Outbound lead generation lets you target your ideal customers and bring in new valuable leads.
It doesn’t mean outbound is easy; some say it’s expensive, especially when you don’t know how to do it right.
We are about to change that.
This article is your ultimate guide to outbound lead generation, where you will find all the answers to your questions.
The outbound expert also shared the best outbound lead gen strategies to use, as well as the most common mistakes to avoid.
What Is Outbound Lead Generation?
Outbound lead generation is when sales representatives engage prospects who don’t know about your product or service.
It’s a proactive method of getting more potential clients rather than relying on passive inbound leads who show their interest in your business.
Gathering your outbound leads includes methods such as:
→ Cold calling
→ Cold emailing
→ LinkedIn prospecting
Outbound leads are found and added to your sales pipeline with an outreach campaign.
They have been contacted because they fit the criteria of your ICP.
For example, if you’re an accounting software company, your outbound leads will be the accounting managers you’ve discovered from LinkedIn, email finder tool, or other sources.
Outbound leads can then be classified as marketing-qualified leads or sales-qualified leads.
Outbound Lead Generation Is Key To Revenue and Business Growth
Outbound lead generation is crucial to businesses that don’t have many inbound leads or a strong brand presence.
“Companies like Salesforce, HubSpot, Gong, and lempire don’t necessarily do much outbound because people come to them anyway,” Tal Baker-Phillips, the sales leader at lemlist, explained.
“But for companies who don’t have that big of a following, outbound is where they will be able to double, triple, quadruple the revenue they bring.”
But that’s not the only benefit of doing outbound.
The huge part of the outbound lead generation that makes it such a powerful tool is that, as a business, you’ll learn much more than in inbound.
“You learn outbound lead generation by trying different things. You’re able to analyze, you’re able to get statistics, you’re able to use analytics, and you learn more about your company, your ICP,” Tal argues.
In the long run, that significantly impacts your revenue as you use it to your advantage.
As soon as you have more data points from your outbound lead gen efforts, you can grow your revenue exponentially.
9 Best Outbound Lead Generation Strategies in 2025, According to The Expert
Outbound lead generation has changed dramatically in the last few years thanks to the rise of AI, newly emerged sales intelligence platforms, and what leads expect from you.
Hint: more and more personalization.
Nearly 80% of marketers report that consumer expectations for personalized content and engagement have changed dramatically (Evenbound).
In the past, many businesses relied on organic traffic to generate inbound leads.
The smarter your outbound lead generation is, the more valuable leads you get and the more deals you close.
We asked the best in the outbound game to show you how to do so.
Tal Baker-Philips shared 9 most effective outbound lead generation strategies that will boost revenue and drive growth:
1. Use AI to make your emails relevant to your leads.
Tal encourages sales reps to use AI to personalize their outbound emails for different reasons.
First, highly personalized cold emails aren’t flagged as spam and land in your leads’ inboxes.
“If you can get over half of your email adapted by AI, the better. It means that the percentage of your email text that’s changing is high. And it means that ISP Google sees your email as less spammy because you’re writing something different every time.”
Second, AI helps you to make your email relevant.
“AI-powered and highly personalized outbound emails make it much more likely that your lead will engage with you because they are more likely to see it as something that will solve their problem,” Tal argues.
2. Understand your ICP from the inside out.
The most effective outbound tactic, whether you send an email, a LinkedIn message, or a call, is to make your message problem-centric.
To do so, “a sales rep needs to understand their ICP inside out, upside down, back to front,” Tal says and adds that many reps fail to do so.
The more you can talk about someone on their level, what they do, and understand intricately what problems they have, the more likely you’ll be able to speak in a way that lets them see.
Your lead will think, “This person truly knows what I’m talking about,” Tal explained.
And that triples your chances of getting a meeting, a pitch, or a demo, which warms up your outbound lead and brings them very close to converting.
3. Build your credibility with a personal brand.
The number three pro outbound strategy to use as a sales rep is building credibility by getting things done in real life, not just on paper.
“As a sales rep, do a webinar, record yourself, and post it on LinkedIn,” says Tal, adding that it’s crucial to actually do the research and be the most knowledgeable person in your field.
“Otherwise, you’re just talking about it,” he added.
And there’s a reason why. Tal explains: “The sports people who talk about football or the people who talk about basketball are ex-football players and ex-basketball players. Because they’ve built credibility by doing it.”
It’s one thing when you talk about outbound on LinkedIn or in your outreach and another if you’ve actually done it and gone through trial and error.
Trust is a key factor in any outbound lead generation, and credibility helps you to achieve it.
