r/LeadGeneration

Hey everyone,
I run a small lead-gen business in the home renovation/trades space – we generate inquiries from homeowners and sell them on to contractors. It’s working reasonably well, and we already have buyers who purchase leads on a regular basis.

What we’re missing is real nationwide coverage on the buyer side. Right now we’re too dependent on a handful of individual partners, and when one of them cancels or drops off, it really hurts. So we’re looking for bigger platforms or marketplaces where you can sell leads at a fair price – ideally with a broad, reliable base of buyers.

Honestly, this doesn’t get talked about much online, even though it’s a pretty central issue for anyone in lead gen.
Has anyone here had good experiences with platforms like that – in the trades space or in other industries?
Any tip is appreciated, even if it’s just one platform that pays fairly and reliably.
Thanks in advance!

I used to look at lead gen mostly as a volume problem.

Not enough replies? Find more people. Pipeline looks thin? Add more leads. Campaign slows down? Build another list.

But the more I’ve worked with outbound, the more I think a bad list at 10x the size is still just a bad list.

Sometimes 50 companies with a clear reason to care outperform thousands that technically match the ICP.

Curious what changed this for other people.

Was there a campaign, client, channel, or specific result that made you stop caring as much about lead volume and focus more on lead quality?

And what do you actually look at now before deciding a lead is worth contacting?

I've spent a few years building and running funnels for lead-gen sites and I'm curious what actually frustrates people day to day? Tracking/attribution, page speed, A/B testing setup, handling drop-off, integrating with your CRM/email tool, etc.? What's the thing you wish just worked better?

Genuinely trying to understand what's broken out there.

I hate cold calls so much. How do you get through them?

I've been seeing signal-based lead gen show up more and more lately and I think the term is starting to get used for almost anything that involves a little more data.

The way I understand it is actually pretty simple, traditional lead gen starts with: who fits our ICP? but signal-based lead gen starts with a different question: which accounts are showing signs that the problem we solve is becoming relevant to them right now?

That difference sounds small but it changes quite a bit about how you build the system. Say your ICP contains 10,000 companies but the traditional approach is to find those companies, pull the relevant contacts, enrich the data and start working through the list.

You might end up with something like: 10,000 accounts -> 50,000 contacts and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. You need an account universe before you can do anything else but the problem is that being a good fit on paper doesn't tell you whether anything is happening at that company right now.

Signal-based prospecting is trying to narrow that down so as a simple example, you might go from: 10,000 accounts -> 500 with relevant recent signals -> 100 worth investigating -> 30 worth contacting but those aren't benchmark numbers, the exact numbers will obviously depend on the business.

The point is the filtering process.

Instead of treating every account that matches your ICP equally, you're looking for evidence that something has changed: maybe a company is hiring for a role related to the problem you solve or maybe they've announced an expansion, launched a new product, changed their technology, raised funding or brought in a new executive.

You can also have signals inside your own CRM or product data that tell you something is changing and any one of these can be pretty weak on its own cause you can't always predict which signal is coming from where.

A company hiring for a particular role doesn't necessarily mean they're buying or someone mentioning a problem on Reddit doesn't necessarily mean they're a buyer. But if the company fits your ICP, they're hiring around the problem, and someone from the company is also publicly discussing that problem?

Now there's a much better reason to investigate the account.

This is where I've found the idea of account-level context much more useful than looking at isolated intent scores so instead of giving a salesperson: "company X has an intent score of 82" you want to give them something closer to: "company X fits the ICP, hired three people in this area recently, changed part of its tech stack last month, and someone on the team has been asking about this problem."

Now the salesperson has something they can actually evaluate.

Scale Intelligence is built around this signal-based GTM layer where it connects fragmented signals across sources and turning them into account-level context that helps teams identify relevant opportunities and prioritize where sales attention should go.

To me, that's the progression:

Lead database -> who exists?
Intent data -> what activity are we seeing?
Signal-based GTM -> what's actually happening around this account, and does it give us a reason to care?

