Lead Generation in 2025: How Technology, AI, and Teams Need to Come Together

Lead generation over the years has been the middle child in your go-to-market strategy. It's not really been the focus, and it often sits silently there, not being engaged with the way it should. Now, with the advent of tech, AI, and this will be the critical tool you use to fill the top of the funnel, it will come into its own. In this article, I'm going to lay out the following:

1. Address the existing issues with lead generation
2. Layout what "good" looks like as a basic framework in 2025
3. Show how tech is evolving (and is helping at the moment)

This article, though, comes back to facts and a working model that we use and work with our clients on. It's not glamorising AI and technology, which is fashionable at the moment. It is, though, bringing AI in when it's needed and when it works.

Remember lead generation is about you getting out there. Ultimately, you can have the best, or one of the best, products in the market, but if people don't know you exist, then they cannot buy from you. It doesn't matter if you run a small business with five people or a multinational; the go-to-market strategy is the same. If you are not front of mind with the market, you will at some point start to go backwards to the company that is.

There are three core parts to lead generation, and they are and should be held together by Marketing, not Sales. The reason I say this is that Sales will not execute consistently the way Marketing will. They will not track data, and they will not follow up. That's the reality that we all know and hate, but it's the reality. The reason for this is that Sales sees themselves and their managers as salespeople, not lead generators. This manifests itself in none or very little lead generation happening. Currently most rely on inbound to hit their quotas.

It's fixable, easily and without, as Darth Vader would say, "disturbing the Force," which reminds me of my favourite joke. Darth Vader turns to Luke Skywalker in a lightsaber fight and says, "Luke, I know what you're getting for Christmas." Luke stops mid-swing and says, "What? How do you know?" Darth Vader scowls and says, "I felt your presents." Christmas coming, so thought worth getting it out there. Mmmmmm.?

Anyway, back to serious things. If Marketing owns lead generation as a process, all the way through to the completion of the first meeting, then all will end well. The following breaks down a typical go to market model, and who should be doing what, and why.

There are three parts to a go to market mix:

1. Branding
2. Marketing
3. Outbound lead generation

Branding

Branding is about who you are and how you are perceived by the market. This includes your logo, your website, your messaging, and your overall presence. It's important to have a strong brand that resonates with your target audience.

Marketing

Marketing is about getting your message out there. This can be done through a variety of channels, such as advertising, public relations, content marketing, and social media. It's important to have a well-rounded marketing strategy that reaches your target audience.

Outbound Lead Generation

Outbound lead generation is about proactively reaching out to potential customers. This can be done through a variety of methods, such as cold calling, email marketing, and LinkedIn outreach, but usually its done by people, physically to people. It's important to have a targeted outbound lead generation strategy that focuses on the right prospects.

I want to now focus on outbound because that's the focus of this post, but bear in mind that outbound, marketing, and branding are actually one thing, and one without the other severely diminishes output.

Let's talk about outbound. For those of you who are not sure of the difference, outbound lead generation is, as the name says, an outbound thing. You reach out and touch someone, interacting, stimulating some sort of action that results in a conversation, which, if nurtured well, will then turn into, ideally, a meeting. This should be sales-led, founder-led, team-led interactions in a lead generation strategy.

Lead generation is not being done well because it's traditionally sales-led. For example, you have a stand at an event; the salespeople don't prep, they are not super effective at the event, and they don't follow up within 24 hours on contacts gained. This is how lead generation as a whole works in most companies. This needs to change, and that is what this article is about. How do we build an effective lead generation model, company-wide, where Sales, Marketing, and Branding come together?

I just want to put into context what falls under outbound lead generation. This is a list of some, not all, outbound lead generation methods or critical parts that need to be up and running. There is no order to them, but take a bit of time, and then review, as a whole list, what you should be doing well. For 1000Step the second list, which I have tagged at the bottom, you can see what we are doing and whats working and also what we are not doing.?

