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Over half of French decision-makers (51%) have made lead acquisition their top priority for 2024, according to a Sellsy study[i]. This focus is understandable, as lead acquisition directly impacts a company’s commercial performance in a context where cold prospecting is losing momentum.
In this article, we provide a comprehensive guide to lead acquisition: the basic principles, lead acquisition channels, key considerations, best practices to optimize the process, how to calculate the cost per lead (CPL), and the necessary tech stack.
Lead Acquisition: Principle and Importance
Lead acquisition encompasses a set of marketing and sales processes aimed at identifying and attracting prospects who may be interested in the company’s offerings.
This strategy typically involves collecting contact details from these prospects in exchange for a benefit or useful resource, with the goal of engaging with them later to convert them into customers (or to advance them further along the buying journey).
Reminder: what is a lead?
To recap, a lead is a professional (B2B) or individual (B2C) contact who has shown some degree of interest in a product or service offered by the company.
This interest, which integrates the lead into the sales pipeline, is demonstrated through a traceable action (such as downloading a white paper or signing up for a webinar).
The Two Pillars of Lead Acquisition
Lead acquisition relies on two main pillars:
- Lead Generation, most often within an Inbound Marketing framework. This involves feeding the top of the acquisition funnel with new contacts;
- Lead Qualification, which assesses the commercial potential of each lead based on behavioural and/or declarative criteria. In theory, within a lead acquisition strategy, only qualified leads are handed over to the sales team.
Each lead is characterized by usable contact information (name, email, phone), a specific acquisition context (source, channel, marketing campaign, etc.), and a level of qualification. This qualification level can be expressed using a score (Lead Scoring) or a broader category:
- Cold Lead: A contact demonstrating minimal interest.
- Warm Lead: A prospect who has interacted with the company multiple times.
- Marketing-Qualified Lead (MQL): A contact that meets the criteria defined by the marketing team.
- Sales-Qualified Lead (SQL): A prospect that satisfies the qualification criteria established by the sales team.
| 💡 Good to know |
| In a lead acquisition strategy, the value of a lead is assessed according to its probability of conversion into a customer, based on several indicators: its hierarchical level (seniority), its decision-making power, its budget, the urgency of its need and its degree of commitment measured (Lead Scoring). This qualification determines the prioritisation of the sales process. |
What Are the Main Lead Acquisition Channels?
In most companies, lead acquisition strategies rely on multiple channels, forming an omnichannel approach: email marketing, social media, SEA (Search Engine Advertising), SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and more.
1. Email Marketing and Marketing Automation
Despite the over-solicitation of audiences and the saturation of inboxes, email marketing consistently ranks among the top three most profitable lead acquisition channels, with an average ROI of €36 for every €1 invested.
This success can be attributed to several advantages:
- Scalability and Personalization: Email campaigns can reach a large volume of prospects while tailoring messages to their characteristics and behaviours. Since 2023, generative AI has made this channel even more profitable. ;
- Automated Sequences (Marketing Automation): These allow marketers to configure workflows that send the most relevant marketing content at each stage of the acquisition funnel. Examples include:
- Welcome emails for new subscribers, Nurturing campaigns for warm leads, Reactivation emails for inactive contacts, and Winback emails for lost customers.
- Granular Tracking: Email marketing provides detailed engagement metrics, such as open rates, click-through rates, and post-click conversions. These data points feed into lead scoring systems, helping prioritize upcoming sales actions more effectively ;
- A/B Testing: Email campaigns are particularly suited for testing various elements (subject lines, calls to action, send times, contact frequency, etc.), fostering a culture of continuous improvement powered by data. Additionally, the integration of AI bridges gaps in marketers’ data analysis capabilities, further enhancing performance (read more about this here).
| ⚠️ Attention |
| Since February 2024, Google and Yahoo! have tightened their rules on mass emailing, with a new spam reporting threshold set at 0.3%. While this will have little impact on large companies with qualified databases, it will have a particularly strong impact on companies that use aggressive outbound emailing. |
2. Social Selling (LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.)
In the B2B space, LinkedIn dominates the conversation, generating 80% of social media leads. Unsurprisingly, most marketers prioritize Microsoft’s professional network in their lead acquisition strategies, achieving success rates at least twice as high as other social platforms.
LinkedIn’s effectiveness stems from its professional DNA: decision-makers are present and active on the platform, even more so since the pandemic. Its precise targeting capabilities and InMail messages boast response rates up to three times higher than standard emails (averaging 18-25%).
