B2B lead generation: leads you would actually take.
Target account research, verified contact data and campaigns that produce meetings with people who match your ICP. Reported as pipeline, never as lead volume.
● Start here
Tell us about the business.
It takes about a minute. It reaches the people who would do the work rather than a sales inbox, and if we are not the right fit for what you need we will say so.
Goes to hello@katama.io. No sequences, no newsletter, no list.
● What B2B lead generation is
Lead generation is the work of identifying the companies and people worth selling to, reaching them, and converting that contact into a qualified conversation.
Done properly it is a research problem before it is a messaging problem. Most of the failure happens in the list, not in the email.
Volume is the wrong target.
The contract creates the problem
Almost every disappointing lead generation engagement fails the same way. The contract sets a number of leads, so the supplier optimises for that number, and the definition of a lead quietly loosens until it is met.
Your sales team works the list, finds nobody they can sell to, and stops trusting the source. Now you are paying for leads and paying for the time it takes to ignore them.
Time buyers spend with vendor reps
17per cent of the journey, across every supplier
You get less time than that
That 17% is split across every vendor in the deal, so any one rep holds roughly 5% of a buyer’s purchasing time. Two thirds of buyers say they would rather have no rep at all.
Which means the engine has to create demand and qualify it before your team is ever involved, and the research has to be good enough that the one conversation you get is with the right person.
Buyers who prefer a rep-free purchase
67per cent, and rising
Prefer no rep
67%
Of B2B buyers say they would rather complete the purchase without talking to a sales rep at all.
Time with reps
17%
Of the buying journey is spent with vendor sales reps, split across every supplier considered.
Service pages
24.1%
Of citations at the B2B evaluation stage go to service pages, against 17.4% for articles.
AI visitor value
4.4x
The conversion value of a visitor arriving from AI search against a traditional organic visitor.
Agree what qualified means before anything gets built.
● The only four numbers we report
- Qualified meetings held, not booked
- Sales opportunities accepted by your team
- Pipeline dollars created
- Cost per opportunity, trending
What the first ninety days look like.
Define qualified
Before anything is built. What counts as a real meeting, who can approve a deal, what disqualifies an account. Written down and agreed, because this is where the relationship usually breaks.
Build the list
ICP drawn from your closed-won data rather than a persona workshop, market sizing, account selection, contact research, enrichment and verification. The slow part that decides everything after it.
Warm the infrastructure
Separate sending domains, warmed properly, monitored continuously. Three to four weeks before volume is safe. Anyone promising meetings in week one is burning your primary domain to get them.
Run the sequences
Multi-touch across email, LinkedIn and phone, tested by segment rather than guessed at. Volume held below the level where quality drops.
Meetings and weekly review
Meetings land in your reps’ calendars with the account research attached. Every one is reviewed against the qualified definition, weekly, including the ones your team rejected.
● The build versus buy question
Hiring an SDR team, honestly compared.
| In-house SDR team | Outsourced | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to first meeting | 3 to 5 months including hiring and ramp | Roughly 5 weeks, set by domain warming |
| Fixed cost | Salary, tooling, management, whether or not it works | Monthly, cancellable at the quarter |
| Who manages them | You, and it is a real job | Us |
| Product knowledge | Deeper, over time | Shallower, which is a genuine trade |
| Tooling and data | You buy and maintain the stack | Included |
| What you keep if it ends | The team, if they stay | Domains, data, sequences, CRM records |
In-house wins once you can keep a manager and three reps busy and current. Below that, the maths rarely works, and we will say so on the call rather than after you sign.
What sits alongside it.
Outbound & SDR
The execution layer. Account research, multi-touch sequences across email, LinkedIn and phone, and meetings booked into your reps’ calendars.
Read →Social media marketing
Familiarity makes a cold list warmer. The accounts you are about to call have already been seeing you, which changes how the first conversation opens.
Read →Demand generation
Outbound into accounts that have never heard of you is expensive. Demand generation makes the same list cheaper to work.
Read →Who this suits.
- Deal sizes justify a human touching each account
- You have reps who can take the meetings we book
- You can define what qualified means and hold to it
- Your ICP is identifiable from firmographic or intent data
- You want a lead volume number in the contract
- Nobody internally will follow up inside 48 hours
- You sell to consumers rather than to businesses
- Your contract value cannot support the cost per opportunity
Fair questions.
How is this different from buying a list?
A list is a starting input, not the work. Most purchased data is stale, wrongly titled, or aimed at people who cannot approve anything. We research and verify contacts against the account, which is slower and is the reason the campaigns work at all.
Who owns the data and the domains?
You do. Sending domains, sequences, contact data and CRM records are yours and stay yours if we stop working together. We will not build an engine you cannot take with you.
What happens to leads that are not ready?
They go into nurture rather than back onto a call list. Most of a target account list is not in market this quarter, and treating not-now as no is how companies burn their addressable market.
How many meetings should we expect?
It depends on ICP size, contract value and how crowded your category is, so any number quoted before the research is a guess dressed as a commitment. We set a target after the first month of data and report against it weekly, including the weeks we miss it.