The Future of B2B Lead Generation with Jim Lillig
The Paradigm Shift in B2B Marketing
For three decades, B2B marketers have been targeting haystacks instead of needles. That's the assessment of Jim Lillig, a veteran digital marketer with experience at Bosch, NSI Industries, and numerous other organizations where he's helped transform digital marketing departments into centers of excellence.
"For 30 years, we've marketed to haystacks," Lillig explains on our recent episode of the Click and Mortar podcast. "When I saw this site... it changed the entire focus, like the way Copernicus changed the way we look at the world."
The site that sparked this Copernican revolution in Lillig's approach? A tool called Primer that allows marketers to create highly targeted audience segments and reach them across multiple platforms—not just LinkedIn.
The Problem with Your CRM
One of the most eye-opening revelations from Lillig's discussion centers on a fundamental flaw in most companies' customer relationship management systems.
"The funniest thing I ever find is that most people in their CRMs have the wrong people in their CRMs," he notes. "They've got accounting, they've got payroll, they've got people there, and they think that's their CRM."
When companies launch new products or attempt upsells to their existing database, they're often targeting the executioners—not the decision makers. These contacts may process orders, but they don't make purchasing decisions.
"They don't make decisions. They don't say 'buy that.' They say, 'you go buy that,'" Lillig explains. "But they don't put their emails into your CRM."
The Three Buckets of B2B Marketing
According to Lillig, all contacts in your marketing ecosystem fall into three buckets:
Marketing Qualified Leads - People you think might want to do business with you
Sales Qualified Leads - People who have shown concrete interest
Customers - People already doing business with you
The game-changing approach comes from properly segmenting these groups and then marketing to them from your CRM—with each segment receiving tailored messaging across multiple channels.
Beyond LinkedIn: The Omnichannel Imperative
One of the most common mistakes Lillig sees in B2B marketing is an over reliance on LinkedIn.
"If you're only on LinkedIn, how much time is your prospect on LinkedIn in a day?" he asks. "LinkedIn is becoming less and less of a factor for B2B marketers when you talk about places like Medium, Reddit—someplace where people are actually reading things and absorbing information."
The solution isn't abandoning LinkedIn but expanding your presence across multiple platforms:
Google Ads - Even spending $30/day can dramatically increase reach and frequency
Meta (Facebook/Instagram) - Effective when approached with appropriate content types
Reddit and Medium - Where people actively consume in-depth information
Mobile - Reaching prospects where they spend increasing amounts of time
Connected TV (CTV) - For broader brand awareness
This omnichannel approach dramatically improves performance when it comes time to send emails. Lillig notes that running awareness advertising before sending emails to the same audience can increase open rates from a typical 12% to 35-50%.
The Secret Sauce: Warming Up Your Leads
"If you'd ran $2,000 worth of advertising a month before you sent that email to the same people you're going to send that email to... you're going to get a 35 to 50% open rate," Lillig explains.
This warming strategy doesn't just boost open rates—it significantly improves click-through rates as well, pushing them from industry averages into the 4-15% range.
The reason is simple: when your audience has already been exposed to your brand multiple times across different platforms, the email doesn't feel like a cold outreach. They recognize who you are.
The AI Revolution in B2B Marketing
Artificial intelligence is making previously impossible levels of personalization feasible at scale.
"If we have the time to do this, we would have done it by hand," Lillig says. "But now it's just taking in every source you can possibly find and then processes all that information and then personalizes it to the individual that you're trying to go to."
For SaaS companies specifically, Lillig recommends tools like Sumble and bbop.ai, which he describes as game-changers for identifying in-market buyers.
CRM Implementation: Lessons from the Trenches
Lillig's experience implementing CRMs has taught him hard lessons about getting buy-in from sales teams.
At Bosch, implementing a new SAP-based CRM system resulted in 55% of the sales force quitting within the first year. The key lesson? Make the system immediately valuable to sales teams.
"You better make sure it's useful, really useful. Like from the first second they look at it and they go, 'Oh, wow, why haven't you told me about this before?' That is the only sentence I want out of a salesperson when they open up a CRM for the first time," he explains.
His advice for successful CRM implementation includes:
Create champions within the sales organization (especially among younger team members)
Ensure the data is clean, properly tagged, and regularly updated
Partner with sales to understand what they consider a qualified lead
Segment your contacts extensively
Don't release functionality until it delivers clear value
Measuring Success: Beyond Basic Metrics
When it comes to measuring the success of B2B lead generation campaigns, Lillig and the Click and Order team developed a custom metric: cost per engaged session.
This metric helps determine whether campaigns are effectively driving meaningful engagement—whether that's form fills or significant time spent exploring multiple pages on a website.
Proper event tracking in GA4 is crucial for making these measurements meaningful, allowing marketers to track touchpoints across campaign videos, white papers, forms, and downloads.
The Future of B2B Marketing
Looking ahead, Lillig is focused on what he calls "agentic processes"—using true AI to create more blockchain-type experiences and tracking.
He emphasizes that digital marketers must continually learn and evolve: "You can't sit still in digital marketing. You have to adapt. You have to change. You have to literally learn almost every day."
Lillig recommends B2B marketers dedicate 15-20% of their time to learning what's next, because "your competitor will."
The Playbook for Success
The B2B marketing playbook Lillig developed focuses on helping small marketing teams look like big ones through automation, proper CRM utilization, and omnichannel marketing.
As he puts it: "What excites me now is that with the injection of AI and all the tech stacks that's come to there... we went from a national little department in marketing to becoming the center of excellence for digital in the entire organization in 18 months time."
Watch the full episode for additional insights on how often to update the creative in your digital advertising campaigns.
Watch the Full Episode on YouTube
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This article is based on insights from the Click and Mortar podcast hosted by Mike Patterson and Dustin Trout, digital marketing experts focused on helping businesses maximize their advertising ROI.