Depending on the industry and target audience, a company’s lead acquisition strategy may also leverage other social platforms, such as Twitter: For identifying buying signals in conversations. Reddit: Popular in the IT sector and among English-speaking audiences. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok: To reach broader or niche audiences with tailored approaches.
3. Digital Advertising (SEA, Display, Social Ads)
Search Engine Advertising (SEA) captures explicit purchase intent, with an average B2B conversion rate of 3.75%. Its success lies in targeting transactional keywords and immediately qualifying prospects through optimized landing pages.
Social Ads are ads displayed on social media platforms. LinkedIn’s dominance in Social Selling extends to paid social channels.
LinkedIn Ads offer ultra-precise B2B targeting based on granular criteria such as job function, company size, industry, relationship level with your audience, growth rates, and even the training undertaken by employees of target companies.
Programmatic Display Ads complement the media mix by reaching prospects on the websites they browse. This channel serves two key objectives :
- Raising awareness among look-alike audiences resembling existing customers.
- Retargeting qualified site visitors.
While the cost per lead (CPL) is higher for Display compared to Search, data refinement allows for progressively improved targeting and ROI.
Real-time bidding (RTB) platforms have made these channels (relatively) accessible to SMEs, with test budgets starting at just a few hundred euros.
4. Content Marketing and SEO
Content and SEO form the backbone of long-term lead acquisition strategies, often within an Inbound Marketing framework.
The goal is to naturally attract (i.e., without paid advertising) qualified prospects by addressing their questions and business challenges through high-value content.
Although conversion rates are generally lower than with SEA (less than 2%), inbound leads tend to be more qualified.
The content/SEO duo offers strong ROI because each piece of content can continue generating leads for months or even years, especially in the case of evergreen content. Blog posts, white papers, case studies, and webinar replays create an interconnected ecosystem of content that engages prospects at various stages of their decision-making process.
Additionally, this content can serve as a valuable resource for sales teams, enriching their pitches and presentations.
Best Practices for Optimizing the Lead Acquisition Process
1. Targeting and Pre-Qualifying Leads
Lead qualification should ideally begin even before the acquisition. For each target persona, define two types of criteria:
- Exclusion Criteria: These immediately eliminate unsuitable leads, such as Incompatible industry sectors., Insufficient company size (typically measured by revenue), Geographical regions not covered, Insufficient budgets. These filters are integrated directly into lead generation forms to prevent the sales pipeline from becoming cluttered with unqualified prospect
- Lead Qualification Criteria: These assess the business potential and maturity of the lead’s project, focusing on aspects like: The context of their need, Project timeline, Available budget, and decision-making process. The more clearly these criteria are defined upfront, the more efficiently the sales team can operate.
| 💡 À savoir |
| La ressource commerciale est à la fois rare et chère, surtout en France. Selon le cabinet de recrutement Michael Page, il manquerait autour de 200 000 commerciaux dans l’Hexagone. Plus les critères de qualification (et d’exclusion) sont précis, plus vous optimisez le coût de votre force commerciale. |
2. Align Marketing and Sales Teams (or “Smarketing”)
Aligning Sales and Marketing remains a persistent challenge in B2B. According to a study by the LinkedIn B2B Institute involving 7,046 companies (including French firms), only 16% of prospects approached by sales teams had prior exposure to marketing efforts.
This misalignment is especially problematic as B2B buyers are 19% more receptive to sales outreach when exposed to marketing messages within the last 30 days.
The issue is twofold: Misaligned targeting: Marketing often targets a different audience than Sales. Lack of coordination: Marketing struggles to synchronize its actions across the sales funnel. Only 5% of the target audience experiences cohesive marketing efforts from the top to the bottom of the funnel. This fragmentation reduces the overall effectiveness of the lead acquisition process.
Alignment between Sales and Marketing is a major undertaking that involves several best practices, but at a minimum:
- A common definition of personas;
- Shared qualification criteria;
- A unified vision of the buyer’s journey.
Sales teams must be able to rely on a complete marketing history for each lead, while Marketing must adjust its strategy based on feedback from Sales teams in the field.
3. Lead Scoring: From Simple Excel Spreadsheets to Automated Dynamic Scoring
For most companies, a few well-chosen criteria tracked in an Excel spreadsheet are enough to prioritize high-value leads. If you handle fewer than 100 leads per month, there’s no need to invest in complex solutions—doing so might hurt your ROI unnecessarily.