The last question is the one I think matters most cuz the goal is neither to collect a giant pile of signals or build another score but to give sales a much smaller list of accounts where there's an actual reason to pay attention.

We've been using building permit data for lead generation, mostly for remodeling and new construction projects. It's worked pretty well, but keeping up with all the different city and county permit sites is becoming a pain. They all seem to update whenever they feel like it.

For anyone else using permits for leads, how are you keeping track of new ones? Are you checking the sites manually, buying lists somewhere, or using a tool that alerts you when new permits get posted?

I’ve been building a small data/BI consulting business focused on helping companies clean up messy reporting environments, automate manual reporting, improve Power BI/data models, and generally make better use of the data they already have.

The delivery side is the part I know well.

The part I’m still figuring out is consistently getting in front of the right businesses.

For anyone who has built a consulting business, agency, or B2B service company before, what actually worked for you when it came to finding those first few clients?

Cold email? Partnerships? LinkedIn? Local businesses? Referral arrangements? Something else entirely?

I’m especially interested in hearing from people who have experience with B2B lead generation, appointment setting, partnerships, or helping technical founders build a pipeline.

Would love to compare notes. Feel free to DM me if you’ve done something similar or may be interested in sharing your wisdom!

Hey everyone

You know the posts. "Comment GUIDE and I'll send you my framework." "Tag someone who needs this." Ten thousand impressions, four hundred comments.

Everyone thinks it is so annoying. I think comment sections are actually gold leads.

Here's the logic: every person who commented on a post about, say, agency client reporting just told the entire internet three things. They care about this topic right now. They engage in public instead of lurking. And they said something specific you can respond to.

That's a self-selected list of people in your market, timestamped this week, with context attached. For free.

The method:

1. Find the 5 or 6 creators in your niche whose posts reliably farm engagement. Follow them.
2. When a post in your problem space takes off, read every commenter. Skip the emoji replies. Keep the ones who wrote an actual opinion or described a situation.
3. Check their profile fits who you sell to.
4. Reach out referencing the specific thing they wrote. Not the post. Their comment.

I tested this against classic Sales Navigator prospecting over three months: 18% reply rate the classic way, 52% with this method. Same account, same offer.

I got tired of doing step 2 manually, so I built a small tool that grabs commenters from a post. It also watches the creators and keywords for me to automate getting those leads and hands me the commenters with what they said, enrichment and qualification. But the method works with a spreadsheet and 2-3h a day.

The uncomfortable part: the engagement-bait guys are running the biggest lead-gen operation on LinkedIn and giving the results away in their comment sections.

I'm finding myself and others that are just using chatgpt to find a service I want to use.

Example using ChatGPT

1. Who is the best plumber in my local area?

2. Read the reviews on the top 3 plumbers from google maps and give me a summary and your recommendations.

Yes, this is not that prevalent now... but people will use AI to search for business services more and more.

Will the website matter anymore? Does SEO matter anymore? What becomes of marketing?

Hi, I once had a person from Bengladesh who managed to get me an account for cheap, does anyone here do it? DM if needed.

Thanks!

I've started paying a lot less attention to intent scores when looking at B2B accounts.

You can have a company showing an 85/100 intent score and still have absolutely no reason to contact them. The number might tell you that something is happening but it usually doesn't tell you what is happening or whether it's relevant to what you sell.

I'd rather look for actual evidence.

If someone is asking for recommendations, complaining about an existing solution, looking for alternatives, asking how other companies handle a problem, or talking publicly about something they're trying to solve, that's much more interesting to me than their job title or an anonymous intent score.

Then there's what is happening at the company itself, for example: a company starts hiring around a problem, they raise funding, they enter a new market, they launch a product, they change part of their tech stack or a new executive joins.

None of those things automatically means "this company is buying." But these changes can create new problems, new priorities and sometimes new budgets and that's what makes them useful signals.

The timing matters too.

A company can be a perfect ICP for six months and still be a terrible prospect during those six months. Then something changes and suddenly the same company becomes much more interesting.

That's the part I think a lot of intent data misses. The individual signals are rarely enough on their own and it's what happens when you start putting them together. Say a company fits your ICP, is hiring around the problem you solve, someone from the company is discussing that problem on Reddit, and they recently changed a related technology.

I'd want my sales team looking at that account bcuz together they give you a much better reason to pay attention and not just any one of those things proves buying intent. It doesn't.

That's basically the problem signal-based lead generation is trying to solve. Scale Intelligence connects signals from sources like Reddit, LinkedIn and CRM data to build that account-level context instead of making the team work from one isolated intent score.

I'd much rather hand a salesperson this: "this account is interesting bcuz these four things happened recently." than this: "this lead has an 87 intent score." cuz the first one gives you something to work with and for me, high intent is really a combination of evidence, relevance and timing and the score can be useful but I just wouldn't let the score make the decision.

My husband & I run a small moving business (in New England) together. we have a great reputation, most or nearly all of our work is from word of mouth however we need to do some kinda of advertising to get our own leads getting our name out there. We are on angi’s & have great rating. Our google my business page has great rating as well but doesn’t get much attention for some reason. Not sure what happening there. I know there are other companies on that get leads off our reputation We not very tech savvy. We’re not sure how to protect against this or funnel that leads to us and not others. New to Reddit in general. I’m so thankful for any advice.

I have a dataset of all contractor/home service and construction businesses in the US, Puerto Rico and Canada with up to date Google maps info. Interest to anyone?

I’m running a Facebook Ads campaign for a reverse mortgage offer.

On the first day, I spent about $180 and generated 10 conversions. The payout is $32 per conversion, so I earned about $323 in revenue (around $143 profit).

After that first day, performance dropped dramatically. I’m still getting clicks to the offer page, but conversions have almost completely stopped, even though I haven’t made any major changes to the campaign.

I’m trying to understand what could explain such a sharp change.

Was the first day just luck ?

Hi, i run a complete content marketing agency. We do good business— LinkedIn marketing is one of our hero services. We get good leads via word of mouth, but we aren’t able to reach $30-40k months.

I don’t wanna spend on outbound at all. I do use Claude code and Codex, so i can build or advance our digital presence. Current lead source is via my LinkedIn (5-8) per week, and i convert more than 60% of these.

How do I build or what do i do to scale my inbound? I post a lot on Reddit, so that has also helped, but i wanna scale it like to 20-30 a week.

Any suggestions?

We’ve been putting more money into getting traffic the last few months and the numbers look decent but something feels off so we’ll get like 4,000 people on the site in a month maybe 70 fill something out and everyone else is basically gone. We know almost nothing about them some probably bounced in 10 seconds, sure but I doubt all of them did.

I used to just look at form submissions and call those our leads now I don’t know if that makes much sense like someone can spend five minutes reading the pricing page and come back three days later look through a couple case studies and leave without ever giving us an email. Feels kind of weird that we spend so much effort getting that person there and then treat them like they never existed

I've spent most of my career running marketing and communications for complex B2B organizations.

I'm strong on positioning, messaging, narrative, content, and understanding how a business actually makes money. I can sit with a founder or a CEO and diagnose why their pipeline is broken at the strategy level. I'm also decent at using AI to create content and insights at scale that used to require a human with my skillset.

What I am **not** is a demand gen specialist. That's a missing piece of the puzzle that connects everything I do with dollar-based ROI, and it's necessary, I believe, to fill out my current offering.

I've owned demand gen as a function and worked next to people who ran it well, so I'm not at zero. But if you handed me a blank slate and a pipeline number to hit, there are pieces I'd be improvising.

Here's why I think there's a real opening. The companies I know best are complex B2B, mostly SaaS and professional services. Long cycles, technical products, multiple stakeholders, senior buyers, and price points in the high five figures for their own products. Those companies generally are willing to spend on acquisition but won't hand their pipeline to a lead-gen-only shop that can run cold email but can't hold a conversation about their business. I can hold that conversation and, for better or worse, that's my differentiator in this market.

