What’s the Best Way to Get B2B Leads in 2025? (Top 3 AI-driven B2B Lead Generation Strategies)

Finding the best way to get B2B leads that actually convert remains the number one challenge for most sales teams and RevOps leaders.

Surprisingly, most companies continue using lead generation and marketing tactics that are woefully outdated. 

Don’t take our word for it. Google and open any article about “how to generate B2B leads” or “best ways to generate B2B sales leads” and see for yourself.  

You’ll most likely find the same recycled list of business growth strategies:

• Cold calling
• Email marketing
• Social media
• Content marketing combined with lead generation forms
• Search engine marketing (SEM) or search engine optimization (SEO)
• Online advertising or paid ads
• Demand generation
• Building landing pages
• Building relationships
• Trade shows
• Referrals

Then they’ll go for even more ways to generate B2B leads and mention things like: 

• Free trials
• Free tools
• Free marketing materials
• Podcasts 
• Webinars
• Etc.

Sure, these tactics have their place. But they are basic; any respectable salesperson or B2B marketer should already know all of these. As well, any respectable marketing or sales department should have most of these in the marketing efforts.

Also, presenting them as a disjointed checklist without strategic integration is precisely why so many companies struggle with lead generation and marketing campaigns. And for you, this means that you only get theoretical knowledge with no practical path forward.

Even worse, attempting to implement all these strategies simultaneously would stretch your team impossibly thin. You’ll have mediocre execution across the board rather than excellence in the areas that matter most.

In this article, we bring you 3 unique ways to approach lead generation, constantly generate interest, get high-quality leads, and ensure a healthy sales process in the modern (AI) world. 

The interesting thing here is that the strategies we’re going to discuss are all connected and work with the same system from identifying potential customers to booking the meeting or closing the deal, so you know, getting the best value. 

Let’s get started. But first, let’s discuss why you need to drop most of the strategies you know (or how you approach them at least).  

Note: Struggling to identify your total addressable market (TAM) and connect with decision-makers in your target market?

We’ll run a completely done-for-you outbound campaign and automate your sales prospecting process to generate a pipeline with your best-fit prospects ready to engage with your sales reps—on autopilot.

Book a 15-minute call now to discuss your unique business needs and discover our flexible packages.

Why traditional B2B lead generation methods are failing

Since OpenAI (ChatGPT) launched in 2022 and triggered the wave of AI lead generation tools we now see as a revolution in the landscape, the rules of B2B lead generation have changed a lot — and it’s now more of a paradigm shift in how companies identify and connect with potential leads.

Forget about all the buzzwords AI product builders and web devs like to throw around. What we mean is that there are now new ways to look at sales data and find sales opportunities, ergo, new and better ways to generate B2B sales leads. 

Even more importantly, at our company (Utmost Agency), we get hired by and talk to a lot of people leading sales and RevOp teams. Most sales and marketing teams we talk to are facing several issues. Here are five of the most concerning ones: 

1. Declining email effectiveness

Email marketing is generating fewer leads year over year. 

Generic cold emails aren’t cutting it. Inboxes become more crowded as anybody can just whip up a cold email with AI and send it to their list of 1000 prospects scraped from Apollo.io. And understandably, spam filters become smarter (AI-Integrated) and more aggressive to keep up.

2. Wasted time on unqualified leads

Sales and marketing teams spend countless hours manually researching and reaching out to prospects who aren’t ready to buy. They have no ways or systems for quickly qualifying leads into their sales pipeline. So, they end up reaching too early or too late and lose.  

3. Disconnected systems

In the attempt to be part of the AI revolution and own the best systems, most companies use multiple tools that don’t communicate with each other. This brings them bitter bills, but more importantly, it creates data silos and inefficient workflows that further hurt their lead generation efforts. 

4. Lack of intent data

Traditional lead gen methods fail to leverage real-time buying signals that indicate when potential buyers are in-market or moving towards needing to buy solutions to generate high-quality leads. 

This might not seem like a big miss, but imagine your competitor owns a system that lets them know when a company fitting your ICP needs your solution before they even hit the market. 

They find them, reach out, and win the deal. Meanwhile, your sales reps are still reliant on the good old cold calls and cold email campaigns. 

5. Manual processes that don’t scale

As businesses grow, manual prospecting becomes increasingly unsustainable. Salespeople spend a crazy amount of time manually moving data across systems or researching and enriching contacts, to name the least. 