4. Forget your product; focus on how it solves your lead’s problem.
“Most reps focus on benefits, which is save time, save money. But you cannot say that in an email,” Tal argues.
You cannot focus on pain points because if the pain was bad enough, they would have already solved it.
“You can’t focus on your product and its features because no one cares,” Tal explained.
In prospecting, your goal is to link your product to the problem that they’re solving.
To do so, you need to know your ICP better than yourself (we come back to strategy no.2).
5. Segment your outbound campaigns by different personas.
According to Tal, each ideal buyer persona has to have their own campaign because each lead has a different KPI and a different set of problems.
You can’t target all your leads at once, expecting to close a deal.
The truth is, if you target everyone, you target no one.
6. Solve one problem at a time and A/B test every step.
It’s very common for sales reps to make their outreach campaigns too long.
The most effective outbound email campaigns are short.
“It’s best to have just three steps in a campaign. If you have that, you have 30 emails per day in total,” Tal argues.
The goal is to focus solely on one problem at a time and A/B test with three steps in that campaign.
7. Use waterfall enrichment to get the correct lead data.
In outbound lead generation, your campaign success depends largely on the quality of lead data you’ve got.
Why? Because there’s no point in crafting the best outreach email if your lead won’t receive it.
“You’ve got to send your email to deliverable email addresses. A lot of reps fail to do so,” Tal explained.
To make your outbound lead generation campaign a success, you can’t just rely on one lead source.
“You have to have six, seven, eight, or more lead sources, and for that, you need Waterfall Enrichment.”
“You should get roughly 70% to 80% deliverability when you are finding your data,” he explained and added: “I’m not just saying this because this is lemlist’s stats, but because it’s a game-changer.”
With lemlist’s waterfall lead enrichment, you obtain more than 80% valid emails with one click.
8. Find the right trigger to reach out to your leads.
“You have to find leads based on a probable reason they might want to engage with you. So you can’t just scrape leads from LinkedIn and expect them to engage with you,” Tal argues.
Sales reps should be very smart about where they scrape their leads from.
“Instead, find the right trigger. For example, let’s scrape leads that are in companies hiring. Or, scrape leads of people with websites that have two languages or more than four languages or sales reps that are working in six different countries.”
lemlist’s B2B lead database with more than 450M contacts and 63M companies is the best way to find verified leads, connect to your ICP, and build lead lists in seconds.
It’s the most extensive lead database available in the market right now.
9. Use inbox rotation for your outbound campaigns.
One of the most common mistakes sales reps make is not having a warm-up tool like lemwarm in place.
“They send too many emails, so they send more than 30 or 40 per day in total. They don’t warm their emails up, which means they’re not having emails sent to and from them,” Tal said.
As a result, your emails get flagged as spam.
“Inbox rotation is a killer feature nowadays that any sales rep must have.”
Essentially, lemlist’s inbox rotation increases your daily sending volume with multiple email senders per campaign.
You can combine different lemlist accounts as senders into 1 campaign and reach out to 2x, 3x, and 4x more leads without the risk of landing in spam.
14 Most Common Outbound Lead Generation Mistakes To Avoid
The truth is that most sales reps make the same mistakes when generating outbound leads that everyone else does.
Tal shared 14 of the most common ones that are easy to fix and avoid for good:
- Not knowing your ICP in and out
- Not identifying one problem your product solves for each ICP (it’s different for every lead!)
- Sending too many outreach emails (more than 30 or 40 per day)
- Not warming up your emails (and not using a warm-up tool like lemwarm)
- Not using the inbox rotation feature
- The lack of a perfect technical setup
- Use one source to obtain your lead data which is inaccurate (you need lemlist’s Waterfall Enrichment)
- Focus solely on your product features and benefits
- Scraping leads from LinkedIn only and targeting them randomly
- Not segmenting your outbound campaigns by persona
- Creating outbound campaigns that are too long
- Solving multiple problems at once when targeting your lead
- Buying lead lists online
- Not A/B testing every step in your campaign
The problem is that while these mistakes are easy to avoid, they ruin your outbound lead generation efforts because you target the wrong leads with the wrong message.
As a result, the conversion rate suffers, revenue plummets, and businesses start thinking that either outbound lead generation is very difficult or expensive and not worth their effort.
That’s not true, and they’re missing out big time.
What Should You Do Instead? Practical Outbound Tips
Instead of these common outbound mistakes, make sure you:
✅ Get to know your ICP from the inside out. If you don’t know where to start, start by using our ICP generator:
✅ Identify 1 problem that your product solves for your ICP and stick your message to that one problem.