My problem is that I've been on the buying side of agency relationships for a long time and I know exactly what it looks like when someone oversells and underdelivers. I'm not willing to be that person.

I've come close once already. I ran an engagement last year that did exactly what the client asked for and didn't deliver what they actually wanted. It didn't fail on execution. It failed because I took it. They had no clear idea who their best customer was or what offer brought people into their orbit, and they wouldn't give me the access to their own customers I needed to work it out. Ninety days from a standing start was never going to produce revenue under those conditions, and I knew it going in. I took the job anyway because I wanted the case study, and then I ate the scope trying to earn it instead of waving them off like I should have.

I'd rather take longer to get competent than burn credibility with the exact network I'd be selling into.

I'm not pushing anything hard until I'm confident I can produce ROI.

Three questions:

1. Building the skillset. How'd you learn to run this stuff for real? Your own money through channels? Learn as you go on clients? Working under an operator? Certifications or communities that weren't a waste? I'm open to paid courses, but a lot of them look like the real business is making you a customer of their tech, where you carry the risk, and they take a piece of the upside. Tell me which ones are actually worth it.
2. Partnership as the alternative. Maybe the answer isn't "learn all of it." Maybe it's find an operator who's strong exactly where I'm weak, where I bring the relationships, the diagnosis, and the message, and they bring the execution engine. If that's right: where do you actually find that person, and what's a sane structure? Rev share, subcontract, real partnership? What failure modes should I watch for? The one I keep coming back to is that if the operator underperforms, the client blames me, because it's my relationship and my name on it.
3. What important questions did I neglect to ask? What did you not know going in that ended up costing you time, money, credibility, business, etc.?

Also happy to be told I'm wrong about the opportunity or about how I'm approaching it.

For those receiving 60+ inbound leads every week, how are you figuring out which prospects are worth pursuing? How do you separate the serious buyers who are ready to move forward, people who are just researching options, and leads that don’t have the budget or intent to buy

I have talked with a few agency owners who mentioned that a large portion of their booked calls end up being unqualified. Some teams manually review every submission, others rely on HubSpot workflows and lead scoring. Some let the sales team figure it out during the call.

I want to address three questions:

Do you qualify or score leads before they reach your calendar?

What percentage of booked calls typically turn into qualified opportunities?

What tools or processes are you using to filter inbound leads?

I am not trying to promote anything. I am just trying to understand how agencies are solving this problem.

I'm starting out as a solo freelancer providing website development services, with the long-term goal of eventually building an agency.

Since I don't have clients yet, I'm trying to figure out a practical way to generate my first few leads.

My current approach is to find businesses through Google Maps, collect their website, email and social media information, check their website to identify genuine problems or opportunities, and then reach out with a personalized message offering my services.

I'm planning to start with one niche and test the process with a small number of prospects before scaling it.

For people who have experience with freelance or agency client acquisition, is this a good approach to start with, or am I missing something important?

Also, would you focus more on businesses that don't have a website, or businesses that already have a website but clearly need improvements?

If you were starting from zero today, would you use a similar approach or take a completely different route?

I'm mainly looking for honest feedback before I spend too much time building a process around it.

Hi everyone! I’m a virtual assistant who handles lead generation remotely for a roofing company based in Washington State, USA. Since I work remotely, I’m looking for online platforms, communities, or strategies that can be managed virtually.

Over the past several months, we’ve been testing different organic lead generation channels. Nextdoor has been one of our strongest sources of homeowner leads, but recent platform changes have made our previous workflow much more limited. We’ve also tried Facebook, LinkedIn, cold email, and cold calling, but we’re always looking for other effective ways to reach homeowners organically.

If you were responsible for generating qualified homeowner leads online for a roofing company in the US, where would you spend your time?

Are there any platforms, websites, online communities, directories, or strategies that have consistently worked well for you?

I’m mainly looking for methods that can realistically be managed remotely, so I’d really appreciate hearing what’s worked for you. Even if it’s something outside the usual Facebook or Google recommendations, I’d love to learn about it. Thanks in advance! 🙌🏻