Lead Generation vs. Lead Nurturing: What’s the Difference?
What would happen if a business owner mixed up revenue with profit? They would be in a whole lot of trouble pretty quick.
Well, the same goes for lead generation with lead nurturing.
A solid grasp of these two overlapping—but also distinct—concepts is essential for creating an effective B2B sales funnel.
We’ll break down the differences between them and show you how to apply both generation and nurturing in real-world settings.
What Is Lead Generation?
Lead generation is the process of capturing a potential customer’s contact information, usually a name, email, or phone number. It’s the first step in the multi-stage process of turning total strangers into new customers.
As a top-of-funnel activity, automated lead generation programs use a variety of digital marketing tactics to generate interest in a brand.
Here’s an overview of the most common lead-gen methods:
SEO-focused articles that answer common customer questions and appear in Google search engine results. C. Lee Smith, the founder of Sales Hunt, generates a substantial portion of his company’s leads through SEO: “We embark on creating valuable blog posts that target pain points our audience faces, such as improving operational efficiency or marketing ROI.”
Paid ads that promote your web pages and lead magnets. The biggest ad platforms are Google and Meta (Facebook and Instagram).
Social media posts, usually in the form of educational content on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and other social platforms. You can also run targeted ads on these networks.
Gated downloadable content like ebooks, templates, and webinar seats. Users have to give their contact details to access them.
Outbound cold calling, in which sales reps call businesses and try to identify and speak to a decision-maker. (one of several methods in outbound lead generation)
Dedicated landing pages for your lead magnets and gated content. By capturing contact info, these pages convert visitors into inbound leads.
The goal of any lead generation strategy is to attract potential customers, provide them with value, and pitch them your lead magnets (like webinars or ebooks) that relate to their interests.
Once they submit a form to access this content, you’ve officially generated a lead.
Lead Generation Example
To illustrate lead gen in action, let’s look at how HubSpot generates B2B leads.
HubSpot dominates the Google SERPs. Its blog attracts hundreds of thousands of potential customers.
To show how this works, imagine I’m a marketer who wants to learn about marketing automation. I Google “marketing automation.”
I see HubSpot’s article and click on it. I read and find it all very informative. I think, “Wow, HubSpot is so helpful!”
But I haven’t become a lead yet. I’m still a visitor. The transformation happens only when I hand over my contact info.
So, how does HubSpot get it?
Alongside its blog content, HubSpot recommends related downloadable resources. If a reader wants to access this upgrade, they click on the “ad” and are taken to a landing page. There, they can submit their contact information to download it.
For example, in its article on sales planning, HubSpot offers a free sales plan template:
This template is promoted throughout the article, even at the very top before the content begins. That’s how important collecting email addresses is to HubSpot.
When I click on the template, I’m taken here:
If I submit the info, I get the template, and they get my email address.
Why’s that so important?
Because leads are rarely ready to buy when they first come to your website, they need some nurturing, and email is one of the best ways to do that.
What Is Lead Nurturing?
Lead nurturing is the process of turning marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) into sales-qualified leads (SQLs). It’s the bridge between interest and purchase. Focused on mid and bottom-of-funnel activities, a lead nurturing strategy guides leads through the consideration and decision phases of the sales funnel.
Often, this guidance comes in the form of relevant educational and sales content, delivered to them over email by marketing automation tools. We also start to see the involvement of sales (often BDRs), who build relationships with leads through direct outreach and social selling.
This begs the question: “Why not just book a call immediately with the leads you generate?”
The reason is that most of those leads don’t know enough about your business or products to make a sales decision. In fact, 96% of visitors who come to your website are ready to buy. First, you need to educate and inspire them. But most of all, you need to win their trust.
Here are the best lead nurturing tactics for building rapport with leads:
Email drip campaigns: Create trigger-based email campaigns that send email content in response to a lead’s online activity (like downloading an ebook). AI outreach tools like Artisan have dedicated features for monitoring lead activity and delivering personalized emails.
Retargeting ads: Run ads that “follow” the lead around the internet and promote solutions relevant to their recent engagement with your online content.
Post-webinar follow-ups: Set up automated email sequences to continue the conversation with leads after a webinar.
Case studies: Share content demonstrating real customer success stories.
Educational webinars: Invite leads to live or recorded webinars where you break down a relevant business challenge, feature release, or industry trend.
Sales outreach: Send email and LinkedIn message sequences to leads to encourage them to book a demo or sales meeting. AI apps with LinkedIn tools, like Artisan, do this on autopilot and at scale.
Here’s how Christopher Pappas, the founder of eLearning Industry, nurtures leads after they download an exclusive whitepaper:
“This download initiates a nurturing workflow that includes a sequence of emails focusing on problem solving and demonstrating our expertise. Our sales team supplements this by sending tailored messages aligned with the lead’s specific interests, further accelerating the qualification process.”
