6 key lead generation trends that are dominating the B2B industry
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.
Updated:2025-08-10
Reading time:14 min
The two biggest drivers of the new B2B lead generation trends in 2025 are empowering teams with AI tools and ultra-relevant outreach. Let’s see how you can apply them to your business and get the upper hand against skyrocketing lead generation costs and less-prone-to-outreach prospects.
B2B lead generation industry trends in 2025
Here are the 6 biggest trends to shape your lead generation in 2025, according to our experts:
AI for strategy building
Omnichannel as the standard
Account-based marketing at scale
Intent as an actionable strategy
Customer-centric, value-first engagement
Adapting to AI search (GEO)
If your business is using B2B lead generation outsourcing, check if your chosen vendor is following these trends — they will help you stay competitive in the coming years.
Learn below what tactics we at Belkins have been implementing within these trends with proven results, and get some actionable tips from our top experts.
Trend 1. AI for strategy building
Let’s navigate the AI so prevalent in B2B marketing hype and identify where it delivers real, measurable value.
“AI won’t replace deep thinking, insight, or real experience. It just scales what you already have.”
In 2025, the true power of AI in lead generation lies not in automating everything, but in its ability to unlock actionable insights and enable personalization at an unimaginable level.
Use AI to cross-analyze your data
Today, marketing and sales teams can access more data than ever. There are CRM entries, website analytics, performance metrics, sales call transcripts, intent signals, and more. The challenge is not finding information — it’s trying not to drown in it while digging for insights. By the time you’re done combing through 10,000 lead intents, it will be too late to reach out. This is where AI proves indispensable.
Top AI tools for lead generation that Belkins’ experts use:
Bombora
G2
TrustRadius
BetterContact
FullEnrich
6sense
AI algorithms process complex datasets in minutes. This allows B2B teams to uncover deeper insights beyond surface-level analysis and use them in the lead generation strategy.
Score ideal customer profiles (ICPs)
AI can analyze successful deals, lost opportunities, and market trends to identify patterns that define your true best-fit customers and their behavioral and contextual nuances. Sophisticated lead scoring helps your sales representatives target prospects with the highest probability of conversion.
“Knowing the client’s ideal client profile and value proposition, we can store this data and use it to look through the website of each potential lead to score them. AI will recommend whether this is a good fit or not, with an explanation, and then we won’t add those that are a bad fit, we won’t add them to our list.
Before AI, a person was doing this, and obviously, people make mistakes. With AI, it became more precise.”
Michael Maximoff, Co-founder of Belkins
Understand buyer needs and language
By analyzing the voice-of-customer content (transcripts of sales calls, customer support chats, subreddits), AI can identify the precise words prospects use to talk about their pains, goals, and objections.
“The level of detail and insights we’re getting from this allows us to personalize our campaigns with more relevance. The offers are more targeted to their needs and objectives and speak their language.
Next, we use that same foundation to personalize our advertising, LinkedIn posts, articles, emails, scripts, you name it.”
Michael Maximoff, Co-founder of Belkins
Identify market and competitor trends
Our team constantly analyzes AI-generated client outcomes and market feedback summaries to identify overarching trends in our successful strategies and pinpoint examples in the relevant industries and business models.
Michael also adds:
“Creating strategies for clients changed a lot when we enhanced our expert playbooks with AI. Before AI, our manager could only rely on the ideal client profile that the client submitted and the testing. We’d usually spend a couple of months testing and refining the strategy.
Now, with AI, we can design a competency mapping system. It dives deeper into each buying persona on an industry and sub-industry level and gathers intelligence regarding their objectives, pain points, and challenges. Then, it connects that data to the solutions the customer provides.”
In addition, AI can scan public data sources to analyze competitor presence and identify potential weak points (like negative pricing sentiment or feature gaps). These create opportunities for proactive outreach campaigns.
To make the offer relevant, break down bigger market segments into industries and sub-industries, break down one title into multiple titles, create buying committees, and then tailor your offer based on that.
