Meta: Agentic Lead Gen Generative Research  

Context

1. Lead generation (lead gen) is the process of attracting people to your business and turning them into potential customers. Meta considers lead gen an untapped $20B per year opportunity.

2. During research, businesses regularly told us that they consider business messaging via WhatsApp, Instagram Direct and Messenger the future of lead generation (lead gen)

3. Yet, businesses struggled to scale business messaging for lead generation

4. The research had 2 primary goals:

   1. Understand why businesses struggle to scale business messaging

   2. Identify AI-supported and/or agentic lead gen solutions to help businesses scale messaging

5. Please note that this case study for a single project in a series of studies that helped the team to move from opportunity scoping to releasing a closed beta of the new 0-to-1 agentic lead gen management tool

Methodology

1. 30x 90-minutes remote interviews with businesses in the US, Vietnam and India (10x participants in each country)

2. We knew from prior research that lead gen usually touches 3 different roles in a company. To capture the full lead gen workflow, I conducted each interview as a triade with the following job functions:

3. Marketing lead: Develops overall lead gen strategy and owns the budget

   1. Performance marketer: Creates ads and monitors campaign performance

   2. Sales or call center agent: Interacts directory with leads via WhatsApp, Instagram or Messenger

4. I moderated interviews in the US. Local research vendors moderated interviews in Vietnam and India.

Recruitment Criteria

1. Business must be in a lead gen vertical (services or high consideration commence)

2. Businesses must currently use some form of business messaging to connect with consumers

3. Businesses must have between 25 to 500 employees

   1. Businesses with less than 25 employees tend to get a low message volume

   2. Businesses with more than 500 employees tend to have more complex enterprise software setups

4. Mix of current tooling setups (first party setups, third party setups)

5. Mix of lead gen verticals (services, healthcare, automotive, financial)

Insights

Businesses struggled to scale business messaging primarily due to 3 key barriers:

1. Data fragmentation: They respond to messages in an inbox, but track leads in a spreadsheet or CRM systems. Those 2 tools don’t talk to each other, which means that business have to constantly toggle between 2 tools and manual copy and past data between tools.

2. Lack of lead scoring: As messages come into the inbox, they all look the same. Businesses don’t know which message to respond to first.

3. Lead qualification is a repetitive and time consuming process: When a lead comes in, sales agents ask leads the same few questions over and over just to assess wether the inquiry is serious and the business could actually fulfill the request.

4. Common CRM systems currently do not offer a compelling soliton to these challenges.

Recommendations

1. Enable lead tracking functionality directly in the inbox. Most businesses track the same few data points (lead stage, follow-up status, phone number, etc.). These data point should be directly attached to each lead conversation.

2. Use AI to enable conversation based lead scoring and identify which message to respond to next

3. Train AI agent to handle basic conversational lead qualification

Follow-up research

Based on my recommendations, the team aligned on a vision for a new agentic lead gen solution as port of the larger Meta Business Agent.

I supported the team with 2 follow-up research projects:

1. Concept testing to decide if we should pursue a Table, Kanban or Chat based interface (we decide on Table + Chat)

2. Four weeks iterative rapid research to support the alpha

Outcomes

The lead gen team followed all recommendations and ultimately build 2 versions of the new lead gen tool:

1. Lead Gen Inbox: In 3 months, the team build lead tracking capabilities directly into the current Meta Business Suite Inbox, including simple agentic lead qualification. This is new feature is currently available to ~38 million businesses using the Meta Business Suite.

2. Agentic Lead Gen: As part of Meta Business Agent, the team is build a new 0-to-1 agent lead gen management suite

   1. Meta Business Agent lead gen was shown to the pubic during the Conversations Conference 2026 in London

   2. Now in closed Beta, the product is on track to generate $500M annually