ll prompt follow-up. So, encourage your BDRs and SDRs to reach out to each contact to identify champions and confirm if they’re part of the buying team.

Do account-based marketing (ABM) for high-value targets

For over five years, ABM has been a top lead generation trend, with 81% of B2B marketers reporting higher ROI from ABM than other marketing initiatives.

Instead of targeting a large pool of leads and filtering for the best-fit, ABM starts by identifying a handful of high-value accounts and pursuing them with hyper-personalized, multichannel, and multithreaded outreach.

This strategic focus and deep personalization make ABM more effective than traditional sales tactics. Your ABM outreach can span email, calls, social media, as well as high-touch tactics like executive dinners, gifting, and face-to-face meetings. The goal? Get the attention of decision-makers and show how your solution aligns with their strategic priorities.

We apply a light ABM approach to every deal by getting our executives to multithread key accounts. Our C-level leaders and department heads reach out to their counterparts in SQL accounts. As Julia Sorokovikova, our Head of Revenue Operations, explains:

• Consider your annual contract value (ACV). ABM is rarely viable for low-ACV products. Many experts suggest it's unfeasible for deals under $20,000, as the time spent on personalization can tank your unit economics. To assess viability, compare your projected ABM spend to expected ROI. Also, make sure your average deal size after adopting ABM increases enough to justify the added effort and cost.
• ABM doesn't have to be one-to-one. 6sense recommends using one-to-one for enterprise deals worth $500K, one-to-few for mid-market deals of $100K–$1M, and one-to-many for deals under $100K. To create a one-to-one feel at scale (in one-to-few or one-to-many campaigns), segment accounts by shared traits and speak to those in your campaigns.
• Identify the right decision makers. ABM works if you engage the right people. There’s no guessing ICPs. At Belkins, we start by identifying decision-makers from our closed-won deals to form a hypothesis. Then, we A/B test that hypothesis by involving other relevant stakeholders in conversations with our main contact. Finally, we prompt contacts to reveal key decision-makers by asking questions like, “Where do we go from here?”

Nurture leads to sales-readiness 

As I mentioned earlier, not everyone in your TAM is ready to buy. A Databox survey puts it into perspective: 40–70% of qualified leads aren’t sales-ready. Such leads require nurturing. 

Lead nurturing helps you build trust and guide low-intent leads toward a buying decision. Below are key steps to creating a lead-nurturing strategy.

• Choose your nurturing channels. Options include SEO, social media, webinars, face-to-face events, podcasting, and retargeting ads. At Belkins, we use a mix. 
• Map your customer journey. Define key stages (e.g., awareness, consideration, decision, retention) and identify what prospects need at each one. Then, tailor your content accordingly. Today’s buyers expect relevant, stage-specific experiences. Miss that, and you risk losing them.

• Unify customer engagement between marketing and sales. Imagine sales bombarding a prospect with cold calls while marketing is slowly nurturing them with helpful content. It shouldn't happen, but it does. This disconnect gives prospects a bad impression. Avoid this by ensuring teams log all client interactions in your CRM and use it as a single source of truth.

Build a memorable brand

If buyers don’t think of you when they start their journey, your odds of winning them are just 5%. A Bain & Google survey shows why: 80–90% of buyers already have a vendor shortlist before doing any research, and 90% pick from that initial list.

Now add this: an analysis of 2.5M sales calls found 40–60% of B2B buying journeys end with no decision at all.

See the problem?

• Roughly 40% of deals never close.
• About 55% of deals (i.e., 90% of the 60% that move forward) go to vendors already on the buyer’s radar.
• That leaves just 5% for everyone else, split among the other vendors discovered during the research phase.

Yet many B2B leaders still treat brand as an afterthought, chasing short-term revenue while deprioritizing brand awareness. We do the opposite at Belkins by:

• Publishing remarkable content. As John Bonini says, a content brand earns a loyal audience before they are ready to buy. That’s the bar for our blogs, webinars, podcasts, and YouTube channel. 
• Fostering founder brands. Our leaders — Michael, Vladyslav, and Brian — share insights via events, newsletters, and social media. Some of our fastest deals come from prospects who first engaged with their content.
• Nurturing employees’ brands. AEs host webinars and feature in blog posts they share on LinkedIn, boosting both their profile and Belkins’.
• Getting sales to build relationships early. Awareness isn’t just marketing’s job. Sales gets proactive by connecting with target accounts on LinkedIn, engaging with posts, and sharing expertise long before asking for business.

