How to fix common issues with lead generation quality
Author
Vera Karimova
Vera is a B2B content expert with 17+ years of experience helping brands drive leads.
Reviewed by
Michael Maximoff
Co-founder of Belkins, serial entrepreneur, and investor with a decade of experience in B2B Sales and Marketing.
Published:2025-04-01
Reading time:12 min
Does your lead generation feel exhausting? It’s not just in your head. The average response rate for cold emails has gone from 7% in 2023 to 5.1% in 2024. In 2025, it is between 1% and 5%. Many tried-and-true outreach tactics no longer deliver results.
At Belkins, we’ve witnessed this change firsthand. We have always been on top of high-quality lead generation via email outreach and LinkedIn networking.
But day by day, the growth felt more like a grind as it became harder to get the planned results from these channels.
A big change was needed.
Want to know what we changed? Read on to learn why traditional outreach is failing and how to fix it.
If you’re struggling with lead generation, and get the #1 pros in the industry to deliver results, guaranteed.
Why did traditional cold outreach stop working like it used to?
Since the end of 2021, lead generation quality and conversions have consistently declined. Traditional outreach started giving up its position for several reasons:
More robust spam filters: Changes in spam policies and bulk-sending organization bans have made reaching people via email notoriously hard.
Limited engagement cycle: The traditional approach cycles through the leads so quickly that it cannot sustain the quality and quantity of leads. Within a year, campaign outcomes drop.
Craving for personalization: Cold email writing went from a mass-messaging game into a sophisticated pursuit of selective buyers with ultimate personalization and precision.
Strategic shift in lead generation: Omnichannel playbook
To solve these issues, we at Belkins developed a new omnichannel lead generation approach — not just to boost engagement but to dramatically improve lead quality. Instead of focusing on volume, omnichannel outreach nurtures prospects across multiple touchpoints, ensuring that only the most engaged and sales-ready leads move through the funnel.
The point of the omnichannel strategy is to build up more touchpoints from awareness to conversion, delivering a consistent and compelling message across multiple aligned channels. This approach extends engagement cycles, allowing prospects to warm up naturally, leading to higher-intent leads and better close rates.
Instead of rushing prospects through a short engagement window, an omnichannel approach allows for prolonged, structured interactions:
More nurtured prospects: Leads have more time to engage, ask questions, and show genuine buying intent before reaching the sales team.
Higher-quality conversations: Engaging prospects across email, LinkedIn, and phone ensures that only serious, well-informed leads move forward.
Better conversion rates: Prospects nurtured across multiple touchpoints are more prepared to make a purchase decision when they reach sales.
Omnichannel turns good results into great: In a recent case study where we helped a startup investment platform drive leads, our initial strategy involved test campaigns with cold emails only. Yet this single-channel outreach was so successful that after 4 months of collaboration, we implemented an omnichannel approach (email, strategic LinkedIn, and intent-based calling campaigns) along with marketing initiatives directed to the same audience.
This strategy brought a double return, boosting the reach and engaging prospects through multiple touchpoints, which increased the chances of positive responses.
How to increase B2B lead quality?
How do you improve the quality of your lead generation? First, understand what you are trying to generate.
The most common issue with lead generation quality stems from a poor lead understanding. Most people consider a lead to be just a person who fits a profile: a random name at a random company that might have some responsibility for where your product would fit. That’s barely a lead.
A lead is someone who has expressed interest in your or similar products.
A qualified lead is someone who has expressed an interest in your product, understands it, has a budget for it, and has a near-term need for it.
Someone who has met those requirements, agreed your product may be a fit, and engaged in discussions is the opportunity.
So, with this in mind, common issues with lead quality from the worst to the most soluble, are:
Issue with leads
What does it mean?
How do you fix it?
They do not need your product.
Though some salespeople pride themselves on selling sand in the desert, you can spend your time better on more-qualified prospects if there is not even a hidden need.
Refine your ideal customer profile (ICP) and analyze the potential markets for your solution. Look into existing case studies to define your value proposition.
They do not have purchasing power.
Tough, yet not hopeless. If you’ve found yourself in this conversation, you can tactfully find out who could be a better contact person for your case.
Rework your target persona, determine the composition of the buying committee, and gather the decision-makers’ contacts. Customize your outreach to address the specific needs of every position.
