LinkedIn. Twitter. Facebook. Cold emails. Cold calling. Inbound vs. outbound. These are only some of the many ways to generate leads – and everyone knows them.
The question is not how you should generate leads. The real question is how to generate leads for your business EFFICIENTLY. This includes techniques which can save time, effort and money while ensuring that you reach your audience at the right time and with the right message.
Another important aspect of efficient lead generation is – how to do it without offending a prospect (yes, I’m targeting the ‘hi, how are you miss, would you like to buy this ultra-whitening toothpaste – it can change your life!’ type calls). That was a mouthful – pun intended!
While you may know many of these techniques, here are some tips on how to generate leads efficiently for your business.
What are the most efficient ways to generate leads? (As appeared on Quora)
- Cold emailing: Cold emails have a bit of a bad reputation and more so due to the surplus of carelessly written and on the nose sales emails people tend to receive every day. However, if we think of it with an open mind, cold emails are actually a powerful tool to generate leads. For my part, I’ve managed a response rate of about 1 in 5 with various cold email templates I’ve experimented with, which really is higher than the usual open and response rates. A major factor in finding success with cold emailing is the data you are working with. Many data providers out there have pre-made lists with numerous pseudo companies and bad data like outdated contact details etc. Also remember that you should build lists on your ideal customer profile.
For targeted lists built on your ideal customer profile, you can look into Cloudlead. Benefits of using Cloudlead for lead generation include:
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- pay as you go model where you pay per contact and only pay for leads that you want. No annual obligations for leads you don’t want or will not use.
- replacements on anything above 10% hard bounces
- 90–95% accurate data
- sales triggers and intent data for your niche/product or industry
- Here is a short guide on the 4 Tools for Perfecting Your B2B Sales Funnel – Entrepreneur– very useful read
- Cold calling– you can adopt a combination of cold emailing and cold calling. For example, after the 2nd or 3rd email in your drip campaign, you can try calling prospects who’ve opened your email multiple times. Here’s what my colleague Moaaz as to say about cold calling:
- “My only advice is:Don’t rush this process: Many sales managers/ directors decide to overlook several key points when initiating a cold calling sales strategy. I know cold calling is results driven, direct and quick in terms of getting responses. However, this doesn’t mean you don’t follow some ground rules to ensure your process goes well for you and more importantly your prospects. You’re bound to get great results with cold if you – Research before calling: I can’t express this point enough. You need to know, a) Who you are calling b) What that company does and c) Any intelligence you can gather about their tactics”
- Regular Blogging and SEO – Blog regularly – Make a schedule for updating your blog (daily or weekly) and stick to your schedule. Share your articles on your social media and ask your friends to share across platforms like LinkedIn for increased visibility.
- Drive traffic to your website and blog through clever SEO hacks (follow Neil Patel for tips on SEO) and regularly sharing your blogs on your social media.
- Social Media Posting – Carefully build a list of followers on your account if you don’t have a good following. Start by following influencers and thought leaders in your space. Chances are that they will also follow you back. Post regularly using tools like Hootsuite. However, you have to be careful about the medium you are utilizing. Try publications like Medium and LinkedIn and platforms like Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest. This is a matter of knowing where your audience mostly is.
- Lead Capture Forms and Live Chat Option: Include pop-up forms and lead capture forms on your website. Make landing pages to share value added material like case studies. Carefully build a marketing list and email them at least once a week with insightful content.
- Pro tip: include a live chat software on your website – this will allow you to take advantage of your website traffic by connecting your buyers with you instantly. Many leads slip through our hands because they simply don’t have the time to fill out lengthy demo forms.
The single most important thing to do is to – experiment. That’s the key to success. Where one technique might not work for your business, a combination of these might.