1. LinkedIn database building
2. LinkedIn initial messaging
3. LinkedIn ongoing nurture
4. Networking events
5. Partner management
6. Thought leadership
7. Webinars
8. Email campaigns
9. Centers of influence
10. Ongoing nurture of contacts
11. Lead to prospect to appointment
12. Mapping and managing of databases
13. Personalized communications with prospects
14. Breakfast meetings
15. Lunch and learns
16. Training courses
17. Cold calling
18. Social media engagement beyond LinkedIn
19. Industry conferences and trade shows
20. Podcast appearances
21. SMS campaigns
22. Community engagement through forums or groups
23. Account-based marketing (ABM) outreach
24. Video messaging (e.g., via Loom)
25. Influencer partnerships

Below is what we do and excel at in our own BD at 1000Steps. The important thing is that we are aware of what we are good at and what we are not good at, email campaigns as an example, what we need to work at, and what we are not doing. Take a look and tag yours. See what you are doing and reflect on it.

[ ] Centre’s of influence

[x] Personalised communications with prospects

[ ] Email campaigns

[ ] Breakfast meetings

[ ] Lunch and learns

[x] Training courses

[ ] Cold calling

[ ] Social media engagement beyond LinkedIn

[ ] Podcast appearances

[ ] SMS campaigns

[ ] Community engagement through forums or group

[x] Video messaging (e.g., via Loom)

[ ] Influencer partnerships

[x] Account-based marketing (ABM) outreac

[x] LinkedIn initial messagin

[x] LinkedIn ongoing nurture

[x] Networking events

[x] Thought leadership

[x] Webinars

[x] Ongoing nurture of contacts

[x] Lead to prospect to appointment

[x] Mapping and managing of databases

[x] Industry conferences and trade shows

[x] LinkedIn database building

[x] 1000Steps list

[x] Partner management

Blimey, eh? It's complex, and there are a lot of moving parts. The person who owns this needs to:

1. Understand the method
2. Be able to build and run the chosen methods
3. Empower the right people to do the right things
4. Track the data
5. Adjust the model and the focus of the model

Who Is Responsible for This?

Actually, in most businesses, big and small, it's not happening in a strategic way. Think about it and try to answer these questions.

1. How well are you nurturing your base outside of emails, with proper nurture and touch points?
2. How well have you defined your base?
3. What is your thought leadership model across all team members on LinkedIn, not just you as a founder or marketer, etc.?
4. Which is being used, that outbound lead generation responsibilities are being done. It's easy: data. Just have a clear set of KPIs that come out in a report. It's a paragraph in a document, from the sales director and marketing, that these are the KPIs, these are what were missed, this is why, and this is what I am doing.

Remember that the top of the funnel defines the pipeline, without it, your pipeline will be ZERO. This is a huge issue. It's worth a 40 to 100 percent increase in revenue over a three-year period if you get it right.

CEOs, board members, investors, you must look at this weekly or, at worst, monthly. Is it working on a scale of 1 to 5? How many leads are coming from where? Which of those are converting to revenue, and why?

Expand and make it bigger and better until you reach max capacity. Finally, you need to keep pushing. When marketing, branding, and outbound work, you will be stunned. This is going to make your business stable, scalable, and revenue much more forecastable. It's a win for Sales and a win for investors. Stability for all because you are getting this right.

A friend of mine had a salesperson in New Zealand. He was working on a huge deal, had closed part of it—300k recurring—and the next bit was 4 million. It was a game-changer. The rep, though, was tough to manage, but this deal was important. The rep would not do BD, was not feeding the pipeline, just working on this deal. Ultimately, they fired him after it became clear the deal was not coming. Interestingly, they got the deal six months later, with a new salesperson, and this rep had not been doing what he said he was in the deal, and the bonus was the new sales person is doing a great job of BD.

Salespeople need to do:

Consistent lead generation

Contact nurture

Pipeline management and sales

Client management and upselling

These are all part of their roles and are equally important. Most companies focus on one. It’s not enough, they are all for SME’s in particular important.

What Tech? Where Does AI Come In?