That’s simply sales talent being wasted while they could have low-cost systems that take care of these, so they can focus on selling. 

Top 3 best strategies to generate B2B sales leads in 2025

We are going to share three effective lead generation strategies around AI that we use every day. 

We’ll break down exactly how you can implement these strategies yourself, with detailed steps and explanations of the tools you’ll need to actually generate leads.

Strategy 1: Build an outbound automation workflow on autopilot for autopilot lead generation across multiple channels

The traditional approach to outbound sales and lead gen means manually researching prospects, crafting individual messages, and following up through various channels. 

That’s a labor-intensive process that scales poorly and relies heavily on individual sales rep performance.

The approach we’re selling you here is different. 

Simply put, it’s a systematic workflow that combines strategic targeting with operational efficiency using AI outbound sales or lead generation tools like Clay, specialized data sources, Instantly.ai, Periodix, and automation platforms like n8n.

Step 1: Understand your ideal customer profile (ICP) and learn from your existing customers and data points

For us, the foundation of effective outbound lead generation isn’t volume, it’s precision. 

So, before you even think about Apollo.io or any other data tool, we need you to deeply understand what you sell, who you’re selling to, and why they should buy.

Sit down with the owners of your company and ask thought-provoking questions beyond the usual demographic data about the target audience. 

You need to understand why your company created your product or service in the first place. 

• What specific problems were the founders trying to solve? 
• Who are your oldest existing customers, and what do they have in common? 
• How did these customers manage before they found your solution? 
• What job titles typically make the purchasing decisions for your product?

These conversations will give you a much clearer picture of your ICP than simply focusing on company size, industry, and location. You’ll start to understand the essence of your offering and the value it delivers to customers.

Next, look at the data you already have. 

Most companies are sitting on valuable data without even realizing it. Your website visitors, LinkedIn followers, CRM contacts, past leads, and other engagement data can provide excellent starting points for outbound campaigns.

To leverage this data, you’ll need to connect different systems. This is where Clay comes in. 

Clay offers you a powerful data enrichment and workflow automation platform that lets you bring together information from multiple sources. 

It has native integrations with popular CRMs like HubSpot, which means you can easily import your existing contacts for context and information on who you should go after.

The value of doing this groundwork is that it lets you understand which data sources you should focus on and that most of the popular ones out there are not the best for you.

For LinkedIn data, you can use PhantomBuster to extract information from LinkedIn profiles, company pages, and engagement with your posts. 

Most of these tools connect natively with Clay, but if you have data sitting in a custom CRM that doesn’t necessarily connect with Clay, you can use n8n.io to upload your data without the manual work.

The key advantage of starting with people who have already engaged with your business in some way is that your outreach won’t feel completely cold. 

These prospects will be more likely to respond because they have some familiarity with your company. 

The most important factor about this groundwork is that it allows you to learn. If you do it very well, you can clearly tell what companies fit your ICP and know what the point of contact (buyer persona) should look like when you need to reach out. 

Step 2: Find contextually relevant sources based on your specific business and ICP to ensure you’re going after the right people

Your choice of data source needs to be contextual. Apollo.io, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, or Lusha aren’t always the options for you. 

For example, for a client of ours targeting event hosts with exhibitors and sponsors, we specifically used 10times as our data source because it provides comprehensive information on upcoming events across industries, locations, and other relevant criteria.

We then use tools like Instant Data Scraper to extract this information and upload it to Clay for further processing and enrichment.

So, you need to find the best data source for your business based on your target ICP. Here are some good examples we recommend: 

• 10times: best for finding companies hosting events in all industries around the Western world 
• EdSurge: best for scraping EdTech companies
• SifData or Clay: great for tracking job changes and sales trigger events at SaaS companies
• ConstructConnect: for construction projects and contractor databases
• Definitive Healthcare: best for rich profiles on healthcare providers, hospitals, and payers
• Data Axle: excellent for legacy business-to-business sectors like manufacturing and distribution
• StoreLeads: great for data on Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce stores
• Crunchbase: best for startup and venture funding data
• CB Insights: excellent for private company insights like fintech trends and funding
• BuiltWith or Wappalyzer: best for tracking tech stacks on websites 

Some of these are not necessarily data tools but information sources. In this case, we recommend using a tool like the “Instant Data Scraper” Chrome extension to avoid manual work.

If you have excellent case studies with great customers and want to target similar companies, we recommend that you use PandaMatch.io. 