On Personalization and Timing in Lead Nurturing
Personalization is non-negotiable in lead nurturing. In fact, 71% of customers expect businesses to deliver personalized experiences. Providing leads with helpful, relevant content over time is the best way to build trust and interest in your brand.
In addition to personalization, outreach timing also plays a big role in effective nurturing. A lead who attends a webinar is thinking about the material for a few hours afterwards. After that, their memory of the event diminishes rapidly. They’re soon back to business as usual.
Therefore, strike in those initial hours. Marketing and sales automation tools help you do this. Use them to create ready-to-go, personalized follow-ups that are sent according to a lead’s online behavior. This way, leads get messages at the right time, every time.
Key Differences Between Lead Generation and Lead Nurturing
While lead generation and lead nurturing are closely related, not to mention highly interdependent, they serve different purposes in the sales process.
Understanding these differences helps you manage your funnel more effectively.
Lead Generation: Key Characteristics
Goal: Capture new leads
Funnel stage: Top of funnel (awareness)
Channels: SEO, paid ads, webinars, social media
Teams: Marketing
KPIs: Cost per lead (CPL), lead volume, form conversion rate
Personalization level: Broad and more general
Key tools: Ad platforms, social media networks, content management systems
Lead Nurturing: Key Characteristics
Goal: Build relationships and drive conversions
Funnel stage: Mid-to-bottom (consideration and decision)
Channels: Email, case studies, follow-up, sequences
Teams: Marketing and sales
KPIs: Email engagement rate, lead-to-conversion rate
Personalization level: Highly targeted
Key tools: Marketing automation software, outreach tools, AI BDR platforms, email marketing campaign software, lead segmentation tools
Lead generation attracts leads and fills your pipeline. Nurturing moves leads through it. Broad in appeal, lead gen can be thought of as casting a wide fishing net in a location with a high potential yield.
Meanwhile, lead nurturing—the more personalized of the two—resembles the “fattening up” of those fish in a controlled environment until they’re ready for market.
Both rely heavily on content marketing. After all, content is the best way to attract and nurture new leads. But the content differs in focus. Lead gen content primarily educates leads about their problems, while nurturing content teaches them about potential solutions, including the business’s products and services.
How Lead Generation and Lead Nurturing Work Together
Lead generation and lead nurturing should never be siloed. When combined into one cohesive system, they form a satisfying customer journey from stranger to lead to customer.
Marketers generate leads by sharing educational content that appeals to a broad target audience in the early stages of the buyer’s journey. After collecting contact information from potential buyers, marketers and sales reps work together to send more personalized, commercial content to encourage the lead to buy the product or service.
To illustrate the relationship, let’s look at an example of a journey a new lead might take with a business. Notice how data collected in the lead generation phase informs the lead nurturing process.
Lead generation
1. A potential lead sees an ad on LinkedIn for a lead magnet.
2. They click on the lead magnet, go to the landing page, and submit their contact info.
3. The lead is added to the CRM and officially becomes an MQL.
Lead nurturing
4. The creation of the new lead triggers an email sequence in your sales automation tool, which also sends a LinkedIn request (as in the Artisan example below).
5. The lead receives follow-up emails with valuable content that relates to the lead magnet they downloaded.
6. The lead books a demo through the CTA in the email and becomes a sales-qualified lead.
To pull off this synergy, marketing and sales need to align on the following:
Which lead data points to collect
Which marketing automations to trigger
The behavior that distinguishes an MQL and an SQL
Hand-off protocols between marketing and sales
The demographic and firmographic makeup of an ideal lead
Sometimes, businesses use lead scoring software to facilitate hand-off between marketing and sales.
These tools track leads and assign points for certain attributes that align with the buyer persona and actions that signal buying intent. When leads hit a score threshold, nurturing is complete, and a sales rep takes over.
Real-World Examples of Lead Gen and Lead Nurturing
Let’s look at some real-world examples of how companies are using lead generation and nurturing together to fill their sales pipeline.
SaaS Lead Gen and Nurturing Example (Loom)
Loom is a screen recorder app. On the homepage, Loom promotes its free trial, one of its main methods for generating leads.
Once a lead provides contact information to access the free trial, they’re able to test out the app’s basic features.
This approach highlights an important point: a free trial is a great form of nurturing because it helps leads nurture themselves. As they play with the tool, they start to appreciate it and become more interested in buying it.
Of course, like any good business, Loom doesn’t ignore the lead after they sign up. Once they submit the form to access the free trial, they receive automated emails teaching them how to use the platform, ensuring they have a positive experience.