“Relevance is not about the geography or title, but the problems those companies might have. Maybe it’s a similar company size, maybe the fact that CEOs have been in their positions for a couple of years, or maybe it’s a very difficult industry. There are more major commonalities than just geography. You aim to build your value proposition and personalization around these factors.
When you have a genuinely relevant offer, your engagement could be through the roof.”
Michael Maximoff, Co-founder of Belkins
Now, AI has analyzed the data and given you precise customer insights. How can you act on them in a way that resonates with an individual buyer? Hint: It’s not by inserting First_Name or College_Name. Generic “personalized” messaging is dead; buyers expect relevancy for their unique context.
Tailor the messaging
An AI-suggested strategy is the starting point for crafting relevant outreach messages. AI can suggest angles or relevant case studies based on the prospect’s role, industry, or recent activity.
Then, experienced copywriters and SDRs should apply their understanding and “taste” to ensure the message is authentic and effective, avoiding robotic pitfalls.
Michael says:
“Human writers are indispensable because only humans can creatively solve the problems of messaging and market fit, find the silver lining, and get the point that you want to make across.
AI can help repackage or expand on it, but the initial idea, the creative aspect of the campaign, should be done by a person. You can’t program an AI prompt for that.”
Deliver content dynamically
Dynamic content, which shows different offers to different prospects, is a trend in both B2B and B2C. Ultra-customization becomes possible thanks to AI that can fill in websites, landing pages, or ad variations with content adaptations based on the attributes or real-time behavior of the specific visitor.
In reality, it looks like this: John, CEO of Johnson Inc., comes to your website, but instead of a generic landing page, he sees a headline “Hi John — here’s how Johnson Inc. can reach yearly goals by Q4 and beat Competitor Inc. to the LatAm market with our solution”.
You can instantly highlight the most meaningful benefit of your offer to a specific prospect, saving a lot of time and effort.
Trend 2. Omnichannel as the standard
McKinsey reports that B2B customers now engage across an average of 10 channels, up from just 5 in 2016. This makes single- and multichannel strategies insufficient. In 2025, omnichannel lead generation is a new standard for B2B growth.
Recent data shows that companies with strong omnichannel engagement strategies demonstrate an 18.96% engagement rate (compared to 5.4% for single-channel) and see a 9.5% year-over-year increase in annual revenue.
Here are the critical pillars for mastering omnichannel lead generation:
Establish a data and tech ecosystem
Set your CRM system as a central hub with seamless, two-way integration with every tool across your marketing, sales, and customer service departments. From email automation platforms and LinkedIn outreach tools to ad networks and website analytics, everything should mirror here to create a real-time information flow with a 360-degree view of every prospect and customer.
✏️ Belkins’ tip:
- Integrate the top-tier outreach tools (Expandi, Reply, Nooks) with your CRM (in our case, HubSpot).
- Leverage this unified view to track all prospect engagements (connections, responses, website clicks, ad interactions) in real time.
- Trigger engagement-based resequencing (call prospects who connected but didn’t respond; email those who didn’t answer calls) to maximize output from every touchpoint.
Orchestrate multitouchpoint journeys
The first question you ask when crafting a campaign: Where does your target audience spend their time online and offline? The system above helps you find that out, and here’s how you turn it into an omnichannel strategy:
Lay out a detailed map of touchpoints along the buyer journey.
Assign specific channels and content types to each stage.
Develop relevant messages for each stage.
Deliver them via the prospects’ preferred communication methods.
Synchronize all channels.
In synchronized campaigns, each touchpoint reinforces the last, guiding the prospect forward.
For example, a prospect engaging with a content piece might trigger a personalized BDR outreach via LinkedIn, followed by a targeted email sequence, and finally, an intent-based cold call.
💼 Belkins case study: Learn how we used an omnichannel approach in our campaign for a startup investment platform, integrating email, LinkedIn, and calling to increase monthly meetings by 100%, set 346 appointments in 15 months, and achieve a 125% ROI.