However, when the volume of leads exceeds what can be managed manually (a sign you’re doing great work), automated dynamic lead scoring becomes both relevant and economically viable. The goals here are to:
- Automatically identify hot leads and pass them to sales teams as quickly as possible (conversion rates increase with faster lead follow-up) ;
- Nurture warm leads with tailored Marketing Automation sequences to guide them further along the sales funnel;
- Quickly filter out cold leads to avoid clogging the sales pipeline. These leads can later be included in nurturing campaigns.
4. Marketing Automation: Automate Without Dehumanizing
While Marketing Automation tools help industrialize your digital acquisition processes, be cautious not to fall into the trap of full automation… Prospects can easily spot automated messages that lack added value (just as they increasingly recognize generic content written by AI).
Opt for a hybrid approach: automate repetitive tasks (such as sending welcome emails, scheduled follow-ups, and contact record enrichment), but maintain a human touch at key moments of the buyer’s journey. A personalized message from a sales rep at the right time will have more impact than an automated sequence, no matter how sophisticated.
It may sound cliché, but it remains true: automation should free up time for what truly matters—analyzing needs, creating high-value content, personalizing sales pitches, and building a trusted relationship with qualified prospects.
5. Optimizing the Lead Generation Process with Data (Without Drowning in Numbers)
Tracking marketing actions gives you access to a wealth of data about your leads. But be careful: too many metrics can hinder analysis! Focus on the KPIs that directly impact the ROI of your lead acquisition strategy: cost per acquisition by channel, conversion rate at each stage of the funnel, maturation cycle duration, and conversion rate into customers.
These are the data points that will help you:
- Identify the most effective lead acquisition channels;
- Spot bottlenecks in your acquisition funnel;
- Optimize your marketing efforts.
For example, if your LinkedIn leads are more expensive but convert twice as well as those from SEA, it might be time to reassess the allocation of part of your “lead generation” budget.
But keep in mind, that numbers don’t tell the whole story. Qualitative feedback from your sales team about lead quality and direct insights from prospects is essential for refining your acquisition strategy.
How to Calculate the Cost per Lead (CPL)?
The cost per lead (CPL) refers to the marketing investment required to generate a new qualified contact.
| 💡 La formule du coût par lead (CPL) |
| CPL = (Dépenses totales d’acquisition)/(Nombre de leads générés) |
For example, if you invest €10,000 over a quarter (€3,000 in LinkedIn Ads, €4,000 in Google Ads, €2,000 in content marketing, and €1,000 in tools) and generate 200 leads during that period, your average CPL is €50.
To refine the analysis, calculate the CPL granularly by channel:
- LinkedIn : 3 000 € / 40 leads = 75 € per lead ;
- Google Ads : 4 000 € / 120 leads = 33 € per lead ;
- Content/SEO : 3 000 € / 40 leads = 75 € per lead.
The cost of acquiring a lead only makes sense when compared to the conversion rate and average deal size. If your LinkedIn leads convert twice as well as SEA leads, their higher CPL is still profitable. For an average deal size of €20,000 and a conversion rate of 10%, even a CPL of €200 remains viable. Everything is relative!
Different Automated Acquisition Solutions
The ROI of your lead acquisition strategy will largely depend on the relevance of the tools used. There are three main categories of automated acquisition tools.
1. All-in-One Marketing Suites
These tools, such as HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot, cover the entire lead acquisition process: landing pages, forms, automated emails, CRM, and analytics. They are suitable for medium to large-sized companies with a marketing tool budget ranging from €2,500 to €5,000.
2. Specialized Lead Acquisition Tools
These solutions target a specific aspect of lead acquisition, for example, Stripe for conversion forms, Zapier for workflow automation, Hunter.io for lead enrichment, etc. More accessible (ranging from €50 to €200/month), these tools allow startups and SMEs to gradually build their marketing stack based on their needs.
3. Sales Engagement Platforms
Solutions like Apollo, Lemlist, and Reply.io allow for omnichannel prospecting automation: personalized emails, LinkedIn connections, and targeted calls. Typical budget: €100 to €500 per salesperson per month, with a quick ROI for short sales cycles.
[i] https://go.sellsy.com/ressource/les-grandes-tendances-de-la-prospection-pour-2024