✅ Use lemlist’s Waterfall Enrichment to make sure your lead data is verified by various data providers.
✅ Implement a warm-up tool like lemwarm to make sure your outbound campaigns reach your prospects.
✅ Use lemlist’s inbox rotation feature to make sure your deliverability is high (and your emails don’t land in spam).
✅ Find leads in lemlist’s B2B lead database and stop scraping your leads randomly online.
✅ Make sure your outbound campaign is no longer than 3 steps.
✅ A/B test all of these steps to identify what works and what doesn’t.
✅ Use lemlist’s AI variables to personalize, tailor, and adapt your emails for every lead.
✅ Build your credibility and personal brand (Taplio is an excellent tool for it), and don’t rely solely on LinkedIn presence.
Outbound vs Inbound Lead Generation
Outbound lead generation | Inbound lead generation | |
---|---|---|
Leads | Cold (but you have full control over them) | Warm or hot (but you have no control over them) |
Focus | Sales | Content |
Approach | Proactive, direct and personalized to each lead | Passive |
Goal | Generating leads | Building trust and brand credibility |
Process | Fast | Slow |
Results | Immediate or very fast | Long-term but cost-effective |
The Verdict | More challenging at first but brings results fast | Easier with less tangible results |
With outbound lead generation, you are in charge of finding and attracting leads.
With inbound lead generation, leads come to you because they are interested in your content or your product. It means they’re easier to move down the sales funnel and convert.
Businesses with a great product-market fit (which is pretty rare!) tend to have more outbound leads.
According to Tal Baker-Phillips, inbound is easier. “Inbound lead generation is easy because people are interested. They’ve done the four or five stages of research, and they’re just at you.”
As long as you have a website where you share content and a marketing strategy, you will get inbound leads.
You can’t choose what kind of leads you get, but there will be a steady stream of them.
With outbound leads, it’s a different story.
By actively reaching out to outbound leads with cold outreach, cold calls, or LinkedIn messages, you can better target your ideal buyer persona and get down to the core of your ICP.
Over the long run, it means more conversions, bigger deal sizes, and longer customer lifetime value.
Tal Baker-Phillips believes that outbound lead generation is superior because, as a business, you learn much more, even though it can be more challenging at first.
“You learn so much with outbound by trying different things. You’re able to analyze, get statistics, use analytics, and learn more about your company and your ICP.”
The more you learn, the more you improve your business and grow your company quicker.
“With outbound, you get to the point where you have more data points, and you are able to grow exponentially.”
In the end, a profitable business needs both outbound and inbound lead generation.
Is Outbound Lead Generation Expensive?
“It’s expensive if you don’t get people that don’t know what they’re doing,” Tal Baker-Phillips said.
According to him, to make outbound lead generation work without investing too much, you need:
- Two people: an Ops person and a sales/growth person
- Use proven outbound lead generation strategies that work
- Understand your ICP very well
- Practice perfecting a bunch of cold outreach emails
“And then you can really cook with gas in terms of booking those meetings,” the sales leader at lemlist explained.
What Are The Most Popular Outbound Lead Generation Channels?
- Cold calling
- Email outreach
- Content marketing
- LinkedIn and social selling
- Advertising
- SEO (organic search)
- Event networking
- Influencer marketing
- Webinars, podcasts
While it may be tempting to pick one and focus all your lead generation efforts there, that’s not how profitable companies do their outbound lead generation.
How To Do Outbound in 2025?
Reaching out to your leads via separate channels is no longer a sufficient lead generation strategy.
Multichannel prospecting is the new approach to outbound.
It means that instead of using linear workflows sales reps and growth teams use advanced conditions to create hyper-personalized workflows based on each lead’s actions.
In 2025, using advanced conditions within your sequences is the best approach for automating your outreach on a large scale.
Frequently Asked Questions
How to increase outbound leads?
Implement any of these common outbound channels:
- Cold calling
- Cold emailing
- Event networking
- PPC Advertising
- Multichannel outreach
What works the best in outbound lead generation?
Personalized messages have a 32.7% higher response rate.
The more personalized and relevant your message is to your lead, the better chances you have to engage them successfully, get a meeting, and close a deal.
You want to focus more on sending mass emails because you get a 93% higher response rate in comparison to single recipients.
To do that manually will take hours of draining work, and not every company has the resources to allocate.
Thus, we recommend using the best outbound lead generation platform like lemlist, which does AI-powered hyper-personalization at a scale that’s unique and human-like.
Liucija Adomaite is a viral content writer and organic traffic expert on a mission to help turn ambitious businesses into big names.