Solved: Improve B2B Lead Gen from Facebook Ads

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! Happy to give you some initial thoughts on your current B2B funnel. What you're doing is a pretty common setup, but from my experience running these sorts of campaigns, it's often a slow and leaky way to get high-value clients, especially for SaaS and service businesses.

You're right to focus on giving value upfront, that's spot on. But the journey from 'free tool user' to 'demo booked' can be a massive chasm where good prospects fall through the cracks. I think there's a more direct and powerful way to approach this that gets you in front of better quality leads, faster. It involves flipping the entire model on its head.

We'll need to look at the real problem with the 'nurture' model...

The classic "free tool -> email sequence -> demo" funnel looks logical on a whiteboard, but in the real world, it's riddled with problems. First, it's slow. A decision-maker with a burning problem needs a solution now, not after a seven-day email course. While you're nurturing, your competitor who offers an instant solution is closing the deal. You're basically giving your best prospects time to find someone else.

Second, it's incredibly leaky. Think about the drop-off at each stage. How many sign up for the tool but never really use it? How many recieve the emails but never open them? How many open them but never click? By the end of it, the tiny fraction of people who actually book a demo might not even be your best-fit customers, just the ones with the most patience.

But the biggest flaw is the final step: "Request a Demo". Honestly, it's one of the most arrogant calls to action in marketing. It presumes your prospect, a busy executive, has nothing better to do than schedule a meeting to be sold to. It screams "I want your time so I can pitch you". It's all about what you want, not what they need. It's a huge barrier and positions you as just another commodity vendor in a sea of sameness. You're asking for their most valuable asset—their time—in exchange for a vague promise of a solution. That's a bad deal, and they know it.

To fix this, you have to stop thinking about demographics and start thinking about nightmares.

I'd say you need to define your customer by their pain...

Forget the sterile profiles. "UK-based companies in the finance sector with 50-200 employees" tells you nothing important. It leads to generic ads that speak to no one. To stop burning cash on ads, you must define your customer by their specific, urgent, and expensive problem. Their nightmare.

Your ideal customer isn't a job title; it's a person in a problem state. A Head of Engineering isn't just a role; she's a leader terrified of her best developers quitting because their workflow is a complete mess. The General Counsel at a tech firm isn't just a lawyer; he's the person who will be fired if the company is hit with a massive fine for a compliance breach. That's the stuff that gets them to act.

When you understand their nightmare, you can find them. What podcasts do they listen to on their commute to distract themselves from the stress? What industry newsletters do they actually read hoping for a solution? What software tools do they already pay for? This intelligence is the blueprint for your targeting. We're not talking about broad interests like "Business". We're talking about hyper-specific things like people who follow certain thought leaders on LinkedIn, are members of niche industry groups on Facebook, or use complementary software to yours. Do this work first, or you have no business spending a single pound on ads.

You probably should rethink your economics with LTV...

The next trap is obsessing over a low Cost Per Lead (CPL). A low CPL is often a vanity metric that hides a bigger problem: low-quality leads that waste your sales team's time and never convert. The real question isn't "How low can my CPL go?" but "How high a CPL can I afford to acquire a fantastic customer?" The answer to that is Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

Most businesses I talk to either don't know their LTV or they drastically underestimate it. Once you know this number, you can advertise with confidence. Let's run through a quick, realistic calculation. You'll need three numbers:

• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What's the average amount a customer pays you each month?
• Gross Margin %: After your cost of goods/services, what percentage is profit? For SaaS, this is often high (e.g., 80-90%). For services, it might be lower.
• Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of your customers do you lose each month?

The formula is simple: LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

Let's say your ARPA is £500, your gross margin is 80%, and your monthly churn is 4%.
LTV = (£500 * 0.80) / 0.04 = £400 / 0.04 = £10,000.

Suddenly, things look very different. A healthy business can often spend up to a third of its LTV to acquire a customer. This is your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). In this case, your maximum affordable CAC is £3,333. If your sales process converts 1 in 10 qualified leads into a paying customer, you can afford to pay up to £333 per qualified lead. That £250 lead from a perfectly targeted LinkedIn ad doesn't seem so expensive anymore, does it? It looks like a bargain. This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent scaling and frees you from the tyranny of cheap, useless leads.

You'll need a message they can't ignore...

Once you know their nightmare and what they're worth to you, you can finally write ad copy that works. Your ad's only job is to get the right person to stop scrolling and think, "They understand my exact problem." It needs to speak directly to their pain.

For a B2B SaaS product, I always use the Before-After-Bridge framework. You don't sell a "FinOps platform"; you sell the feeling of relief. The ad would look something like this:

Before: "Your AWS bill just arrived. It’s 30% higher than last month, and your engineers have no idea why. Another fire to put out..."
After: "Imagine opening your cloud bill and smiling. You see where every pound is going, and waste is automatically eliminated."
Bridge: "Our platform is the bridge that gets you there. Start a free trial and find your first £1,000 in savings today."

For a high-touch service business, you use Problem-Agitate-Solve. You don't sell "fractional CFO services"; you sell a good night's sleep.

