Lead Generation — Personalised New Business Marketing in 2024
Lead generation is simply making that first connection with your ideal prospective clients.
How does anyone know you’re looking for new business if you don’t say?
How do you know if someone has the problem that you solve if you don’t ask?
The number one issue we see with business development is when people assume that everyone else is too busy or in-demand to talk.
Yet, we can all make time when we find a perfect win-win opportunity.
So, how do we find the right people, at the right time, to matchmake — without unlimited advertising and networking spending?
Let’s discuss how our lead generation systems:
- Identify your total addressable market (TAM)
- Find all the publicly available contact details matching your ideal contact profile (ICP) — for legitimate interest contacts, in relation to their business role
- Ask them if they have the problem or need that you have something to offer that solves
- Generate a continual flow of new leads, calls, and engagements from genuine personalised connections, happy for the introduction
Reverse engineer the results
The ideal result for our outreach initiatives, is that your new clients are glad you found them, brought your solutions to them, and all sides will benefit greatly from the newfound connection.
Working backwards from this, we have to ensure your offer gives significant value, and those we introduce you to, need what you can deliver.
The advantage of partners
There are many times in life, we wish someone would just bring us the answer.
This is precisely what we do — at scale.
We can gather hundreds and thousands of business contact details that match your offer, based on; company type, size, revenue, head-count, fundraising activity, region, job titles, time in role, etc.
The more detail you can share in describing your ideal contact persona, the more accurate an avatar we can build for lead generation — and assess their likely interest in your capabilities.
Note; regarding GDPR, these details are not for mass emailing of generic marketing materials, such as newsletters.
Lead contact details are strictly for prospect research — to confirm a legitimate interest in receiving direct messages, for role-specific business opportunities.
Further details on GDPR best-practice is covered below, in the FAQs…
Lead generation tools
Our lead generation toolkit is surprisingly simple, it’s just:
- Search engines
- Shared spreadsheets
- Collaborative scripts — for introductions, follow-ups, and responses
- Social media
- Phone or video calls
The clever part is our experience of the nuances in conveying the right messages, at the right time, to the right people.
We have to present the appropriate offering, responses, and follow-ups for both sides of the conversation to be happy with their new-found connection.
Of course, this is also known as a sales funnel.
Hence, we have a page and service dedicated to sales funnels — to make the most of these valuable leads.
We must respect our prospects’ time, budgets, needs, and priorities — and to make sure it’s a good fit for all parties.
Lead qualifying scripts
Just because we have a new connection, it doesn’t mean we have to do business — everyone needs to qualify, and be qualified.
A great starting question is often a variation of:
Do you have this specific problem?
Often then followed by your explainer — for how you’ve solved that before for people like them.
Lastly, there’s timing and budget — when do they need it solved?
And, how will the solution need to pay for itself?
We tailor outreach, follow-up, and response script to each brand and person.
Communication is always in your voice and style — with our prompts and refinements — to ensure qualifying information, and next-steps, are clear to all.
Search engines for leads
The “search engines” we use for finding leads are social media platforms, industry and events websites.
We use these as directories of contacts, companies, and links — where people provide their contact details, specifically to attract new opportunities.
For example: LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X, BuiltWith, Google Maps, membership bodies, conference attendees, event directories, your own CRM systems and mailboxes, etc.
We can use all of these, and any other company and contact data source, to build out your databases of relevant prospects — sending them each a researched, timely, and personalised introduction.
The tools we will be using are known as “scrapers”, that automate the reading of publicly available data for up-to-date lead generation details.
Then we have to clean and validate all contact data.
We extract, clean, and import the details we need, typically: Name, Company, Work Phone, Work Email, Website, Profile Links — plus any other business information available, for context.
The Data Protection compliance use-case for this business contact data is a legitimate interest in individual permission-based business-to-business connections — using the business correspondence details that people publish to invite such relevant messages.
Handling large amounts of similar data takes great diligence, as we’ll be relying on the accuracy of every single record, to ensure each connection is personalised and appropriate.
Email outreach to new leads
We get one chance to make a first-impression.
Unfortunately, open email inboxes have been abused over the years by spammers. So, our first courtesy and challenge in emailing anyone for the first time, is in respecting their time and our first impression — by not spamming them with irrelevant, generic nonsense.
This means; we must have a genuine reason to email, and the email must be unique, personal, researched, and seek permission.
We earn invitations for further conversations by offering more value than the time-costs we’re asking of the recipient — just for them to entertain, read, and reply to our addition to their daily correspondence.
Recipients must always be offered the opportunity to decline further messages, and if so requesting — to respect their protections under privacy laws and professional communications best-practice — no further similar communications can be sent for at least 4-years.
By value, we mean; a unique insight from our research, or a tangible complimentary taster from one of our lead magnets.
Our first message is never to sell any products or services, merely to offer some useful insight from our research — and any complimentary resources we have, that may help in their role and business.
Only when further correspondence or a call is requested, do we have the permission and opportunity to gather further information — and qualify if our offer is indeed relevant for their needs and resources?
Direct messages
The principles for emailing also apply to direct messages — within each respective platform’s restrictions, terms, and costs.
We’ve all received the templated spray & pray messages, can tell them a mile off — and archive them abruptly without a further thought. We don’t do generic.
The key to a genuine message is to make a connection to content that a person has recently published, that invites comment.
We’re not invading people’s personal space, we’re inviting them into ours.
Business development assistants
Your time is valuable — so is your recipient’s. We respect both.
We save everyone time by creating processes — including AI-assisted response analysis systems — for time-efficient personalised message composition.
This enables outreach to tens or hundreds of relevant contacts a day, every day — to only then pick up the conversation when it becomes appropriate.
All you have to do is; review our drafts, customise them if required, and approve for sending.
It’s the work you know needs doing to generate new business — but otherwise have to do manually, repetitively, and consistently, to achieve the numbers needed to meet your new business targets.
Most of our full-time business development clients like to have around one or two qualified leads a day to interact with, to allow enough time to give each a thorough brand experience.
We can scale systems for more leads per day, or pace them for less, and pause for holidays and other catch-up needs.
We’ll monitor all shared introductory communications through our dedicated CRM system — to help with training and refining the process. Until you onboard new clients, and move the conversations to your private channels.
Lead generation FAQs
This may be a new initiative for your or organisation, or you’ve tried something similar, unsuccessfully.
Let us reassure you that our methods work, are ethical, the system is scaleable, and we will achieve your goals.
Results are guaranteed. The timing just depends on you saying when…
And, that brings us to our question for you…
How much new business can you handle?
We’re live, direct, and strictly ethical — so let’s get straight to business…
Tell us what you need, and your first sample batch of leads is on us!