20 Leads Worth £1m ARR. They Still Asked For More.

How to Generate Leads in 2026 | The Revenue Room | Masterclass Edition

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“We need more leads”. Says every person in every b2b sales and marketing organisations up and down the country and across the world. And it’s true, up until a certain point.

We used to joke in the sales agency industry, the classic one line we would always get back from clients is… “we need more leads, we need more leads, we need more leads”.

It’s an insatiable thirst that these companies have, and you can understand it. But the reality is, in some markets there are only a finite number of leads to go at. The question would always come from me, at least, is… “well, what have you done with the leads that we’ve sent you already?”.

Bearing in mind the types of businesses we’re talking about are enterprise level, with a ticket price of 5, 6 or even 7 figures! To penetrate into the businesses that can afford to pay those sorts of fees is not easy. So, interrogating the client on where these leads end up is vital feedback and provides coaching opportunities.

I remember one particular client who operates in the marketing tech sphere. They’d brought in a marketing person and a salesperson, and they hired my Agency to supplement their lead generation. Rich Contacts were targeted with opening up the doors of large consumer-based businesses. Think telco, banking, retail, FMCG. In the first month or so we delivered quite an exceptional number of leads, I think around 20 ICP specific, targeting senior level marketing people at very well-known consumer businesses.

In our monthly catch up we get the classic, “we need more leads” comment, but the potential value of the 20 we’d already delivered exceeded a £1m ARR potential. Now I’m not expecting them to close 100%, but when we started to interrogate what they’d actually done to take care of these leads and convert them further down the funnel, some huge gaps were found. For example, there was only one attempt to rebook a no-show appointment, they’d had failed to provide a basic follow up post call, they failed to close them on the next step, they hadn’t done a sufficient discovery to unearth pain (the list went on).

So very quickly we found most of those 20 high value leads had been burnt through and not really been appreciated or taken care of in an appropriate way. That led on to us providing some additional consultation around what to do once these leads hit the calendar. We soon turned most of those 20 back into some semblance of a sales cycle and ensured that the correct process was followed going forward. Including a deep dive into the discovery call process. (there is more to come on the topic of discovery calls in future newsletters).

That’s one true story, and I’ve got umpteen stories of a very similar nature. But when I reflect on where we were in 2018-19 to where we are today, the rules of engagement for generating leads in B2B have changed drastically.

That in part is related to the sheer ease at which people can create content and plug that into a lead gen strategy, thanks to automation and AI. Alongside side us entering the GTM engineer era. But ultimately what GTM engineers have created is simply a lot more noise, and the market has quite frankly become saturated (and bored).

I think everybody’s pretty fatigued with AI slop being delivered to their inboxes these days. Most B2B folks now understands the dark arts and secrets of AI tactics for hyper personalisation outbound. Which means… even a well-placed email that appears to be customised and personalised, because it is calling out something from their LinkedIn profile, stinks of AI. Its clear a machine has written it, it feels very mechanical, it feels synthetic. It just feels off!

I am knee deep in the topic with clients most days. I can tell you that the champions of 2026, the real businesses and strategic lead generation experts, that are cutting through the AI noise are doing so with authenticity and building connections with a people on a much deeper level, they are also creating preeminence along the way. ❝

I refer to the process as embracing the Snail and riding the Bee!

There’s a really interesting paradox here of course, because the Snail moves slowly, it moves deliberately and with purpose. Whereas the Bee is more frenetic, it’s faster, it covers a lot of ground, creating more width, versus depth.

Today I want to talk the SNAIL methodology that I coach on.

The compounding effect of all of these different interactions and touch points allows you to build brand equity, and the timing advantage comes with that, because when they’re ready, and let’s remember, only 3% of people are really in buying mode at any one time, you have to have a lot of breadth and scale to your outreach. Timing is the number one factor to success in business, full stop, but particularly as it relates to sales and lead generation.

The snail framework allows us to unpick and put in place strategies that fulfil revenue targets over the medium to long term.

There is a paradox to that, of course, and that’s where the Bee comes in. Sometimes you do need to go fast. It’s all well and good having long term relationships and building credibility over time, but there is a need to go fast in certain moments.

The most successful businesses I work with are the ones that are able to embrace that paradox and make it work for them. The Bee and the Snail coexist because both tempos are essential, and the real skill is learning how to run them in parallel.

With that said, I’m running a workshop in two weeks’ time, focusing specifically on the SNAIL framework I’ve developed, in a follow up we will also be looking at tactics for the Bee mode methodology as well.

Combining these two really is part of the secret sauce to generating more leads in 2026.

If your business needs an injection of new opportunities of a higher calibre, join me in a couple of weeks the Revenue Room – masterclass edition.

It’s free to join, and everyone that does will get a free copy of my white paper, The Snail and the Bee Revenue Paradox, and you can dig into that a bit more and apply it to your own businesses.

Thirty minutes. The SNAIL framework, live. Everyone who joins gets the white paper free.

Simon

Revenue & Beyond