If you’re targeting ICPs in a super niche business vertical, we recommend that you use TryTelescope.io. It’s like ChatGPT, but for finding companies within your ICP. 

At this stage, we recommend talking to an outbound sales and lead generation expert. That’s because there are always better systems out there that are super great but not very popular outside of non-expert conversations.

Note: Struggling to identify your total addressable market (TAM) and connect with decision-makers in your target market?

We’ll run a completely done-for-you outbound campaign and automate your sales prospecting process to generate a pipeline with your best-fit prospects ready to engage with your sales reps—on autopilot.

Book a 15-minute call now to discuss your unique business needs and discover our flexible packages.

Step 3: Enrich your data with contact information

Once you find the perfect data source for your business and scrape a preliminary list of targets, the next step is to enrich this data with contact information. 

Within Clay, you can use integrations with services like LeadMagic.io, FullEnrich, or Findymail to automatically add email addresses, phone numbers, company domains, LinkedIn profiles, and other relevant contact details to your list.

You can use only one source, but our experience has shown that using all three together creates a complementary system and offers more data points. 

Step 4: Filter your lists and clean the data

Now comes a crucial step that many businesses skip: thorough filtering and verification. 

Remember, quality always beats quantity when it comes to B2B leads. Use Clay to verify domains and check against previous contacts and do-not-contact lists. 

You can also integrate tools like BounceBan and DeBounce to ensure email deliverability.

Beyond these basic checks, apply specific filtering criteria based on your ICP and campaign goals. 

Tools do a great job, but before launching campaigns, always ensure you have the best data quality by checking yourself. 

For example, if you’re targeting event hosts, you might need to verify that they’re actually hosting events (not just participating). 

Tools often miss such subtle details, and you need to get them right because they directly impact whether a prospect is likely to need your solution.

Step 5: Build a multi-channel outreach automation system

With your refined prospect list in hand, it’s time to set up automated outreach across multiple channels. This doesn’t mean sending the same generic message to everyone — it means creating personalized, relevant communications at scale, and here’s how.

• Use ChatGPT and/Claude.ai in Clay to create your outreach messages 

The main point here is that you’ll need to develop messaging that resonates with your prospects based on all the prospect data you have sitting in Clay. 

What this means is that you use the pain points of the ICP, the value of your product, and the enrichment data you have sitting in Clay to create your message.

You’ll then get messages personalized to each prospect. Plus, Clay natively integrates with both tools (ChatGPT and Claude.ai), so you can generate the message in a single click. 

We mention both tools, but you should choose based on preference. 

As well, sometimes, we only use the tools to generate bits of messages and not the entire thing, so that we can add some creative touch. 

So, consider what’s the best approach for you. 

• Use Instantly.ai for email and Periodix.net for LinkedIn outreach 

At this point, you’ll have your entire Clay table filled up or enriched and ready to launch your outreach campaign. 

To execute your email campaigns, you can export your data from Clay to Instantly.ai. We do it seamlessly in a few clicks because both tools integrate. 

Instantly allows us to set up sequences of personalized emails with automated follow-ups based on whether recipients open, reply, or take other actions, and report back to your Clay table so we can access everything in real-time from there. 

The tool also provides valuable analytics on open rates, reply rates, and other metrics that help you refine your approach over time.

For LinkedIn outreach, Periodix helps automate connection requests and follow-up messages with the data from our Clay table—same thing as Instantly, except on LinkedIn.

Periodix doesn’t directly integrate with Clay, so you’ll have to use n8n.io to make them communicate and report both ways. 

While there are platforms that handle both email and LinkedIn outreach (like Lemlist), we’ve learned from experience that using separate specialized tools for each channel gives you more flexibility and features for a similar or lower cost.

• Integrate your CRM or spreadsheet for cold calls 

If your sales strategy includes phone calls, you can prepare your team with detailed information from your enriched data. 

That’s basically the step before the automatic message creation. Instead of messages, you can ask the AI to create cold call conversation starters. 

This includes not just contact details, but also conversation starters based on the prospect’s background, role, and company situation. 

Having this context makes calls much more effective and less awkward for both your sales reps and the prospects they’re calling. 

So, when the information is ready and each prospect row is enriched here, you can export it to your CRM (automatically through) for your sales team or into a spreadsheet.

The beauty of this outbound automation strategy is that it creates a consistent flow of outreach without requiring constant manual effort from your team. 

Once the system is set up, it continues working in the background while you focus on other aspects of your business.