On top of the free trial drip sequence, Loom also adds new users to a nurturing email sequence, which teaches them about the value of upgrading plans (with a bit of FOMO thrown in, just for good measure).
But email isn’t the only nurturing strategy deployed by Loom.
The platform itself has a built-in onboarding process that helps users set up the tool in a way that serves their specific needs.
And of course, within the app, there are also built-in “ads” for the paid version (along with CTAs), which explain the benefits of upgrading.
As the free trial comes to a close, leads receive a “last call” email, reminding them that they’re about to lose access to advanced features.
Loom’s sequence is a masterclass in combining email marketing and a free trial into one cohesive lead nurturing strategy.
B2B Service Lead Gen and Nurturing Example (Ghostwriting Academy)
Ghostwriting Academy is a coaching business that helps freelance writers increase revenue through ghostwriting.
They attract new leads in several ways, but their main method is social media marketing, primarily through highly educational Twitter posts and YouTube videos.
Notice how all of their marketing content comes directly from the founder's (Nicolas Cole) social profiles, not a company profile. This is a great way to build trust among potential students.
When it comes to their lead gen content, they offer free webinars, ebooks, ultimate guides, and other lead magnets in exchange for contact details.
Once they have gathered and verified their email addresses, they relentlessly email leads. But it’s hard to be annoyed, since the content is always focused on relieving pressing pain points, reaching desirable goals, and answering nagging questions.
Ghostwriting Academy gives us a beautiful example of how you can use free, highly informative social media to attract leads, and then use consistent, highly relevant email marketing sequences to convert them into buyers.
Why You Need Both Lead Gen and Nurturing for Sales Success
Lead generation and nurturing are both critical if you want to consistently win new business. Taking one out of the mix is a sure route to poor results. You might not even see any results at all.
Without Lead Generation…
A company with a lead nurturing program but no lead generation process is like a soccer team with a forward but no midfielders. The forward is up there waiting for the ball so they can score, but it never comes. There’s no one to pass it to them.
Here are the major issues:
No new prospects enter the pipeline and your funnel dries up.
Without a comprehensive lead gen program across all relevant touchpoints, ROI drops.
Account executives (AEs) are forced to spend their limited time sourcing their own leads.
Without Lead Nurturing…
Generating a lead and putting them immediately into sales meetings, without nurturing, is like eating raw bacon out of the bag. Without the necessary cooking beforehand, you’ll get ill.
This “cooking” is the nurturing and education phase. For example, 74% of IT decision-makers are more likely to work with IT vendors that educate them throughout the decision process.
Here are the major issues:
Leads who aren’t ready to buy drop out of the funnel, lowering conversion rates.
Sales reps waste time on cold, unqualified contacts.
Your leads buy from the competitors that are giving them more attention.
Why a Balanced Strategy Means Better ROI
The ideal strategy is a balanced one. When your business invests equally in lead generation and lead nurturing activities, you achieve the optimal ROI.
With an equally weighted strategy, you’ll see the following results:
Reduced customer acquisition costs (CAC): A balanced approach helps you target higher-quality leads, automate relationship building, and boost referrals, thus reducing the cost of acquiring new buyers.
Shorter sales cycles: A dual approach leads to better-educated leads who trust your brand. The result is that it takes fewer sales meetings and presentations to convince them you’re the right choice.
Higher conversion rates: Targeted lead gen helps you identify leads who fit your ideal customer profile, and are thus more likely to convert.
How Artisan Bridges the Lead Gen and Nurturing Gap
Artisan is a unified solution for lead generation and lead nurturing, tasks that have traditionally been handled separately.
Powered by an AI BDR named Ava, the platform handles the entire process of attracting and nurturing B2B leads, from finding target buyers to sending cold emails and LinkedIn messages.
Artisan takes care of all of the following tasks:
Prospects leads from a database of over 300 million leads
Automates outreach and follow-ups (LinkedIn and email) with personalized sequences
Applies lead scores based on behavior across a range of touchpoints
Syncs with your sales stack via CRM integrations
A/B tests campaigns in the background and automatically optimizes them
With AI handling outreach, your AEs can focus on selling the warm prospects it generates and nurtures, not building lead lists and blasting cold emails.
Better Together: The Synergy of Lead Generation and Nurturing for Business Growth
Lead generation and lead nurturing work together. But managing both in tandem is easier said than done.
That’s why tools like Artisan exist. Aristan is an AI-first, all-in-one sales automation platform that takes care of key lead gen and nurturing tasks, from identifying high-quality leads to sending them personalized email sequences at scale.
The result? Your reps' calendars fill up with high-quality leads eager to learn about your offer. And they barely had to lift a finger to make it happen. AI did it for them.