Align teams to focus on revenue
Omnichannel dismantles departmental silos. True integration demands that sales, marketing, and delivery teams work as one, pulling in the same direction.
Define this direction by giving customer-facing teams shared KPIs like pipeline value, booked appointments, and new closed revenue — something highly tangible. This fosters accountability and eliminates the “blame game.”
✏️ Belkins’ tip: Consider placing your Business Development Representative (BDR) function under marketing. This provides marketing with immediate feedback on lead quality and ensures BDRs adhere to developed processes, acting as the human bridge that accelerates leads through the funnel.
Trend 3. Account-based marketing with personalization at scale
While traditional marketing sends your message to a broad group of viewers to get some interested clicks, account-based marketing (ABM) narrows your marketers’ and sales departments’ focus to a few highly qualified accounts. Companies that have implemented ABM have seen a lift in average annual contract value of 171%.
Pick marketing-qualified accounts (MQAs)
ABM doesn’t work with one person-based Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL); it has Marketing Qualified Accounts (MQA) instead. Such an account provides the sales team with a complete picture of a sales-ready account, including the full roster of decision-making committee members and insights into group intent and intel.
Get creative with your approach
In ABM, account insights let you devise a creative way to address each potential client. Creativity and relevance are your keys to success.
MQAs give your marketers detailed data on each member of the decision-making team. From there, you can choose different channels to deliver your unique pitch — from emails and personalized ads to mailed gifts and offline events.
For example, Engagio used Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual event, to reach their target companies. They identified marketing directors of attending companies and created bobbleheads of each one.
The marketing directors could pick up their figurines at Engagio’s booth during the event or get them shipped in return for meeting with a rep. The result of this creative idea was 31% of the target accounts taking sales meetings.
Find more examples of creative ABM campaigns here.
Deliver individually-packed value
Even though ABM targets hundreds instead of tens of thousands of leads, each is very high-value.
ABM buyers want to be understood and engaged by experts, not just sold to. Avoid generic and robotized communication in favor of keeping things real, doing your homework, and showing the exact value you can bring to the prospect.
To increase your chances as much as possible, use the high-value approach as follows:
Gather data for each MQA
A list of current decision-makers: their names, positions, and backgrounds.
An explicit confirmation of their need for / usage of your product or a similar one.
Publicly available quotes and statements of their goals relevant to your value proposition (e.g., the company’s projections on sustainable energy practices, if you sell sustainability SaaS).
Create valuable collateral
Research on the biggest players/competitors in the MQA’s niche, broken down into personalized insights (e.g., “Out of 5 top players in your industry, {{yourCompany}} is the only one not allocating any budget for implementing edge computing solutions next year”.)
A customized offer for each separate prospect, mentioning their internal processes and structure. (Involve your CBDO, CTO, etc. to curate this offer.)
Unique pitch send-out that grabs and holds attention. Get your best direct copywriters and designers to make your offer authentic, scannable, readable, and memorable for a particular person. (i.e., instead of naming it “Streamlining logistics and operations for {{companyName}}”, try “An idea on reducing the Q3–Q4 workload for Sarah’s department”.)
Pace the send-out campaigns
Allocate time for analyzing the incoming feedback and tweaking future campaigns accordingly (i.e., if your pitches get little scroll depth, you might re-work the designs or copy).
Ensure your sales team has enough time to cater to the engaged prospects.
Trend 4. Intent as an actionable strategy
What is intent in lead generation? It is a combination of certain signs and behaviors that show a high probability of the company being in an active buying cycle and considering your product.
These signals might be:
Clicks on a social media advertisement
Multiple people from a company visiting your website
Regular and continued visits to your website
Increased time spent on your website
Newsletter subscriber behavior
These can be cross-compared with the lead qualifying data points:
Recent job switch
An employee has been recently promoted to a decision-making role
The company recently got funding
The company is hiring massively
Someone in the company searched for a competitor’s product
By collecting the data on these behaviors and analyzing them with the help of AI, you can target each lead with the most relevant messaging at the right moment in the right place.
