The Basics of Lead Generation

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. 

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