Full-funnel B2B lead generation strategy for 2026 and beyond

For years, B2B sales teams have relied on outbound selling — and it worked. But things have changed because modern buyers are more informed, cautious, and in control. 

They research, compare vendors, and show up only when they’re confident in their desired solution.

In fact, it now takes 70+ touchpoints across six channels to earn the trust of modern buyers with valid purchasing intent. This validates the view of Michael Maximoff, our Chief Growth Officer and co-founder: “Simple appointment setting is dead.” 

That doesn’t mean outbound is obsolete; it implies outbound alone can’t sustain growth. 

Beyond outbound sales pitches, buyers expect credibility, which marketing can help build. That’s why the future of lead generation must evolve from a sales-first approach into a marketing-led, sales-driven engine. This blend of inbound credibility and outbound precision forms the backbone of a robust B2B lead generation strategy.

So, how do you build that?

I’ve picked Michael’s brain to show how Belkins implements this framework. Read on to get the inside scoop on the four-step “bottom-up” omnichannel playbook Belkins uses to build lead generation strategies and predictable revenue engines for clients.

Part 1: The foundation — strategy calibration before execution

Before I became a marketer, I was a chemist. And no experiment began without calibration — comparing instruments to a known standard to ensure accuracy and document deviations.

Calibration here means setting the stage for generating desired results by using your market reality as the standard. It also aligns targeting and messaging to ensure campaign efforts don’t falter. 

That’s why our “bottom-up” framework begins not with tactics, but with market validation and ideal customer profile (ICP) refinement — the marketing equivalent of equipment calibration.

Focusing on fundamentals: The three lenses of a winning strategy

Every company’s unique DNA is shaped by its product, deal size, and market maturity. Calibrating your approach means shaping your strategy around these elements, not someone else’s playbook.

At Belkins, we design our clients’ strategies through three lenses. This ensures their go-to-market motion is scalable and aligns with their growth stage.

1. Product/industry lens

We ask: Is your value delivered upfront or over time?

An example is a SaaS company that sells monthly subscriptions. They move fast, have short buying cycles, and deliver measurable value within weeks. But an IT services consultancy delivering multi-month projects plays a different game. They have slower implementation, face complex decision chains, and build trust over time.

2. Average contract value & sales cycle lens

We ask: Are you hunting whales or using a net to fish?

Average contract value (ACV) dictates the pace of a sales motion. If you’re selling enterprise solutions with six-figure deals, expect long sales cycles, multiple decision-makers, and the need for relentless nurturing. Your outreach and content should educate, de-risk, and build confidence.

If you’re mid-market or SMB-focused, agility matters more. You can afford faster cadences, broad outreach, and automation-friendly messaging — because your deal velocity, not deal size, drives growth.

3. Market position lens

We ask: Are you defending a reputation or building one from scratch?

Established players must defend their credibility and reinforce differentiation — their edge lies in consistency and trust. Disruptors, however, must earn legitimacy. They need to educate, challenge conventions, and make a case for why their new way is worth the risk.

Where you stand dictates your brand story: whether you’re reassuring or reimagining, proving or protecting.

Relevancy over personalization: Mastering your ICP and value proposition

Knowing a prospect’s first name or company size is superficial and holds little value. 

Understanding their current priorities, constraints, and decision dynamics is what counts as real relevance. And you get this by mastering your ICP.

Belkins uses Michael’s proprietary approach, called “competency mapping”, to uncover this depth of understanding. It shows your target market, identifies the decision-makers, and shows how they make purchasing decisions.

Here’s the Belkins way of running a competency mapping exercise to help you run yours:

Step 1: Break down your ICP

Narrow your target industries to smaller or specific sub-segments. Then, rank them based on:

• Ease of selling: How accessible and responsive is this segment?
• Strategic fit: How interesting or valuable is it to your business?
• Growth potential: Is the market expanding or stagnating?

Once ranked, focus your efforts on the sub-segments you can handle at a moment.