You can proactively set up the marketing campaigns for the different combined segments. Whenever the magic combination pops up, the system will push the lead up the list and notify sales reps about the hot opportunity.
Basing your actionable strategy on intent signals turns your funnel from reactive to proactive, pinpointing the relevant leads the very moment they start searching the market for your solution.
Intent combination examples
Regular and continued visits to your website + Recent job switch
This combination means that the person is likely putting together a toolbox for their new scope of work. Your automation can proactively send them an invitation for a demo call and a sweetened deal (compared to the pricing on your website) wrapped in a personalized message that includes their old and new company names.
Clicks on a social media advertisement + Someone in the company searched for a competitor’s product
This is a sign that the company is actively in the market for your solution. This is a good moment to send them an outreach message and propose a way to lighten their search burden by sending over collateral with all the features and a price comparison of your solution vs. those of the top competitors.
Multiple people from the company are visiting your website + The company is hiring massively
This combination may indicate that the company is heavily investing in growth in terms of headcount and gearing up for your kind of service/product. It’s a superb signal combination that calls for increasing outreach and engagement with the decision-making committee members, adding your value proposition and case studies relevant to growing and/or scaling companies.
Trend 5. Customer-centric, value-first engagement
The B2B buying journey is saturated with information. Bombarded by ads, buyers demand genuine value and authentic connections. Only the companies that can demonstrate this from the start engage prospects and turn them into clients.
The easiest way to demonstrate your value to customers is to deepen relationships with current accounts and use their insights to fuel your B2B sales lead generation.
“Building a strong business case for a current client is the fastest way to their referral. Once they see that you are driving results for them, then they are comfortable recommending you to colleagues and partners to solve similar challenges.”
Authentic customer engagement is your best sales tactic and source of actionable intel.
Build a sales-marketing-client feedback loop
An internal synergy between marketing, sales, delivery, and customer success is a core operational principle at Belkins.
“Omnichannel is about aligning. To build omnichannel and to cover the whole user journey, you have to align all three teams: sales, marketing, and delivery.”
This alignment creates a powerful feedback loop that continuously fuels value-driven strategies in three steps:
Sales and SDRs hear prospects’ most pressing questions, common objections, and specific pain points in real-time conversations.
Delivery and accounts teams understand client product usage. They know real-world challenges and tangible results achieved post-sale.
Marketing receives unfiltered insight from the buyer’s perspective and creates emails, articles, case studies, and collateral that directly address real concerns and objections.
Since this value-driven content speaks to the buyer’s reality, it is perceived as relevant and helpful, encouraging prospects to choose your offers.
Sometimes, company leadership sees prospects as if they had buying intent all the time, like a pool of needy buyers, and all they think about is making a sale.
In B2B sales, though, this is a terrible mistake. You need to embrace the prospect’s needs and challenges — not just right now, but six months ago and a year ahead. This mindset turns you from an annoying salesperson into a connection that knows what they’re living through and is always there to give advice or help out.
Start by focusing your outbound on starting conversations instead of pitching sales.
“In terms of relationship-based outreach, I think that the best angle is based on something that your recipient has recently posted, commented on, liked, or published. For example:
“Brian,
I saw your recent article on systematizing your follow-up process. It was compelling, especially creating an open task for every open opportunity so you ensure that nothing slips through the cracks. I have found some challenges with our current process, and I would like to pick your brain if you have a spare 10–15 minutes. Would you mind lending me your ear and expertise to work through it?”
Outreach like this almost always gets me on the phone because I am willing to help people.
I even had one that said:
It started the conversation and eventually got me on a call with him.”
Brian Hicks, VP of Sales at Belkins
Double down on thought leadership content
Thought leadership is a key strategy for offering value to the widest possible pool of prospective customers and preparing the ground for outbound marketing.
Online events effectively generate an audience of qualified prospects and shorten the sales cycle. To add even more value, enhance your leadership channels with collaborations with other opinion leaders in your field.
We have been doing this successfully for years in the Belkins’ podcast:
When creating your thought leadership content, make sure it is up-to-date and created with the new AI-based search rules in mind.
Trend 6. Adapting to AI search
Alongside traditional search engines, AI models like ChatGPT are rapidly becoming primary interfaces for B2B buyers to get quick, synthesized answers to complex questions. Here’s how you can ensure your content gets featured in the AI’s answers.
Do a holistic content strategy
Whether it’s for SEO, GEO, or any other form of search, the basic principles of quality content have not changed. Shallow and repetitive content is bad. Helpful and practical is good. Get these right first for AI to bring you up as an expert in your field and start driving leads.
At Belkins, we started enhancing our content and website 3 years ago, focusing on delivering the right information for the right intent, wrapped in readable formats, and placed on an efficient, fast website.
“We focused our search optimization strategy on the fundamentals:
- Who are our clients?
- Why do they need to care about what we write?
- Do we believe in the things we write? Are they authentic? Are they fresh? Do they have insights?
- Is our website optimized for the best practices in terms of loading speed, disabilities, mobile performance, and slow internet?
- Is it optimized in terms of the UI? How easy is it to use and consume information?
- How easy is it to find information on the website? How are the pages interlinked?
- Who else has mentioned us or referred to us?
A holistic strategy should be simple. Your company does cool things, cares about them, writes about them in depth, provides insights, and educates in a way that is very easy to consume. This is it.”
Michael Maximoff, Co-founder of Beklins
Fast-forward to 2025. We have over 150 leads from the AI channels so far. We did not tweak the content for the AI — we were just consistently, diligently posting high-quality, proprietary-data-based articles.
Creating content that clearly states who you serve and why you’re the best at it and backing it up with proprietary data, research, case studies, and examples, gives AI an understanding of the full business contexts you work in and exactly what pain points you solve.
This helps LLMs bring you up as an answer to context-rich queries from users.
Become the authoritative source
At its core, AI search aims to provide users with the most accurate and trustworthy information available. Just as Google evolved to prioritize content demonstrating expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (EEAT), AI models are similarly trained to pull from credible and reliable sources.
For your B2B content to appear in AI-generated summaries, you must establish your brand as a definitive authority in your niche.
Use proprietary expertise
Showcase the genuine, human-driven knowledge that only your company possesses. This comes from years of experience, unique data sets, and the insights of your experts in the subject matter.
Prove your credibility
Earn quality backlinks from reputable industry sources, get mentions in credible media, and contribute to platforms like Wikipedia, where factual information is highly valued.
Clarify your credentials
Highlight the expertise and experience of your content creators and the professionals behind your brand (note how we feature our team of experts across Belkins’ content).
AI search amplifies authority. If your site is consistently recognized as a go-to source for a topic, AI will likely synthesize information from your content.
Structure content for AI
Think of writing less like something done for a search engine crawler focused on keywords and more like a way of organizing information for students who need key facts presented clearly.
Focus on direct answers
Your content should directly and succinctly answer the specific questions your target audience is asking. Avoid jargon or lengthy introductions before getting to the point.
Utilize structured formats
Use formats that are easy for AI to parse and extract data from:
Clearly defined FAQs with concise answers
Bulleted or numbered lists for steps, tips, or features
Tables for comparisons, data, or pricing
Headings and subheadings that accurately reflect the content of each section
Maintain relevance
Ensure your content digs deep into specific long-tail queries. AI is less likely to select generic overviews than precise information on a narrow topic.
Takeaway
To sum it up, for trend-aware B2B lead generation efforts, you want to equip your team with the AI tools they need to speed up the strategizing work; implement omnichannel campaigns, tying up all analytics into one CRM hub; focus on customer intent, tracking the signals and proactively building automated outreach sequences; and adapt to AI search with holistic, thorough, context-oriented content strategies.
If this sounds like a logistical nightmare, but you’d still like to add 100–400+ qualified appointments in a year to your pipeline and close 25% more deals with your dream accounts, just .
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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.