Continuously optimize your sales and lead generation processes

The job is never done. Even after years since Belkins launched, we’re still uncovering ways to make our sales lead generation engine more efficient. Uncovering these opportunities is one goal of our monthly sales and marketing syncs. 

Take our ICP, for example. A recent analysis of closed-lost deals and churned clients revealed a pattern: accounts with fewer than 10 employees either didn’t convert or churned within three months. As a result, we refined our lead qualification criteria to filter out these businesses.

We apply the same mindset when working with our clients. Markets evolve, and ICP data can become outdated. That’s why we treat the ICP as a living document. We track key data such as engagement rates, replies, clicks, answered calls, and conversion rates across the funnel to ensure the ICP remains accurate and effective.

4 strategic outbound prospecting channels for direct SQLs

If you need to hit your SQL quota this quarter, you can get proactive with outbound prospecting.

But here’s the catch: no single channel wins alone. Average cold email reply rates dropped from 6.8% in 2023 to 5.8% in 2024, based on our analysis of 16.5 million cold emails. Cold calling without context? Expect to get ditched. And social selling? Try hitting your quota on LinkedIn posts alone. We’ll wait.

The most effective outbound strategy isn’t cold email, cold calls, LinkedIn outreach, or social selling — it’s a combination of all of them. 

After extensive testing, we developed the omnichannel approach we use today. Since adopting it, our clients have upwards of 200% pipeline growth, 25% higher close rates, 20% lower CAC, and 25% shorter sales cycles. That said, below are the four outbound strategies we recommend.

1. Cold emailing

Cold email remains a core lead generation tactic. If low response rates bother you, consider this recent remark from Cognism CEO James Isilay:

The implication? Though prospects’ inboxes have never been more crowded, you can still break through with personalized and relevant messages.

Personalization transcends surface-level tactics like using the recipient’s first name in the subject line, referencing the college they attended, or commenting on something else from their personal life. True personalization is about context — showing you understand their goals and challenges and positioning your offer as a solution.

Here’s an example of a personalized cold email that got an 80% open rate and a 30% reply rate for one of our clients.

This cold email worked for several reasons:

• We personalized the subject line
• There's no fake personalization in the first line
• We sent a brief and personalized message
• The email provided value (it was during Covid, so the offer was timely)
• The email showed the prospect needed minimal input (“a 30-minute drive from your office”)
• The call to action wasn’t pushy

Sending cold emails with these elements will make you win more leads fast. But make sure to prioritize the quality of the emails over the quantity.

When sending cold emails, we recommend a sequence of three to five emails and a follow up once in every two or three working days. If prospects say “no” or don’t respond after exhausting the sequence, put them on a do-not-contact list so they don’t mark your emails as spam.

💡 Pro tip. Avoid sending cold emails on weekends. Unless you're emailing B2B executives, weekends are the worst times for sending emails. Plus, warm your email before doing cold outreach so your message doesn’t land in spam folders.

2. Cold calling

Cold calling isn’t easy — it’s intrusive, can be robotic, and has a high chance of generating rejections. So, for a long time, many reps avoided cold calling. Here’s the thing, though: whether you dislike cold calling or not, it works!

According to Michael Maximoff, cold calls have made a comeback in the last 2 years. Michael believes one reason is that it introduces a human touch that's absent with automated email and LinkedIn outreaches.

We tailor our calling strategy based on the client’s target market. If your TAM is in a traditional, non-digital industry — think construction, manufacturing, or logistics — cold calling often works best as a more direct contact channel. But say your audience is in a digital sector, like marketing agencies or SaaS; in that case, intent-based calling will deliver stronger results because the outreach will be timed to real buying signals.