They have not expressed an interest in your product.
It’s relatively high on our list because these folks are usually at the epicenter of the annoying cold outreach. Tread carefully and do your best to be relevant.
Find out if they have a pain point and if they are in the market for the solution. If yes, proceed to educate them about your product. If not, add them to the nurturing list, provide valuable information, and keep in touch until the need arises.
They do not have a budget for the product.
This kind of lead is a keeper. There might be a budget in 6 months, or the manager can move on to a bigger company.
“Do they have a budget?” must be part of the qualification call. Make sure it’s there. Meanwhile, nurture these leads with a pricing-focused sequence: Send them discounts and special offers, and address budget concerns in content.
They do not have a near-term need for it.
Sometimes they are still growing, and sometimes it’s the beginning of their 2-year sales cycle, but in either case, this is a lead that you watch closely.
Find out more about their buying cycle, set a reminder, and be ready when the moment comes.
They use a competitor.
This is great: They definitely need your product, they just use an alternative — for now.
Follow-up once in 3–4 months to ask if they’re still happy with their provider. If not, this is a perfect cue to chat more about your services.
They do not understand your product.
It will probably take some talking, but this is the most manageable problem to beat.
Roll up your sleeves: Hone the value proposition for their vertical and business goals and educate those leads with the bottom-of-funnel content.
They do not see it as a fit.
Unleash the sales team to find out more.
Dig into why they don’t. If there are simple objections, your sales team can work with them. But if the reason is deeper, e.g., different technology or legal limitations, then it’s an ICP error. Get back to square one and fix it.
How to improve the quality of lead generation processes
Omnichannel or traditional outreach, the key to our effectiveness at Belkins is that we apply strict quality criteria to each step of the lead generation process.
Here are a few tips from our specialists about what to keep an eye on to make the most of your outreach efforts:
1. Quality of the lead generation strategy
Strategic decisions for your lead generation campaign impact the whole picture. You may write the best cold emails in the world, but it will not help if you try to target folks who never open their inboxes.
A thorough strategy starts with defining the ICP through end-to-end analysis: customer analysis, industry analysis, location analysis, and market trends assessment. Your findings will reveal who is likely to respond best to your value proposition. ICPs help you decide:
Touchpoints to use
Value propositions to share
Key messages to use for each role
Knowing your ICP, you then design 2 outreach approaches: one that works best in this industry, and the other with some data-driven experimental tweaks. You test both, examine the results, make conclusions, and then try the next experimental approach.
How often to review your ICP
Goals of review
Weekly
Connect and brainstorm potential new ICPs you can tackle if the current campaign is not performing well. This is your idea-and-testing area.
Monthly
Review the data you’ve collected over the month and evaluate your decisions to move in a certain direction with certain targets. Assess if there are ICP categories that need to be addressed quickly (e.g., industry events, conference attendees, etc.).
Quarterly
Analyze collected insights on buyers and ICPs to identify which segment performs better. Based on those targets, double down on the exact tactics to reach them.
Finding and enriching the correct data with meaningful insights is a resource-draining endeavor. Depending on the depth of your research, you can take several routes here.
Basic route: You have ZoomInfo, Apollo, RocketReach, or Hunter. Then you have LinkedIn Sales Navigator. These tools provide source data like company names, positions, size, location, recent projects, etc. For many companies, this is enough, though we still advise validating any information you get via third-party providers.
Belkins route: Since we usually investigate different custom-tailored data points, we assign the lead research specialists to gather these in a semi-automated, semi-manual fashion. Instead of relying only on third-party tools, we have in-house enrichment and validation software to help our lead research specialists automate tasks.
“We realized that to ensure the highest possible quality for our customers, we cannot replace humans with tools as many agencies do. We’re doing verification and enrichment manually, especially for projects that require a tailored, personalized approach. We are also developing AI agents for our lead research people to utilize for better efficiency instead of replacing them.”
— Michael Maximoff, co-founder of Belkins
📌 Example: One of our client companies measures carbon emissions. So we needed to find prospects who measure their emissions for their sustainability reports. We scraped reports manually off the websites through our tool and then used Perplexity to review the report, get the findings, and then input them in the documents through Zapier.
