A company emailed me recently with what was actually a tidy pitch. “Would qualified conversations with professional services firms, where you only pay once they are completed, be worth a look?” I replied, “not even if they were free.”
When I started Outsold seven years ago, everyone told me I was the best lead generator in the country and should start a lead generation agency. Maybe that’s exactly why I steered away from that low quality front end of sales and toward the actual expertise of closing deals instead.
Lead gen is a dead industry walking
The overarching reason is simple. An SEO agency will recommend SEO. An advertising agency will recommend advertising. Every agency sells you the thing it sells, not the thing your business actually needs. What works for one company, in one industry, produces completely different results for a close competitor doing the exact same thing.
Sales has always had, and always will have, some overlooked truths.
- Sales is a science that’s constantly evolving. Results tested even a few months ago can produce a different outcome today.
- As people get exposed to a lead generation tactic, they get more educated about it and build a resistance to it, so results decline the more a tactic gets used.
- AI is ramping these techniques up to ten.
- The longer you run a campaign, the harder it gets to keep stealing market share with it.
Everyone still talks about filling the funnel. The truth is the funnel is leaking faster than anyone wants to admit, and the leak is getting wider because of how buyers themselves are changing. Gartner’s most recent sales research found that 67% of B2B buyers now prefer a rep free experience for at least part of their purchase. Buyers aren’t just getting harder to reach through the old channels, building resistance and intolerance they’re actively choosing not to engage with them in the first place. When was the last email or Linkedin message for lead generation you actually read?
The core lead generation strategies, and why they’re drying up
These are for B2B sales specifically, not B2C, which is more of a marketing function and I’ll leave that to the marketing people.
Content marketing and lead magnets. Everyone is drowning in information. One more ebook or checklist behind a form doesn’t stand out, it just adds to the pile nobody opens.
SEO. Increasingly pay to play. The algorithm hides real organic results to force you into ads, and what ranked well two years ago can disappear overnight on the next update.
Pay per click. Often vanity clicks. You can watch the spend go up without a single conversation to show for it.
Telemarketing. Google now blocks a lot of outbound calls before they even connect. Businesses have fewer secretaries or gatekeepers who pick up, and most purchased lead lists go to voicemail or disconnected numbers.
Traditional advertising. Too expensive, and audiences are too fractured across channels to reach reliably.
Social media ads. Rising costs, declining reach, and you’re competing with every other business trying the same tactic in the same feed.
Influencers. Fine for products. Almost useless for complex B2B services where the buying decision involves multiple stakeholders and a real evaluation process.
Email. Spam filters and AI inboxing bury the vast majority of cold outreach before a human ever sees it. Research from Barracuda, Columbia University and the University of Chicago found that by April 2025, 51 percent of all spam emails were AI generated, a figure that’s been climbing steadily since ChatGPT launched. Cold email is cheap and low effort to send, which is exactly why inboxes are full of it and why people have learned to ignore it. As the technology to improve and go wider with AI email, the technology to identify it and block it keeps pace.
SMS. Highly personal, which cuts both ways. It now reeks of fraud to most recipients before they’ve even read the message.
Snail mail, brochures, mail outs. Nobody checks their letterbox anymore.
Account based marketing. Works better than most on this list because it’s targeted, but it still needs a real human quality sales doing the follow up and the selling behind it. On its own it’s just a more expensive research layer bolted onto the same cold approach.
Events and conferences. You pay for the booth, scan a few hundred badges, and most of those contacts never answer a follow up call. The value was never really the leads, it was being in the room when the right person had already decided to buy.
LinkedIn organic posting and social selling. A few years ago, consistent posting genuinely built pipeline. Now the algorithm throttles organic reach unless you pay, and inboxes are as full of unsolicited connection requests and pitch messages as email ever was.
More leads almost always costs you more, not less
This is the argument most people miss entirely. More leads, especially low quality ones, cost you far more than the dollar cost, even when they’re free I don’t want your leads in my pipe. It crushes team morale, wastes huge amounts of time on unqualified, disinterested, half arsed prospects, and increases sales workload hugely. That drives up your cost of acquisition and makes it harder to actually make a sale, not easier. It’s like wading through a knee deep sewer.
Picture this true story, hitting the phones a hundred times in a day and getting three people that answer. One’s a janitor, one’s a receptionist, one’s a mystery shopper. That’s not sales activity, that’s like concentration camp forced Labour. I’d rather be flogged with a whip. It’s a detraction from sales effort. Every one of those calls ate time, energy and smashed your team morale, and produced nothing. Then my sales team gets fired for not producing results.
I’d far rather a team spend the whole day finding five good leads and having four good conversations with a highly qualified decision maker who has need, has interest, and has budget, than run through a hundred vanity calls. We once had a day where the team made eight calls and walked away with two $100K contracts. Eight calls, two contracts. That’s the kind of ratio that should make every “more leads” pitch look ridiculous by comparison.
Even when lead generation is free, most of it still fails a basic profit exceeds cost test the moment you account for the sales hours burned chasing it. That’s the part nobody runs the numbers on. It’s also why salespeople on the floor laugh when marketing proudly announces another list of leads, because everyone who’s actually picked up the phone knows marketing rarely produces a single genuinely qualified one.
There’s another cost nobody puts a number on either. Your shit leads make me and my client look bad.
What actually still works
It’s hard to beat good old fashioned human to human relationships and high quality sales effort. The fix was never driving down the cost of a lead, and it was never getting more volume of leads out of a channel before that channel dries up. The only things that still move the needle are brand perception, the quality of your leads, and the quality of the human experience you deliver once you’ve got someone’s attention.
That’s the entire bet behind Outsold. Not another channel to flood before it burns out like the rest, a full cycle sales team built around the kind of relationship a buyer still wants, even after they’ve done all their own research without you. Gartner’s own data backs this up in an unexpected way. Even among buyers who prefer to self serve, 69% still go back to a sales rep specifically to validate what they found using AI tools. Buyers are not trying to avoid people altogether, they’re trying to avoid being sold to badly. Give them a reason to come back by making sure the person they come back to is good.
The research behind this
The 67% rep free preference figure, along with the 69% of buyers who return to a sales rep to validate AI generated research, comes from Gartner’s sales research survey published in March 2026.
The 51% figure on AI generated spam email comes from a joint analysis by Barracuda, Columbia University and the University of Chicago, published in 2025, tracking unsolicited email from February 2022 to April 2025.
More of this kind of thinking lives at www.outsold.com.au/blogs.