At Belkins, we take an intent-based approach to cold calling. So instead of calling random MQLs, we only contact prospects who show interest by engaging with our clients’ business. This intent signal provides the context for framing the call and brings you up to 30% more appointments. For some clients, especially in traditional industries, we do stand-alone cold calling as a key touchpoint in their omnichannel strategy.

JC Pollard agrees on the importance of context when making cold calls.

Swagger, conviction, research, and asking for permission are not the only things that matter. Sales teams can also lean into humor to generate leads. This will make calls less robotic and more personalized. 

For instance, if you’re making calls on Friday, you can use this opener: “Hey (first name), this is (your name) with (your company). I know the last thing you want to be doing on lovely Friday is taking a cold call from some pesky SDR at (your company), but can I briefly explain why I’m bugging you?”

3. Social selling

Social selling means using your own social media account, as well as those of your company and employees, to promote your company and attract organic leads on platforms like LinkedIn.

One company that has experienced the benefits of social selling is Disability Solutions — a mission-driven hiring platform supporting inclusive talent placement.

When Disability Solutions first contacted Belkins, we noticed three core issues:

• A pipeline bereft of new business 
• Limited brand awareness and digital presence
• No functioning founder brand, as the executive director had a half-empty LinkedIn profile and minimal content

First, we put the HubSpot CRM of Disability Solutions in order for effective automation and tracking. Afterwards, we implemented a three-pillar omnichannel strategy: LinkedIn + content + outreach.

What happened just after three months:

• Pipeline growth soared by 450%
• Targeted outreach drove 17 confirmed appointments, surpassing the goal of 15
• Several posts of the executive director triggered active discussions and had up to 100+ reposts 
• 19,500 and 15,000+ views on the top 2 viral posts
• Connection acceptance and reply rates exceeded 70%
• The director's LinkedIn social selling index jumped from 51 to 62 (top 3% of industry)

These outcomes were driven by our focus on the founder’s brand. Doing this company-wide will generate even more results. To use social selling in your organization, consider incentivizing your team and making the program official. Set ground rules, outline the program’s goals, and state what your team and the company stand to gain. 

Here are some tips for launching a social selling campaign that creates trust and generates SQLs:

• Have a strong point of view
• Occasionally share reviews from happy customers
• Give your team leeway to get creative on LinkedIn
• Ask team members to engage with the posts of their peers
• Have a content bank that contains ideas about what to post
• Encourage your founder to become the face of your company on LinkedIn 

4. LinkedIn outreach

With almost a billion users, LinkedIn remains the primary channel for sales and marketing to generate B2B leads. The challenge is figuring out how to build connections, since LinkedIn has capped its connection requests to 100 per week.

One workaround is to use a mobile connector. While the desktop version enforces a hard cap, the mobile app still lets you send more connection requests. Tools like Expandi’s Mobile Connector let you mimic mobile behavior from your computer, so you can extend your outreach without needing to fumble through a phone screen. That said, below are three tips for improving your LinkedIn outreach results.

• Target prospects who engage with your content. Engagement from your ICP in the form of likes or comments signals intent. Capitalize on it by scraping these profiles and sending tailored connection requests.
• Warm up before connecting. Before connecting, regularly engage with your prospects by liking and commenting strategically on their posts. You can also endorse their top skills. Such engagement with prospects builds familiarity and increases the likelihood they’ll accept your connection request. This approach helped Michael achieve a 40% connection rate.
• Use personalized videos to boost reply rates. Videos add a human touch to LinkedIn outreach. According to Ilya Azovtsev, LinkedIn outreach expert and Co-founder of Growsy, a personalized video in your follow-up sequence boosts your reply rate by 2.3 times on average.

With tools like Sendspark and Response.ai, you can record videos once and use AI to auto-personalize the video for different recipients.

Generate quality sales leads faster with Belkins

Our SQL generation framework, including outbound prospecting methods, works for businesses of all sizes. But there’s only so much you can do if you have a small team or lack the resources to execute what you’ve read. This is where the Belkins team and our sales development service can help.

With our tested framework, we’ve delivered leads for over 1,000 companies, and the evidence that it works is abundant.

So if you’re looking to outsource your lead generation and get the most SQLs, consider a proven sales outsourcing agency like Belkins. Contact us today to start building a quality pipeline.