Introduction: The Fish Pond Theory — A Decade-Old B2B Acquisition Framework That Still Holds
Yu Lei, co-founder of BesChannels, delivered a packed session at Dedao New Business School's April Hangzhou Growth Summit on "New Acquisition Plays + AI" to hundreds of founders. When he wrote the slogan "BesChannels — making acquisition and conversion simpler" ten years ago, he never imagined that the word "acquisition" would bring him together with this audience in person a decade later.
BesChannels has served more than 100 leading B2B enterprises—including Microsoft, Lenovo, Schneider Electric, and Honeywell—and distilled two key insights from that work:
Leads as a Universal Language
Wherever your business revolves around "leads"—B2B or high-ticket B2C—these methods apply.
Strikingly Similar Processes Across Company Sizes
Whether you are a global enterprise with 200,000–300,000 employees or a private company with 200–300 people, the acquisition workflow looks almost identical.
"We developed the Fish Pond Theory ten years ago, and it remains highly relevant today. In B2B, there are only five or six ways to generate traffic and capture leads. The real challenge is what you do after you have the lead."
The Fish Pond Theory breaks down into four stages: capture leads → build a private lead pool → nurture, incubate, and activate → convert and close. It works like fishing at sea—sell the big catch right away, but do not waste the small ones; raise them in a pond until they are ready to sell. Customer acquisition follows the same logic.
Yu Lei emphasizes a core B2B insight: generating traffic ≠ customer acquisition. With AI on the scene, everyone focuses on how AI changes traffic generation—but the greater payoff lies in what you do after you capture a lead.
I. Reactivating Dormant Leads: The Overlooked Gold Mine — The Lenovo Case
The first common mistake: chasing only new leads while letting old ones die in the database. In B2B, leads have conversion cycles. If you focus exclusively on new leads, dormant ones become a massive waste.
Lenovo is a household name. Beyond its well-known PC business, it runs a large B2B operation selling servers, computers, and industry solutions to enterprises. When Lenovo came to BesChannels, the situation was clear: internally they held millions of high-quality lead records, but lacked systematic operations—and email was undervalued as a channel.
Key Insight: The Value Behind Every Lead
Behind every B2B lead—someone buying servers and computers—there may be a deal worth hundreds of thousands, millions, or even tens of millions. With millions of leads, you are looking at one gold mine after another.
Phase 1: Finding the Real Problem
At first the team assumed the problem was weak email copy, poor poster design, or unclear value propositions. Frankly, they had diagnosed the wrong issue. The real core problem: customers always care about their own needs, and those needs should always be hyper-personalized. Before 2024, Lenovo sent the exact same activation content to audiences of 100,000, 300,000, and 500,000 people.
AI's true value in activation: making reactivation emails hyper-personalized.
Phase 2: A Methodology Built on Explicit + Implicit Needs
After some detours, the team distilled a simple, powerful framework focused on two core dimensions:
Explicit Needs
The customer's behavior over the past three months—which events they attended, which assets they downloaded. Like noticing someone recently started ordering milk tea—you know they are a milk tea drinker.
Implicit Needs
Determined by company name + job title. A manufacturing CIO naturally cares about AI transformation; an education procurement director naturally cares about cost. Like knowing someone is from Sichuan—you can guess they prefer spicy food.
Draw two concentric circles: the inner circle is "explicit" (recent behavior); the outer circle is "implicit" (the range of latent needs). If a behavior falls outside the implicit circle—for example, a manufacturing CIO accidentally clicks on consumer-goods content—do not trust that signal, or your message will miss the mark entirely.
The Three-Step Email Method: Surface → Deepen → Bind
Surface the Explicit Need
"Mr. Wang, I noticed you recently attended our AI summit and downloaded manufacturing-related materials."
Deepen the Implicit Need
"As a manufacturing CIO, you are likely focused on how AI can power digital transformation in manufacturing."
Bind the Solution
Based on the first two steps, naturally recommend the matching product or solution.
Results: Lenovo AI Email Reactivation in Practice
Initial Test (Manufacturing + Education)
Scaled Validation (Multi-Industry Rollout)
"Polished copy that looks the same for everyone is far less effective than plain copy that shows you understand them. The core is: I get you. So I tell leaders in the room—sometimes you can let your designer go home early. With AI, you do not need them tweaking posters over and over. What matters is understanding the customer."
Key Takeaways from the Lenovo Case
- Dormant lead reactivation is worth doing—even for resource-rich clients like Lenovo, because the ROI is compelling.
