How to Land the Leads Your Business Needs

Welcome to the third article in our series on lead generation: Lead Gen in 10.

So far we’ve shown you how to define what a ‘good’ lead is for your business and calculate how many of them you need to hit your sales targets. Now we’re going to look at tried-and-tested tactics for generating sales leads. 

The 1^st step is to ask yourself this important question:

What kind of leads do you want?

If you sell a lot of low-price goods or services, your lead generation approach will be different from a company that sells a small number of high-value items. The smaller the number of sales you need, the more targeted your approach needs to be.

In our 2^nd article (How many leads do you need), we referenced existing and new revenue opportunities. Common sense tells us to secure existing business and try to cross or upsell to them first before looking for new leads.

Want 4 more ways to improve your lead generation?
Our Lead Gen in 10 workbook will give you five useful exercises to improve every aspect of your lead generation.

Tried-and-tested ways to generate leads

A) Leveraging Relationships

Leads that come through a recommendation usually close faster than leads that find you online because some of the selling is already done.

The best way to get referrals is to ask for them. Customers who value your service will be happy to refer you on but they may need some kind of nudge. If necessary, you can incentivise referrals by offering some kind of referral scheme.

Distributors, resellers and retailers are a great source of leads but they usually require a bit of elbow grease to start delivering.

You can find some great advice on how to get more value from your existing partners and how to find new ones in our previous article on increasing revenue.

Most businesses have a lot of stalled opportunities in their CRM. These leads may feel like a lost cause but it’s usually easier to re-energise a previous opportunity than create a totally new one.

The final exercise in this series will show you how to find and target existing opportunities in your CRM. If you’re looking for something more detailed, here’s a step-by-step guide that will help you find, re-energise and close old leads. 

B) Nurturing Strategies

4.Cold emails and calls

Cold email is considered quite unfashionable in some quarters. But for many businesses - including our own - it can still generate quality opportunities when done right.

Any kind of cold outreach is only as good as the list you have and how you approach contacts. You need targets that have a problem you can help with and you need to approach them in a way that starts a conversation.

5.Events, seminars and webinars

Offline and online events are a tried-and-tested way to meet potential customers. We have used webinars to drive more than 2,000 signups over the last 12 months. If it works for us, it could work for you.

A common mistake that people make is to think a lot about the subject matter, but not enough about the follow-ups and next steps. Your event and follow-ups should push people onto the next step in the buyer journey.

6.Self-assessment tools

Our Marketing 360 self-assessment is a good example of a self-assessment tool. It asks our potential customers a series of questions and gives them personalised content that helps them understand their marketing strengths and weaknesses. We link to it throughout our website and regularly in our content marketing.

C) Digital Channels 

7. LinkedIn organic & Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is another great way to find leads and make contact. You can use it to build laser-targeted lists of new contacts and share relevant, valuable content with them via InMail. LinkedIn says Sales Navigator is 75% more effective than emails and calling (although they would say that).

Some people find posting content a bit intimidating. If you’re the same, check out our  Top Tips to help business owners and CEO's create awesome LinkedIn posts. It will give you everything you need to start sharing your journey on LinkedIn and building relationships with potential customers.

8. LinkedIn, Facebook or AdWords ads

Buying social or PPC ads can be a great way to reach your entire market with targeted offers. That said, if you don’t go about it the right way, it can also be a quick way to lose money. Buying clicks is usually easy but getting the right people to click and carry on the conversation is the real challenge.

While the platforms have made it possible to ‘self-serve’, working with a specialist who knows what they’re doing will improve your likelihood of success. Trying to save money by working it out for yourself can be a black hole.

9.Website optimisation

Everyone wants more traffic to their website but are you generating the right traffic and doing enough to convert that traffic once it’s on your website?

A lot of smaller businesses make the mistake of focusing almost entirely on generating traffic and ignoring converting that traffic into sales opportunities, often called ‘conversion rate optimisation or CRO.

There are a few simple things you can do to get more conversions:

• Include testimonials from happy customers and case studies throughout your website to reassure visitors you can deliver on your promises
  
  
• Make it easy for people to contact you by email and phone or via simple forms and webchat
  
  
• Invest in an attractive and usable website design - good design is a trust signal! You also need to make sure it looks good on mobile as that will be the entry point for an ever-increasing share of your visitors
  
  
• Focus your web copy on who you help and how you help them rather than telling people what you are, e.g. ‘we help small business owners grow their companies’ is better than ‘we do marketing’
  
  
• Place call-to-actions throughout your website encouraging visitors to take the next step on the customer journey - you have to tell people what you want them to do next.

10.Direct mail

Direct mail tends to be more expensive than digital channels because of the cost of distribution and production as well as the lag time for actual postal deliveries (unless you hand deliver it yourself and make it personalised).

It’s harder to do in the age of remote work, but it can still work. In fact, if you pick your targets wisely it can be spectacularly effective as there are fewer people doing it.

Finding the approach that’s right for you

Not every approach on this list will be a perfect fit for your business. But hopefully they’ve given you some idea of the options available. You don’t need to try all of them at once, just pick one or two that you think are a good fit for you and your customer.

This is the third exercise in our Lead Gen in 10 series. For more exercises to help you close more new business from your lead generation activity, check out the other exercises below:

• What’s a ‘good’ lead for your business?
• How many leads do you need to hit your revenue targets?

If you've followed all the exercises in this series your lead gen should already be picking up. But there's more to marketing than just lead generation. 

Our Marketing 360 assessment will help you identify other potential issues and offer advice on how to solve them.

Click here to get your Marketing Maturity Score.