Problem: "Are your cash flow projections just a shot in the dark?"
Agitate: "Are you one bad month away from a payroll crisis while your competitors are confidently raising their next round?"
Solve: "Get expert financial strategy for a fraction of a full-time hire. We build dashboards that turn uncertainty into predictable growth."

This is how you get clicks from the right people. You're not talking about features; you're talking about their life. You're showing them you have the cure for their specific disease. Anyone who doesn't have that problem will just scroll past, which is exactly what you want. You are pre-qualifying them with your message before they even click the ad, which makes every penny of your ad spend work harder.

We'll need to look at building an irresistible offer...

This brings us to the most important part of the entire equation, and the number one reason I see campaigns fail: the offer. Your offer is not your product or your service. It's the high-value, low-friction thing you ask them to do after they click your ad. And as we've established, "Request a Demo" is a terrible offer.

Your offer's only job is to deliver a moment of undeniable value—an "aha!" moment that makes the prospect sell themselves on your solution. It has to solve a small, real problem for them, for free, right now.

If you're a SaaS company, this is your unfair advantage. The gold standard is a free trial with no credit card required. Let them get their hands on the actual product. Let them feel the transformation for themselves. When the product itself proves its value, the sale becomes a formality. You're no longer generating Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) for a sales team to chase; you are creating Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) who are already convinced. I've seen this single change transform businesses. One B2B SaaS client we worked with couldn't get their CPA below £100 with a demo offer. We helped them restructure to a free trial model, and we brought their Cost Per User Acquisition down to just £7. That's not a typo. Another software client we ran campaigns for achieved 4,622 registrations at just $2.38 a pop by offering instant value instead of a sales call.

If you're not SaaS, you're not exempt. You just have to be more creative. You must bottle your expertise into a tool, a piece of content, or an asset that provides instant value.

• For a markering agency: A free, automated website audit that shows them their top 3 SEO opportunities.
• For a data analytics platform: A free 'Data Health Check' that scans their database and flags the top 5 critical issues.
• For a corporate training company: A free 15-minute interactive video module on 'Handling Difficult Conversations' for new managers.

For us, as a B2B advertising consultancy, it's a free 20-minute strategy session where we audit a company's failing ad campaigns and give them an actionable plan, completely free of charge. You must solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing. This is how you get highly qualified people raising their hands to talk to you, already convinced of your expertise because you've already demonstrated it.

You probably should reconsider your platform and campaign strategy...

Your current approach is focused on Facebook, which can work for some B2B, but it might not be the sharpest tool for the job. The platform choice should be dictated entirely by where your ICP's "nightmare" lives and how they look for solutions.

Google Ads (Search) is for active pain. If your ICP is waking up and literally typing "software for finding contact info" or "emergency electrician near me" into Google, you need to be there. This is the highest-intent traffic you can possibly get. You're not creating demand; you're capturing it. You're targeting keywords that show someone is "prequalified" because they are actively searching for what you sell.

LinkedIn Ads is for targeting specific people. If the problem you solve isn't something people search for, but you know exactly who suffers from it (e.g., "VP of Sales at software companies with 100-500 employees"), then LinkedIn is your best bet. The targeting is unmatched for B2B. It's more expensive, yes, but when your LTV is £10,000, paying £250 for a lead who becomes a customer is a fantastic deal. I remember one campaign we worked on for a B2B software client that brought in leads from decision-makers at a cost of just $22 using LinkedIn Ads.

Meta (Facebook/Instagram) is for defined audiences. It's harder for narrow B2B targeting, but it can be very effective if your audience has clear interests (e.g., they follow specific industry publications or competitors) or if you're targeting broader categories like "small business owners". It's also incredibly powerful for retargeting and building lookalike audiences once you have enough data from other channels.

But here is the most critical piece of advice I can give you on platform strategy: delete your brand awareness campaigns. When you set your campaign objective on Meta to "Reach" or "Brand Awareness," you are giving the algorithm a very specific, and very dangerous, command: "Find me the largest number of people for the lowest possible price."

The algorithm, being a ruthlessly efficient machine, does exactly what you asked. It seeks out the users inside your targeting who are the absolute least likely to click, engage, or buy anything. Why? Because their attention is cheap. No other advertiser wants them. You are actively paying the world's most powerful advertising platform to find you the worst possible audience. Awareness is a byproduct of making sales to happy customers, not a prerequisite for making your first one. From day one, every campaign you run should be optimised for a conversion objective, whether that's a lead, a free trial signup, or an appointment.

This is the main advice I have for you:

To put it all together, this is a summary of the strategic shift I'm recommending. It's about moving away from a slow, conventional funnel towards a high-speed, value-first model designed to attract serious buyers, not just curious browsers.

I know this is a lot to take in, and it's a fundamental shift from how most B2B advertising is done. But the truth is, the old way is broken. Decision-makers are too busy and too sceptical for long, drawn-out funnels. Implementing this new approach requires expertise across strategy, copywriting, financial modelling (LTV/CAC), and multi-platform ad management. It's not easy to get right on your own.

If you'd like to chat through how this could be applied specifically to your clients' businesses, we offer a free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session. We can take a look at one of your current campaigns and give you a concrete, actionable plan to improve it. It's our own version of the value-first offer I've been talking about.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh