The best lead generation strategy is the one with the lowest cost per booked meeting for your market, and for most European B2B teams that is a phone-led mix fed by signals you already own. Below are the 7 prospecting channels ranked by what a meeting costs, then 11 strategies that fill the top of each one. The numbers come from our benchmark of 1,000,000 B2B cold calls in France and from named public sources.

Rank channels by cost per meeting, not by volume

Most channel comparisons rank by reach. Reach is cheap. Meetings are not.

Run the math per channel with three inputs: the cost of a touch, the rate at which a touch becomes a conversation, and the rate at which a conversation becomes a meeting. In our data a cold call connects 11.3% of the time on average, and a conversation that opens on a trigger books a meeting 7-10% of the time. That is roughly one meeting per 100 to 130 dials when the list is right.

Do the same exercise for your email, LinkedIn and events. In our experience the phone wins on cost per meeting as soon as you count the hours spent writing, not just the tool licence.

The 7 prospecting channels, in the order we would fund them

1. Phone, on signals

The only channel where you get an answer, an objection and a next step in the same four minutes. Across our benchmark of 1,000,000 B2B cold calls the average connect rate is 11.3%, and in our experience most connects happen within the first three attempts. The phone is also the channel where timing is measurable: 4pm connects at 15.8%, 10am at 14%, 8am at 9.8% in our benchmark.

2. Your own CRM

Not a channel in the marketing sense, but the cheapest source of meetings you have. Reps use only about 20% of the signals already sitting in their CRM. Half of Sonik's pipeline came from signals that were already there: dormant leads, closed-lost deals, old demo requests.

3. Website visitors

A known account reading your pricing page is a stronger signal than any third-party intent score. Identify the account, call the likely champion the same day. See how we surface website visitors.

4. Email, as a setup for the call

Email rarely books the meeting on its own in Europe. It earns the right to call. An opened email the day before gives you a reason to dial and a sentence to open with.

5. LinkedIn, for mapping and warming

Use it to find the second and third person in the account and to be a familiar name before you call. Do not expect it to carry a quota alone: invitation limits cap the volume.

6. Customers and partners

A referral from a current customer skips the trust problem entirely. The yield per touch is the highest of any channel. The volume is the lowest, so it cannot be the only one.

7. Events

Expensive per lead, but the lead comes with context and a face. The value is lost if the follow-up call happens three weeks later. Call within 48 hours.

11 lead generation strategies that actually produce pipeline

1. Mine the CRM first. Export every contact with a demo, a lost deal or a stalled opportunity older than six months. That is your warmest list and it is free.
2. Call closed-lost on its anniversary. Contracts renew. The reason you lost eleven months ago may no longer exist.
3. Reactivate dormant leads with the right opener. "How have you been?" to a known contact reaches about 10% success, against about 1.5% for a standard cold open in our data. Our dormant lead playbook covers the full method.
4. Follow job changes. A past user who became a director elsewhere is a meeting waiting to be booked.
5. Call website visitors the same day. First-party intent decays in days.
6. Time calls by persona. Founders pick up most around 10am, marketing around 4pm, HR around 1pm. Build the call blocks around that, not around the rep's calendar.
7. Open on a trigger, not a pitch. 65% of reps open by explaining what they sell. Trigger-based openers book 7-10% versus 2-3% for pitch-first.
8. Multithread every target account. Call three people in the same week. One person going quiet should not kill the account.
9. Feed call outcomes back into the list. A "wrong person" outcome is targeting data. Review outcomes by persona every Friday and cut the segments that never convert.
10. Respond to inbound within minutes. A demo request called within the hour is a different lead from the same request called tomorrow.
11. Put the founder on the phone. Founder-led calling produced half of our own early pipeline. Nobody explains the problem better, and prospects pick up for a founder.

Why the phone carries more weight in Europe

Three reasons specific to our market. First, B2B cold calling is legal in France and most of the EU under legitimate interest, with a professional contact and an easy opt-out. Second, cold email deliverability has degraded faster than pickup rates: a mobile number still rings. Third, European markets are smaller. A French SaaS has a few thousand target accounts, not a few hundred thousand, so burning them with low-quality email volume is a real cost.

The practical consequence: in Europe, the channel ranking above is not a preference, it is arithmetic.

How Sonik approaches lead generation

We treat lead generation as a signal problem, then a dialing problem. Sonik pulls the signals from your CRM, your website and the market (job changes, closed-lost anniversaries, visitors, social intent) and turns them into a daily call list for each rep.

That list goes straight into a parallel dialing session, which gives reps about 5x more conversations than a manual dialer. Our north-star funnel is 20 conversations per SDR per day. At an 11% connect rate and a trigger-based opener, that is enough to double meetings without adding headcount.

We measure every channel the same way: meetings booked per hour of rep time.

Conclusion

Channels do not compete, but they are not equal either. Rank them by cost per meeting, fund the phone and the CRM first, and use email and LinkedIn to set up the call rather than replace it. This week, export every CRM contact who has not been touched in six months and call the first 50 at 10am and 4pm. Count the meetings. That number will decide your channel mix better than any article.