Step 2: Map the buying committee

In today’s sales environment, buyers decide as a group rather than individually. So, when you map the buying committee, aim for alignment between your message and each persona. 

As Michael puts it,“The golden rule is to speak the language” of the group members. For instance, a CFO won’t care about integrations; a marketing director will. A technical buyer wants performance data; a business leader wants ROI.

Consider having a maximum of five key players on your committee. Michael recommends finding these people from your historical data or by making logical hypotheses about who they are. 

For each role, itemize their:

• Background: Who are they?
• Goals and objectives: What do they desire?
• Challenges: What’s blocking their success?
• Needs: What’s required to achieve their goals and objectives?

Step 3: Understand the full decision process

Knowing who is involved isn’t enough — you must understand how they make decisions and use this insight to craft your messaging. Michael says it’s at this point that most teams fall short. 

They double-check that the “right titles” are on their list but overlook balance — leaving key decision-makers out of the loop. The result? They end up engaging only half of the buying committee, which might cause deals to stall midway.

Competency mapping closes that gap. It ensures your strategy isn’t just about who you can reach, but who you must convince — and that every outreach or nurture sequence includes the top-priority personas within each target account.

So here’s who to think about:

1. Point of contact (POC): The primary person you engage
2. End user: Uses the product or service
3. Approver: Owns the budget or final signature
4. Initiator: Recognize a problem and starts the buying process
5. Buyer: Has the authority to select vendors and negotiate terms
6. Gatekeeper: Controls information flow
7. Influencer: Shapes internal opinions and provides requirements or procurement information

The most critical asset: Building a high-quality list

In Michael’s words, “A good list equals 50% of your success.”

Yours has to be accurate, irrespective of its source, whether that source is Apollo, ZoomInfo, or any outsourced lead generation provider. It should include verified contacts, align with your ICP, and reflect the entire buying committee.

• Verified: Every contact is validated — no bounces or outdated titles. You can’t personalize effectively and achieve maximum deliverability if your data is wrong.
• ICP-aligned: Each account and contact matches your ideal customer profile — the industries, company sizes, and roles most likely to convert.
• Reflects buying committee: An excellent list maps all key personas — decision-makers, influencers, and end users — ensuring your outreach reaches every stakeholder who matters.

Most teams cut corners here because it’s tedious work. They stop after gathering a sufficient number of names and settle for lists that are “good enough”. 

To get a good lead list, Michael recommends using Clay, ChatGPT, AI, manual validation, or other methods to validate contacts. This is hard, but it’s the one step that guarantees your ICP will read your message.

Part 2: The Belkins bottom-up playbook — from validation to full-funnel

The traditional funnel has awareness at the top, where there’s more inbound, and conversion at the bottom with more outbound.

This top-to-bottom approach doesn’t work well enough for at least three reasons:

1. It’s detached from how buyers buy.
2. It’s expensive to execute as you try to establish messaging-ICP-market fit.
3. There’s constant waiting and hoping for the funnel to bring in customers.

These issues aren’t helpful in most B2B companies because there’s limited time, budget, and human resources to deliver results. As such, the top-to-bottom approach of blasting ads, publishing content no one reads, and letting SDRs flood inboxes isn’t practical.

As Michael puts it, what we need is a functional hybrid strategy:

Instead of starting with awareness, we start where traction begins — at the bottom — where conversations with prospects fuel validation. This bottom-up approach is efficient for testing the market and building momentum through interconnected, cross-channel initiatives. Then, every insight we learn scales upward into a demand engine that converts.

Here’s how it works with a typical B2B budget.

Step 1: The 60-day foundational sprint (conversion first)

Goal: Validate the core message and ICP with minimal spend.
Channels: LinkedIn (soft engagement), cold email, cold calling, or intent calling.
Stage: Conversion.

First, create a competency map and have an accurate list. Afterwards, launch a multitouch, 60-day cadence targeting 50 to 100 dream accounts. 

Begin with LinkedIn by combing through connections, doing outreach with follow-ups, and publishing posts. Next, include cold emails and calls to validate your value proposition, gather market feedback, and identify patterns among contacts.

Within two months, you’ll get clarity on your positioning and messaging. You’ll also see the capabilities of your SDRs to avoid spam filters, do LinkedIn automation, and handle the sales process.

Success metrics:

• Engagement rate (keep negative replies under 50%)
• Meeting booked rate (with a 0.5% minimum benchmark)

Step 2: Add value-driven assets (engagement & nurturing)

Goal: Engage prospects who aren’t ready to buy yet and build authority.
Channels: All the ones from the previous step, plus webinars or live events.
Stage: Engagement and activation.

Now you go from validation to authority building. Here, you spark meaningful conversations rather than chase meetings.

First, enrich your existing list to tighten the ICP fit. Verify that contacts still hold their roles and remove irrelevant accounts using AI-assisted validation.

Next, create value-driven assets that educate and position you as a trusted industry voice.

• Webinars or live sessions: Tailor these to your best-performing segments — by industry, decision-maker role, or even an underserved persona. The content should offer fresh insights into real pain points, and it shouldn’t be a sales pitch. Michael recommends inviting a successful client as a guest speaker to improve social proof and relatability.
• Benchmark reports & white papers: Package your insights, industry data, or campaign findings into reports that offer tangible value. These assets extend your engagement window, giving prospects something worth bookmarking, sharing, or responding to.

Once these assets are ready, SDRs can adjust their messaging and personalize outreach for each persona. They can also lead with value when contacting event prospects. How? Provide sneak peeks of expected insights or highlights from your report. 

SDRs can also reengage prospects who went silent with these webinars and reports because they offer value. Another plus: Prospects who ask for a webinar recording or share feedback on your report are showing clear buying intent.

Success metrics:

• Positive replies
• People RSVPs
• Attendance rate
• Report downloads
• New conversations

Step 3: Repackage and amplify (top-of-funnel awareness)

Goal: Build broader brand awareness using validated insights.
Channels: All the ones from the previous step, including blog content and socials.
Stage: Awareness.

By this point, you’ve started generating proper engagement, and it’s time to turn your learnings into scalable awareness.

Start by refining your lead list again, as each step makes your targeting more accurate. Then, repackage your webinars, reports, and conversations into SME-backed bottom-of-the-funnel (BoFu) content: blog posts and LinkedIn carousels that highlight pain points, lessons learned, and your unique perspective.

Take your messaging and use it to create middle-of-the-funnel (MoFu)/BoFu articles relevant to each member of the buying committee. Empower your SDRs to use the content in their nurture sequences. Each article or post should speak to a persona or industry segment, with CTAs like:

• Do you face similar challenges?
• How does this compare to your experience?
• Is this what you’re seeing in your market?
• Would you approach this differently in your team?
• What’s worked (or failed) for you in solving this?

These actions make content a sales enablement asset that reinforces credibility and sparks new conversations.

Success metrics:

• Organic traffic
• Increased social engagement
• Continued conversations
• More inbound interest

Step 4: Scale with full-funnel execution

Goal: Build a nonlinear, chaotically controlled system that surrounds the buyer.
Channels: All the ones from the previous step + paid ads.
Stage: Awareness, activation, engagement, conversion.

Buyers are everywhere. 

And with paid ads, you can reach them with proven assets from the previous steps.

• Boost proven MoFu/BoFu articles on LinkedIn.
• Run demand gen ads promoting your reports or webinars.
• Use Google retargeting to capture traffic that has shown interest.
• Add search ads to capture high-intent prospects exploring your solution.

Each touchpoint reinforces the others — turning every click, view, or reply into part of a continuous buyer experience.

Also, Michael recommends:

• Building personalized landing pages by role or industry to show clear relevance.
• Attending conferences or niche events to connect with key clients face-to-face.
• Making your outbound motion more proactive with strong CTAs — think “Book a demo” or “Join our workshop.”
• Having SDRs double down on calling and targeted LinkedIn outreach, especially to accounts showing buying intent.

The result is a nonlinear, adaptive funnel — one where every channel feeds the others. At this stage, the team analyzes prospect cohorts based on their engagement across all channels and doubles down on what works, creating a chaotic but controlled buyer journey.

Success metrics:

• A predictable pipeline
• Shorter sales cycles
• Clear ROI across channels

Part 3: The modern SDR — the engine of the omnichannel playbook

A key part of Michael’s strategy is the evolution of the SDR/BDR role. He advocates moving this function from sales to marketing. Previously, SDRs were outbound appointment setters. Their metrics were volume, dials, and demos booked.

Today’s reality is that outbound alone is no longer enough. So, SDRs need to become marketing activators. They need to leverage the entire marketing engine — content, webinars, case studies, ads — to build trust and nurture intent over a longer sales cycle. In effect, they become the human bridge between insight and engagement.

Why SDRs belong in marketing

When it takes 70+ touchpoints to earn trust, pure outreach isn’t enough. Buyers expect context, consistency, and education long before they ever speak to sales.

That’s why our SDRs now sit within the marketing function. They don't just prospect — they execute the omnichannel strategy in real time. Every call, comment, and email becomes part of one cohesive buyer journey. Their daily actions transform our strategy into a unified buyer experience.

The new SDR job description

At Belkins, our SDRs wear three hats:

• Data collectors: They capture live market feedback, behavioral trends, and buying signals that refine campaigns and messaging.
• Content distributors: They share insights, reports, and webinars — personalizing every touch to make content actionable.
• Cross-channel activators: They blend LinkedIn, email, and phone outreach into a single, narrative-driven conversation.

Part 4: Building a tech stack around your strategy

A playbook is only as effective as the tools used to run it. Here are the core functions your tech stack needs to support:

• List building and verification: Tools like Apollo, Clay, and ZoomInfo ensure clean, verified, ICP-aligned data.
• Multichannel cadence execution: Orchestrate LinkedIn, email, and calls through platforms like Outreach, Salesloft, Instantly, and Reply.io. The goal isn’t more automation but better orchestration. Combine automation with human touchpoints so every message feels relevant, not robotic. For LinkedIn, Expandi.io automates personalized outreach and engagement while keeping activity authentic and compliant. Tools like Nooks.ai provide cold calling infrastructure and create a virtual sales floor to improve SDR performance.
• CRM and a single source of truth: The CRM is your data command center where all touchpoints integrate on a single platform like HubSpot or Salesforce.
• Intent data and signal collection: Speed matters. Tools like Bombora, Clay, and Clearbit surface intent signals early — from content engagement to tech stack changes — allowing SDRs to act fast. These signals fuel priority-based outreach, making every call or email more timely and contextual.
• Analytics and feedback loops: Measurement is vital to strategy. Attribution, conversion tracking, and reporting tools show the channels driving ROI and where to reinvest.

Patience, fundamentals, and the path to predictable growth

One truth we’ve learned after running hundreds of campaigns is that there are no shortcuts.

Predictable revenue growth takes time — 6 to 12 ‌months of building, testing, and refining. But once the system clicks, it compounds. Every insight sharpens your execution. Every cycle builds momentum.

The secret isn’t hacks or luck. It’s the fundamentals.

• Clean data
• Clear messaging
• Consistent nurturing
• Alignment between marketing and sales

These build a fast pathway to predictable growth once you slow down long enough to put together a working system.

That’s what this playbook delivers — a framework that replaces guesswork with repeatability. It turns multiple disjointed tactics into a connected engine that drives measurable results.

Founder-led marketing makes it even stronger. When the founder’s voice leads the story, credibility multiplies, and buyers feel the difference.

This isn’t magic that happens overnight. It’s precision, process, and patience — the foundation of every Belkins success story.