More Leads ≠ More Growth

“How do we generate more leads?”

This seems to be the holy grail question when it comes to increasing Marketing performance.

Generating more leads is surprisingly easy:

• Define a “lead” as vaguely as possible (e.g., an email address)
• Gate your web experience everywhere (force users to give up their email at every point of contact)
• Run some kind of lead gen form ads
• Offer incentives (e.g., a competition)
• Buy contact lists
• Steal contact info from data vendors (like 6sense or Apollo)
• Deanonymize users with an IP lookup tool

Boom. You just generated a ton of leads!

You can finally show a graph that goes from the bottom left to the top right corner.
Management will be cheering.
Sales will be dancing.

Or not.

If you think I’m exaggerating — I’m not. Most Swiss B2B companies still run some version of the lead generation playbook I just outlined.

And they pay agencies and freelancers to execute this grand plan.

The results?

• Shitty “leads” Sales doesn’t want
• Sales follow-ups that lead nowhere (“Why are you contacting us?”)
• Tons of marketing budget out the window
• More cynicism from Sales and management toward Marketing

This playbook is exactly how Marketing shoots itself in the foot.
No — actually, make it both feet.

It’s how trust gets eroded and how Marketing teams become the company joke.

All because there’s ONE thing missing from our original question:

“How do we generate more qualified leads?”

That changes everything.

Before we fix the problem, let’s talk about where it came from — that’s up next.