Here is what the entire workflow looks like:

Note: Struggling to identify your total addressable market (TAM) and connect with decision-makers in your target market?

We’ll run a completely done-for-you outbound campaign and automate your sales prospecting process to generate a pipeline with your best-fit prospects ready to engage with your sales reps—on autopilot.

Book a 15-minute call now to discuss your unique business needs and discover our flexible packages.

Strategy 2: Set up an automated intent and buying trigger detection with instant outreach

The best part is that the system you already built in Strategy 1 works perfectly here as well. Here is how. FYI, we will be talking from experience. 

Most sales intelligence platforms offer what they call “intent data”, but it’s typically limited to basic tracking of article views, IP address visits on certain websites, etc. 

This surface-level information rarely means actual buying intent or more leads. 

For instance, a VP of Marketing can read an article about email marketing platforms out of general interest, not because they’re actively looking to switch providers.

At Utmost Agency, we’ve developed a better approach that identifies genuine buying signals through real-time monitoring of business dynamics and events that truly indicate purchasing readiness to capture leads.

We combine tools like Clay, PhantomBuster, Apify, and Trigify.io to create automated systems that continuously monitor diverse sources for specific buying signals relevant to your business.

For example, we’ve built systems that:

• Monitor job postings: For ourselves, we automatically scrape LinkedIn for new SDR job postings every morning, identify the hiring manager and department head, and initiate personalized outreach—all without human intervention.
• Track funding announcements: For a cybersecurity client, we monitor new funding rounds in the IT sector, recognizing that capital infusion typically precedes team expansion, which creates an immediate need for enhanced security measures.
• Detect competitor acquisitions: When a competitor gets acquired, their customers often start seeking alternatives due to concerns about service changes or price increases. It creates a perfect opportunity, and we will outreach automatically.
• Identify role changes: When a satisfied customer or previous lead changes companies, they often look to implement familiar solutions in their new environment. Our systems detect these movements and trigger appropriate follow-up.
• Track industry news outlets: For an AI furnishing solutions provider, we monitor real estate development news sources like Multi-Housing News and Chicago Yimby for announcements of new property development projects. We then automatically extract project details, developer information, and contact persons for immediate outreach.

But how? We’re so glad you asked.

First, you need to know what signals matter for your business, then you need a system to monitor them, capture leads and add them to your sales funnel — continuously. 

This is where automation (through PhantomBuster, Apify, Trigify.io, and Clay) becomes essential. No sales team or marketing department can manually track all these signals across hundreds or thousands of target accounts.

Here’s how to build an automated monitoring system:

For job postings, use PhantomBuster to set up daily automated searches on LinkedIn Jobs. You can configure it to look for specific job titles or keywords relevant to your solution. The data gets pulled into Clay automatically.

For funding news, company acquisitions, and other business events, you can use tools like Apify or Trigify to monitor news sources and company press releases. These tools can scrape websites, RSS feeds, and other sources for relevant information.

For tracking people changing jobs, LinkedIn Sales Navigator combined with PhantomBuster can alert you when contacts from your CRM update their profiles with new positions.

To bring all this data together and launch the outreach, the Clay workflow from Strategy 1 is valuable. 

All the tools we’re discussing here integrate with Clay, so you can easily scrape the information you need and upload it seamlessly. 

Next, Clay, with all the integrations from Strategy 1, it will: 

• create a record for each prospect, 
• enrich all the information about each prospect, 
• check them against your ICP, 
• generate cold outreach sequences based on the specific buying signal,
• send them via Instantly or Periodix.
• Instantly or Periodix will then report back to Clay with positive responses
• Clay can then route them to CRM with notifications to your reps or pull them in a spreadsheet with all the engagement history with the prospect to facilitate the sales call. 

So, the specific signals and sources will vary based on your industry and offering. 

But the approach remains the same: identify the events that typically precede buying decisions for your solution, build systems to monitor for these events, and create targeted outreach that references the specific signal.

The key advantage of this approach is not just the identification of opportunities but the speed and consistency of response:

1. The system detects a relevant buying signal
2. It automatically pulls or enriches contact information for decision-makers
3. It generates contextual outreach marketing messages
4. It initiates contact through the right channel
5. It manages follow-up based on response or non-response

This entire marketing automation sequence happens in near real-time, and it ensures you’re the first to engage when a prospect shows genuine buying readiness. Here is what it looks like:

Strategy 3: Set up predictive lead scoring and automated sales handoff

Even companies with strong inbound marketing often struggle with what happens after inbound leads come in. 

