The Beginner’s Guide to Getting Leads

Basics: what’s a lead?

A lead is a person who has clearly indicated interest in your product or service. This could be someone who has had contact with your sales team and discussed your service, someone who has downloaded your content, or someone who has previously used your product. All of these are leads.

Inbound lead generation is part of any holistic lead generation strategy

Inbound leads are people who approach you. They might do this because they already know that you’re selling exactly the product or service they need. Or maybe you’ve posted a sweet step-by-step guide on how to solve a problem, and they’ve interacted with your content because they’re actively searching for it.

These leads are amazing. They’re self-selecting for your attention! You already know that they definitely want to hear from you, and the parts of your content they interact with can give you some great guesses about what they might be looking for from you.

There are limitations to inbound lead generation

Inbound lead generation relies on people searching for information about the specific problem your product or service can fix. If this was your only strategy, you’d be taking it on faith that your customers all know exactly what that problem is, know if they’re having it, and are actively seeking a solution for it.

While this is a sure-fire way to make sure that the only leads you get are those with a strong interest in your product, it’s hardly a holistic strategy for lead generation—it’s a passive one.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Sometimes it’s best to let a new partner make the first move. But if you always take it slow and steady, you might be missing out on big opportunities.

Outbound lead generation is active

Outbound leads are the leads you reach out to, who then agree to talk to you about your product or service. You can think of it like reaching out for what inbound leaves on the table, which can sometimes be a lot.

Nobody knows what your business does better than you do, and that includes your customers. There are lots of reasons someone might not have approached your company on their own, and not all of them are indicators of disinterest—and that’s where outbound lead generation comes in. Where inbound requires leads to have awareness of a problem and actively seek out solutions on their own, outbound is permitted to be more direct: you can contact someone and tell them about the solution to a problem that they didn’t know had a solution. It skips the awareness and active search elements of inbound marketing—a lead generation shortcut.

Outbound lead generation

When you contact someone to qualify an outbound lead, you don’t want them to be utterly disinterested in your product or service. If you’re selling something that solves a problem they aren’t having, you’re wasting everyone’s time, interrupting their work day and likely annoying them. This isn’t a great way to close a sale.

How to find the absolutely wrong contacts

You can do this easily. Just use long, undifferentiated lists of poorly-defined contacts bought from dodgy sources.

Look, you probably don’t need us to tell you that a random sample of emails someone scraped off six-year-old Facebook pages does not represent a list of actual potential customers for you. Much like an unruly patron at a pub who reels from table to table yelling at other drinkers, yelling at uninterested strangers via their inboxes will also get you forcibly escorted from the premises—and in this case, that means your email sender reputation will be obliterated, your emails won’t arrive, and, in the worst-case scenario, you’ll fall afoul of spam laws. Don’t be that guy!

How to do outbound lead generation right

We know how. We’ve got your back. Here’s a list to get you started:

1. Know who uses your product or service and what, therefore, your ideal customer is going to look like. (Not sure how to do this? Check out this article on how to create actually useful customer profiles.)
2. Only you know your product back-to-front and upside down, so have a hard think about who is really going to benefit from it. Consider:
   1. Demographic factors
   2. Technographic factors
   3. Geographic factors
   4. Budget considerations
3. Be selective and targeted about your contacts for outbound lead generation. Nobody likes to feel like you’re approaching a relationship with them without really valuing them. Make sure every person you’re aiming to turn into a sales qualified lead is on your list of contacts for a reason you can articulate.
4. Personalise, personalise, personalise. By here, you’ve already done the hard work of figuring out exactly why this person is on your list. Now make sure they understand, too. Check any information your research has uncovered about them and use it to make that first contact a personal, tailored and highly relevant experience.