How do you measure B2B lead quality? The best approach is to base your measurement on a lead scoring system tied to your lead generation channels and qualification criteria.
Lead score distinguishes any profile from a real sales opportunity. Efficient lead scoring defines people who not only fit your ICP but also show genuine interest, understand your product, have a budget for it, and have a near-term need.
Using a scoring system that considers budget, decision-making authority, and engagement level helps you prioritize leads most likely to convert. For example, a lead who checks your website gets 100 points; if they visit the pricing page, it’s 350.
A sound scoring system allows sales teams to focus on highly qualified prospects, increasing productivity and conversion rates while avoiding wasted effort on those who do not meet the criteria or are not ready to buy.
Today’s audiences are overwhelmed with generic cold pitch templates, so you have to make an effort in this area. Personalization is the name of the game today. This is why we often recommend to our clients a slower but more promising approach of targeting fewer accounts with messages that involve 30%–40% of personalized points, addressing their specific industry, seasonality, project, and technologies.
A compelling, personalized message addressing a pain point: “I was browsing through {{Source}} and have found a few frustrated reviews from {{Company}} about {{Platform}} deployment. Are you exploring any alternatives at this time?”
But sounding authentic, relevant, and approachable is only half the battle. You also have to maintain messaging across platforms and, most importantly, consistently deliver your value proposition.
If your chosen approach does not produce the desired results, keep experimenting! The right strategy means you are reaching out to the right people, so getting answers is just a matter of picking the right verbal key to their hearts.
📌 Example: In the lead generation project for a video production company, our team faced challenges aligning messaging templates with the client’s vision.
The referral-based targeting we tried did not yield the desired results. The next experiment was to try a 2-link approach promoting animated content. This pivot significantly increased engagement and response rates.
With further iterative testing and messaging template adjustments, we successfully secured over 70 appointments and nearly $60,000 in deals within the first 3 months.
At Belkins, we like to automate everything: Slack, Fireflies, LinkedIn, PandaDoc, automating lead scoring, scraping company data, and adding AI notetakers — we aim to have flawless data inflow with the less-human touch, then use this data to streamline the process.
Yet the stack of tools and software you use for lead generation can be both a blessing (in streamlining your work) and a setback. Ensure you’re not paying higher fees than necessary for software that takes your team months to master properly.
Lead generation process stage
Must have
Good to have
Prospecting
LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Apollo, ZoomInfo
Ocean.io, Trigify.io
Enrichment
Clay, FullEnrich, BetterContact
Leadfeeder
Outreach
Folderly, Reply, Nooks
Maildoso, Mailchimp
Nurturing opportunities
Lemlist, Expandi
Salesforge
Sales funnel management
HubSpot, Pipedrive
Breakcold, Close, Attio
A poor tech stack can lead to valuable data points slipping through the cracks and costing you sales opportunities. A training workshop and Q&A for your team are must-haves when setting up a new tech ecosystem.
📌 Example: In our CRM migration case for Black Hills AI, the company was stuck with Salesforce. The platform was expensive to maintain; it became cluttered and ineffective — simple updates to records or workflows felt like they took forever. To make things worse, insufficient sync between sales, marketing, and service activities hindered team collaboration.
Belkins helped Black Hills migrate to HubSpot, which was more user-friendly and made more financial sense. The all-in-one solution brought sales, marketing, and service together, saving the company money and improving customer journeys.
Improving lead generation quality starts with clearly understanding the lead you’re after.
Want better leads? Hone your lead generation strategy to determine who you’re after exactly. Then scrape the correct data for personalization, have a system for lead scoring, craft messaging just for this person, and automate it with the right tech stack.
We hope this helps you improve your numbers! If it all sounds like too much hassle, you can always contact Belkins — we’ll be happy to do all that legwork for you.
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Vera is a B2B content expert helping brands drive leads. She is a sought-after author with 17+ years of global experience and bylines in Forbes, Entrepreneur, and FastCo.
Expert
Michael Maximoff
Co-founder and Managing Partner at Belkins
Michael is the Co-founder of Belkins, serial entrepreneur, and investor. With a decade of experience in B2B Sales and Marketing, he has a passion for building world-class teams and implementing efficient processes to drive the success of his ventures and clients.