Traditional lead qualification typically suffers from several problems:

First, it’s inconsistent. Different team members apply different standards when evaluating leads. Some good prospects will be overlooked while your sales time is wasted on poor fits.

Second, it’s slow. The time between a prospect expressing interest and receiving follow-up from sales is often days rather than minutes, and in B2B sales, timing is key.

Third, there’s often a disconnect between marketing qualification criteria (Marketing-Qualified Leads) and what the sales team considers a qualified lead (Sales-Qualified Leads). It creates friction in the handoff process.

Fourth, qualification is typically binary and leads are either “qualified” or “not qualified”, when in reality, lead quality exists on a spectrum and requires nuanced handling.

Here again, the strategy we recommend, here solves this problem by automating the entire process from initial lead capture through qualification to sales handoff. 

This ensures that your sales team focuses only on promising opportunities, while no potential customer falls through the cracks.

Here again, it all ties back to Clay and the system we built in Strategy 1. 

Start by connecting your lead capture platforms, valuable resources, and lead magnets (whether on your website, landing pages, or other channels) to Clay through direct integration or n8n. 

This ensures that every new lead automatically flows into your central system, Clay.

Next, set up automated enrichment for each lead. Clay will add critical firmographic information like company size, industry, technology stack, funding history, and growth trajectory. 

Because the workflow from Strategy 1 already integrates all relevant tools, it can also pull in contact details like direct phone numbers, email addresses, social media presence, etc.

Once the lead is enriched, the system applies a scoring model based on factors relevant to your business. Consider things like: 

• Company characteristics: Size, industry, location, growth rate, funding status
• Contact attributes: Job title, seniority, department, decision-making authority
• Behavioral signals: Specific pages viewed, content downloaded, webinars attended
• Engagement patterns: Email opens, social media interactions, repeat visits

You can then assign point values to different attributes and behaviors to create a nuanced evaluation of each lead.

Based on the resulting score, your leads will be automatically classified. 

For example, you can mark: 

• high-scoring leads that meet your specific criteria as Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) and route them directly to sales.
• promising leads that need nurturing as Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and push them into the Clay workflow system from Strategy 1 for lead nurturing sequences. 

As for low-scoring leads that don’t fit your ICP, you can simply filter them out.

Next, for SQLs, the system automatically prepares a complete profile with all relevant information and assigns the lead to the appropriate sales rep based on territory, industry expertise, or current workload. 

The sales rep receives an immediate notification with all the context they need to make an informed first contact.

The system can even generate personalized email templates or call scripts based on the specific characteristics and behaviors of each lead, making it easy for your sales reps to quickly pick up close to them.

Hire Utmost Agency to help you implement the best ways to generate B2B leads

What makes these strategies particularly powerful is not just their effectiveness but how they work together to create a comprehensive B2B lead generation ecosystem that help you capture cold leads and turn them into paying customers.

1. Outbound automation ensures consistent proactive outreach to your target audience
2. Intent monitoring identifies time-sensitive opportunities for immediate engagement
3. Lead scoring and handoff automation efficiently process incoming interest

Together, these strategies create multiple complementary pathways to new business opportunities while minimizing manual effort and maximizing consistency.

This integrated approach addresses the fundamental flaws in traditional lead generation:

• Instead of disconnected tactics, you have a unified system
• Instead of general guidelines, you have strategic planning with specific implementation steps
• Instead of stretching resources thin, you leverage automation to maintain focus

At Utmost Agency, we implement them daily for clients across industries with consistent, measurable results.

Our core business mission has always been to build sales automation and lead generation systems that combine strategic targeting with operational efficiency to deliver consistent results, all running on autopilot.

If you’re ready to transform your B2B lead generation approach and implement these strategies in your business, we offer several ways to get started:

1. Done-for-you implementation: We’ll set up and manage these systems for you, delivering qualified leads directly to your sales team
2. System design and training: We’ll design custom workflows for your business and train your team to operate them
3. Strategy consultation: We’ll review your current approach and provide specific recommendations for improvement

Note: Struggling to identify your total addressable market (TAM) and connect with decision-makers in your target market?

We’ll run a completely done-for-you outbound campaign and automate your sales prospecting process to generate a pipeline with your best-fit prospects ready to engage with your sales reps—on autopilot.

Book a 15-minute call now to discuss your unique business needs and discover our flexible packages.