While it's easy to whip up a "basics of lead gen" post, the fact is that there isn't anything basic about lead generation. It's typically job #1 of marketers: to provide leads - qualified leads - to the sales team to be able to sell. What I hope to outline here are the basics of approaching a lead gen task - particularly if you are a one-(wo)man show or if you know nothing about marketing.

Here are some tips to get you started on the right track: 

1. Understand Your Ideal Customer with Buyer Personas. While this is something that may change over time as your business and products evolve, you should have a good idea of who your customer is before you go about trying to find them. Do the research, starting with existing customers to build a profile of who you are looking for. Start with basic demographics like age, company size / type, job title. Then advance to more sophisticated understanding of their role in the business, their needs, and make sure that your company and products help solve their challenges. I could write a whole post on this process, but it helps to have a rough outline for you to get started. 
2. Start with a Goal. This can be tough for businesses - especially startups - to pin down, but try and determine the amount of leads you will need to meet your revenue goals. There's a bit of math involved with this one, and history of close rates definitely helps: essentially, you are trying to determine the number of Identify goals: looking at your typical sales funnel, what is the ideal # of leads will result in the $ amount of revenue you need to generate for the quarter? 
3. Please don't buy leads. Okay, so less of a personal opinion and more of a desperation to get rid of this terrible practice. Focus your cash and energies into creating the most value possible to attract prospects, instead of buying a list of people who don't know who you are and don't want to hear from you. This practice just needs to go away. Plus I'm sick of "Hi Ashley, How would you feel about getting access to thousands of executive email address lists..." emails. They irritate me and need to go away. . 
4. Run Campaigns. Again, could write a whole other post on this, but using your buyer personas as a guide, identify some channels where your ideal audience will be. Maybe they are on Twitter and you can reach them with paid ads. Or maybe investing in a sponsored content campaign with a leading publication makes sense. Align your goals, budget, and channels to determine the best place to invest. Hint: not everyone is "on social media". Let's make some educated guesses, shall we? 
5. Have a Communications Plan in Place. So you have leads coming in - awesome! Chances are, they may not buy right away. Or, as with B2C, they bought but you want to retain them as a customer. Make sure you have a coherent communications plan to keep these leads engaged, help them down the funnel, and keep them coming back.  
6. Closing the Loop: Analyze Your Results. With your original lead goal number in hand, after you have run your campaigns, revisit at the end of your quarter. In terms of volume, were you ambitious in your lead gen projections, or less so? How many of those leads were in fact qualified? What source did the most qualified leads come from? What was the Cost Per Lead (CPL) of each lead by source? Asking questions like this will help you start the process over again when you draft campaigns for the next quarter. I have to encourage you to also close the loop and speak with reps who received your leads: were they any good? Why or why not?
   
   

Hopefully this gave you a good premise to base your lead gen programs around. It's definitely a lot, and not something to be taken lightly. I'm secretly hoping that after reading this, you actually consider the above strategies and your customer before jumping on that too-good-to-be-true lead list up for sale. You're better than that. 

Overwhelmed? Contact me to help you with your lead generation initiatives. I've done all of the above and much more - and can work with you and your budget to just help you come up with a plan, or we can execute and analyze results together. 

I recently had an inquiry come in on a consulting project for 3 separate projects. He was representing a group of consultants that created 3 different websites, products, and businesses. After some back and forth, he decided I wasn't a good fit. And after the back and forth, I agreed. 

The thing is, he led with (and then couldn't get past) my quoted hourly rates. 

Before you go on about how ridiculously expensive I am, let me explain why leading with cost is not the best option for any marketing project - especially when I don't have all the information I need to make an educated quote. The way I think about freelance work breaks down into 3 components: 

1) Focus on the Goals. The prospect just sent me three distinct websites without much context. He wanted to know what I would charge to "essentially to raise awareness around our products and services through inbounding, direct mail and SEO. Maybe the best place to start is your hourly rate." This tells me a few things: a) he doesn't really have a marketing plan, and b) he just wants a few "marketing-like" things done but doesn't actually understand each tactic and how it will impact the growth of the business.


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A GOOD freelance marketer will stop you right there (as I did - shameless plug) I asked him to take a step back. What exactly did he hope this marketing person would accomplish? Did he want to drive traffic, leads, or brand awareness? By which of these metrics did he define "success"? All these questions force you to think about marketing as a function as it rolls up to your greater business plan, as well as help shape expectations for the freelancer-client relationship.

Needless to say, he just wanted to "raise brand awareness. What is your hourly rate?" 

#fail

2) Understand the Scope. After you have a good understanding of what you want to accomplish and draft a marketing strategy (which I can help with, btw), that's where the tactics - like SEO and Direct Mail - come in. Mapping these tactics to success metrics (I.e., I want my website to generate 3,000 visits in 3 months) will give you tangible marketing goals to start with, work towards, and report against as the project continues. 

After tactics are defined, that's where the matter of hourly rates can come in. Think you have the SEO bug and want to optimize your site? Go for it - then maybe I can take some email marketing off your plate. Listing out tactics, hours to completion, and a deadline by which you want these tasks completed by is how any successful marketing project is manage. I wish I could tell you online marketing it's a magic switch that you flip and forget about after you pay a freelancer x amount per hour. Nope. 

3) Determine a Fair Price. Knowing how much you are willing to invest in marketing comes into play here. Decide what you are and are not willing to pay for, against what you expect to get in return. There's many projects that are definitely a set and forget it - like designing a website - but often involve later maintenance and updating. Then you have recurring marketing activities, like managing social media or writing weekly blogs - all stuff I can do if you don't want to - for a smaller retainer fee. Also included in retainers are monthly reports that will depict how successful all the marketing work was against what you had initially outlined as goals. So just think about what you want and what budget you want to allocate to make that happen. 

After all of this and you still just want some college student to Tweet on your behalf, you've been warned that you get what you pay for.