- Hyper-personalization beats polished design—the core is understanding customer needs, not refining brand visuals.
- Explicit + implicit needs—a stronger way to surface high-value opportunities inside your lead pool.
SMB Validation: The FineUp New Energy Export Case
Theory needs data. The team worked with FineUp, a Shenzhen company exporting new-energy vehicles and motorcycles to Central Asia, North Africa, and Russia—fewer than 20 employees, over ¥100M in revenue, a classic mid-size B2B business.
| Metric | AI Email (768 sent) | Standard Email (248 sent) | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unique opens | ~50% (nearly half opened) | 11 people | ↑ Significantly ahead |
| Link clicks (high-intent prospects) | 7 people | 0 people | ↑ From 0 to 7 |
You may only reactivate 1% each time, but you can run it every week. Twenty to thirty runs a year yields a 20–30% activation rate; fifty runs can push even higher. New-energy vehicle exports face three buyer types: price-sensitive, customs-focused, and premium/feature-driven—hyper-personalization is the key.
Getting Started: Spreadsheet + AI Is Enough
At small scale, you only need a large language model (Doubao/DeepSeek) + a multi-dimensional spreadsheet. Core fields: name, company, title, industry (preferred), recent behavior, and need. The spreadsheet's "AI field" generates personalized copy in one click—for email or for sales to paste into WeChat/WhatsApp.
Implementation difficulty: ★★☆☆☆
II. Marketing–Sales Alignment: The Real Reason Behind Poor Lead Conversion
"Poor marketing–sales alignment is probably the biggest reason leads fail to convert. I have seen leaders who love pitting marketing, sales, and inside sales against each other—but that kind of balance really does hurt conversion."
The Laibao case—a vacuum-industry leader whose China marketing budget was cut (trade-war impact) while opportunity targets kept rising. That dilemma mirrors most mid-size companies: budgets shrink, growth targets do not.
The diagnosis: the handoff from marketing to sales was the core gap. Leads marketing produced broke down when sales received them.
How Marketing Passes the Baton: The BANT Framework
Laibao always uses only "N" (need), because B and T are hard to confirm online for high-ticket, complex products. BesChannels uses only "A + N"—skip B (ad spend reveals budget) and T (resolve offline). Adapt BANT to your business, and you can cut marketing–sales friction in half.
Traditional Lead Card
❌ Name, company, phone
❌ Source channel
❌ No visible need
→ Sales have no motivation to follow up
Enriched Lead Card
✅ Name, company, title
✅ BANT confirmed (N = need confirmed)
✅ Need description, behavior history
→ Sales are willing to call and visit
Results: Zero-Budget Growth
Operational Discipline: Two Real Stories
The Bubble Tea Fund
CRM updates are checked weekly. Miss an update: ¥100 fine the first time, ¥200 the second, ¥400 the third—doubling each time. Fines do not go to management; they go into a team bubble tea fund—and those who pay the fine drink along with everyone else. It leverages loss aversion.
Lead Alignment Meetings
These solve the problem of sales rejecting good leads when busy and accepting weak ones when idle. Lead alignment meetings helped BesChannels discover that certain CRM keywords drove traffic and leads but zero deals—only after 2–3 years of spend did they realize those terms were worthless.
III. AI Accelerates Product Development — But Lay the Groundwork for Acquisition Early
VM1 AI—a Chengdu team of fewer than 20 people serving 160+ countries. When they expanded into Europe, they did not build in isolation. Instead they used acquisition to drive product decisions: run test campaigns in German, French, and English markets first, then see which country's users downloaded more, uploaded more complex tasks, and showed stronger willingness to pay.
Test results: German performed best. They then concentrated resources on the German version. Use acquisition and product feedback to drive R&D—not the traditional "build first, acquire later" approach.
IV. Summary: Specificity Creates Depth
"B2B acquisition is not about constantly hunting for new customers. What really determines close rates is not at the back end. Lenovo had millions of records sitting in dormant lead pools—after activation, lifts of 8× or even 20×. Laibao defined qualified leads clearly and handed them off properly—132% lead growth. None of these were big moves; they were simple. But at root, when you break vague goals into concrete steps, things get profound."
BesChannels' Own Practice
- 60% of activation channels come from AI-driven EDM (real data from the past 7 days)
- Articles written by Agent Abby focus mainly on dormant lead reactivation, not net-new acquisition
- AI Agents nudge sales to follow up on leads—AI reminders outperform human reminders by a wide margin
- AI listens to the first inside-sales or sales call, analyzes lead quality, and determines whether the issue is the rep or the lead
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