Not as much as you would think, but it does, for its part, play a critical role in BD, and it will more and more. I'm going to lay out the parts that AI and tech support me with and walk you through them

Database management

Contact nurture

Content creation

Revenue generation

The first thing to state is that tech is not doing it for me; it's enabling me. It's a source of knowledge; I am still working just as hard, but tech is making me exponentially more productive. Let me break down how I use it, the simplicity behind it, and hopefully, you can take some things away.

Database management. I use my CRM and Navigator to manage this. It's not AI, but with a clean database in my CRM and Navigator mirroring this, it's really enough to get this working smoothly. It works well in Salesforce and Dynamics due to the integration, and with HubSpot, using a platform such as Hub-lead, which seems to work amazingly in integrating HubSpot and Navigator. The key, though, is to use Navigator as a live database and your CRM as a lead and contact management tool. Together, they work fantastically.

Contact nurture. Contact nurture is the secret to success in sales. We too often are hyper-transactional and not thinking long term. Nurture is about touch points and relates to content, management of touch points, types of engagements, and many other areas of management. Nurture is about using technology to make sure you do the right thing at the right time.

This sits around having a simple list, managing 12 touch points over time with the contact. You can do this in your CRM; you can easily do this in spreadsheets; you can manage this in lists in Navigator. For me, personally, Navigator is the best, followed by spreadsheets. AI will soon help with this as you move forward. CRMs are still clunky and not making it intuitive and simple enough. AI very quickly will manage this, it’s not quite there yet but we are not far, months not years.?

Content creation. This has been the biggest game-changer for me, personally. I love to write, even as I am doing now. But my first cut is a brain dump that, although well thought through, is written the way I talk, and if you know me, that's fast, and sometimes some would say a bit disjointed. My daughter was complaining about my texts, that they are written the way I talk, and she cannot understand them. So what I do now (and have done with this piece—if you want to see the rough copy, you can just reach out, and I'll share), is write. I don't edit as I go; then I go into ChatGPT and ask it to edit. It does a great job, although often it cuts too much out or changes it too much, and I need to redo it. Once it's done, I then do a final edit. This article took two hours to write, then one hour to edit. So three hours gives me what I hope is a reasonable bit of content.

For videos, I record them, then use Opus Clip to edit. It then cuts out one-minute bites. It transcribes them and gives me the text. I then use ChatGPT to give me an intro using the transcription, do an edit on it, and voilà.

For PDFs, often companies have deep content. I can pull a piece out, give it to the system, and it edits it in a rewrite. Then I give it to a technical person; they edit and fact-check, and then we post.

It's made creating good content (well, I hope it is—you be the judge) a lot easier. I know what I want to say; I have about 20 articles I want to write. I'm not scared anymore to do this and am able to write one good piece a week in three hours. Yes, that's a lot of time, and if I'm busy, then I do one a month, with short posts around this. I'm not fussed on volume; for me, it's about relevance, passion, sharing—that's the key.

Revenue generation. LinkedIn is the key. Its AI is off the charts. It recognises who you are talking to, who you target by who you are connecting with, who you are liking and commenting on, and who you have meetings with if you sync your diary. Over the last three months, 14 out of 16 proposal meetings involved someone who had read a piece of my content in the previous week. If your content is good, relevant, and people engage with it, then you will be in front of them. It's not difficult, and for us, it's not just about me posting; our team has to do it as part of scaling. I don't force them, but for Sales, Marketing, Technical, and Management, really, not using LinkedIn is poor form. It's a business platform for sharing what you do. Why else would you be here?

Well, there you go. This is my view on lead generation in 2025. We need to up our games. It's gotten easier, and there are no excuses. I don't believe in using shortcuts to automate the sending of messages on LinkedIn, etc. There are two reasons: 1. LinkedIn doesn't like it, and 2. People buy from people. Why would I start with a non-person communicating?

If you get your lead generation model working well, where you have good data, where everyone is engaged, they are trained well, they are doing what they do at different levels of competence, your revenue as a salesperson, as a sales director, as a marketing person, as a senior manager, and as an investor will be substantially more over time. Contrast this with not doing it. Well, you are now competing with companies we coach and manage who are doing it. Who's going to win in that battle?