Business lead generation is the process of identifying new prospects, then using a range of tactics to turn them into new sales opportunities. In this article, 25 experts share their best business lead generation ideas with you. Some you may know, others will be new and they’ll help you improve the quality and quantity of leads entering your sales pipeline.
Here are the top business lead generation ideas from the pros:
Customer referrals should be one of your key sources of new business. This means keeping in touch with your existing customers to ensure you are well placed to get referrals. Kyle Porter advises keeping the conversation informal. For example, “Hey John, we’ve got a killer new feature coming out that does X & Y. Which other marketing execs do you think would find this interesting?”
A good small business sales CRM will automatically provide you with the
sales analytics reports you need to stay to monitor to keep on top of lead generation. For instance, Pipedrive will provide sales stage activity metrics that allow you to see that enough cold calling is taking place. I recommend
Pipedrive because it’s intuitive, it provides all the sales analytics you need to maintain a healthy sales pipeline, sales reps love working with it, and it starts from only $10/user/month.
Being unprepared is a big disadvantage especially when you’re cold calling to generate new prospects. The best sales reps take time to gather some sales intelligence on their prospects and create a plan before picking up the phone.
Steli Efti, the CEO of Close.io explains it very well, “If you don’t have the right plan going into a sales call, it’s going to be much harder to close the deal. Every sales call, from a cold call to a closing call, should follow a pre-planned structure that is meant to optimize the likelihood of a desired result.”
Sales navigator is a sister business to LinkedIn that works completely independently from your LinkedIn Social Media profile. It’s rapidly becoming an essential tool for any B2B sales professional because it has the largest database of customer prospects in the US and around the world.
You can target prospective customers via 31 contact attributes like job title and when they started their current role. You can also target them by 14 company attributes like size of company and location. The huge quantity of data, the excellent data quality and the multiple ways you can cut and dice data using 45 different attributes means that you can target the right leads accurately and communicate with a much more personal approach.
Lusha is a simple app that enables you to reveal mobile numbers, direct phone numbers and contact email addresses when you are browsing prospects in LinkedIn or Twitter. It takes two clicks to launch Lusha in as an app in Google Chrome. If you’re existing customers use Twitter and LinkedIn this is a great way to generate the direct contact data that you need to make effective and more personalized
cold calls.
Using
Leadberry is a cost-effective way to find out who is visiting your website. Leadberry is recommended by
Google Analytics and can provide you with the names of the organizations visiting your site as well as the email addresses of the key contacts that you target. Knowing who has visited your website in real-time via email alerts, allows you not only to identify new leads visiting your site for the first time, but also existing prospects as they revisit during later stages of the sales process.
7. Automate Follow-up Emails to Stay in Touch
Not every lead will turn into your customer on first contact. One thing is for sure, they will likely buy from someone at a future date. It’s important you keep in front of them, so you can have the opportunity to reach them when they are ready to buy. Using a follow up email campaign after your initial consultation will keep your company in front of your prospect on a regular basis. This will in turn lead to some of them converting into sales when they get to a point where they are ready to buy. The fact that the email campaign is automated means that it requires little management from you.
Again, a good small business sales CRM like
Pipedrive or
Insightlyintegrated with a mailing tool like
Mailchimp will make it easy for you to setup an automated email campaign.
8. Qualify Your Leads Better
Linda Parry, Esq., Chief Executive Officer, Product Launchers
What many companies do not realize is that there is generally only one person responsible for making a purchasing decision about your product or service. Put together a hit list of companies that you want to work with and then find out who that one person is through online research and cold calling. Once you have their contact information, personalize your outreach and this will become one of your highest performing business lead generation ideas.
9. Get Personal
Augustus Franklin, Founder/CEO, CallHub
Since I work in the politics and advocacy, I have a lot of customers reaching out to me looking for business lead generation ideas and ways to connect with elected officials, mostly when Facebook, Twitter, and email, all prove ineffective for them. And it’s always the same reason; because all these channels are easily glanced over or ignored. But, writing a letter or calling them up and having a real conversation; that’s difficult to ignore and that’s what always works best.
It’s the same strategy with your cold leads. At a time when people are being overwhelmed with digital ads, it pays to actually call them up and have real conversations that add value to their lives. Getting personal; that’s how you get people to buy your stuff.
10. Reach Out With Cold Emails
Lidia Varesco Racoma, Art director & designer, Lidia Varesco Design
Sometimes the best business lead generation ideas and well established, but simply done well. I created a targeted list of potential prospects in my niche. I reach out to them personally via
cold email to start a conversation and determine if my design studio may be the right fit for them. It has resulted in new clients as well as helped me build my email list. The key is to research each of your prospects thoroughly and send them a fully personalised email.
11. Create Website Landing Pages
One of the most successful business lead generation ideas I use is to drive traffic to a landing page and convert the traffic into leads. Sounds obvious, but there are a lot of tweaks along the way. I’m testing Facebook Advertising right now, though most of our traffic comes from Google Search. Optimizing landing pages takes relentless testing. For example, with less fields for the lead to fill out, we can get more sign-ups, but the quality is not quite as good.
12. Get Serious About Using Keywords
We’ve explored lots of business lead generation ideas and the one that has been most successful is generating leads through search engine traffic. We make a list of questions that customers are likely to ask Google, then we write a post answering each question. In the end, you get very targeted traffic and the ability to build trust with readers by solving their question or problem.
13. Attend Your Local Chamber of Commerce
One of my best business lead generation ideas is to go to chamber of commerce seminars and workshops and network small business owners there. I collect their business cards, send them an email asking if they want to get together for a one-to-one, where we can learn more about each other’s businesses. Many times this leads me to get a new client without spending much money at all.
14. Use Networking to Get Face-to-Face
One of my best business lead generation ideas is still
business networking. I love digital and it’s right at the heart of what I do, but face-to-face contact can’t be beaten for impact and the ability to have a two-way conversation. Being an experienced presenter I regularly offer to present for free at events too. I always keep it informative and non-salesy, and I tend to find that even a third-hand recommendation from someone who saw my presentation and told a friend, can be warmer than a complete stranger coming to my website.
15. Use Success Stories to Woo Your Customers
David Klein , Director of Marketing, ClickTime
Emailing potential customers with links to customer success stories has been incredibly successful for us. A proper case study that demonstrates clear, quantifiable ROI for a specific industry or need, validates the work you do and sets your sales team up for success. Unlike whitepapers and eBooks, case studies are relatively quick and affordable business lead generation ideas to move forward with. Plus, they resonate powerfully with potential customers at all levels in an organization.
16. Make Alliances with Your Top Customers
Develop strategic alliances with customers who naturally refer to you as part of the way they do business themselves. For instance, every client of mine receives a certificate for a complimentary consultation as part of my “Preferred Partners Program.” My partners include a vocal/presentation expert, a financial advisor, professional organizer and executive attorney. All of these services make sense for my busy clients. And all of my partners’ clients get a certificate entitling them to a free session with one of Enerpace’s coaches. It’s a win-win!
17. Generate Leads Efficiently with Co-Marketing
Patrick Whatman, Mention
Co-marketing partnerships have been our most efficient business lead generation idea by far. Each time we partner up with another company to create co-branded content, we get 2x promotion and 2x more leads. Out of all types of co-marketing partnerships, we’ve seen the most ROI from webinars, as they generate the most leads and require less preparation or input from different teams (e.g. design, development). Plus, you’re often able to present the same or similar content to different forums, which saves even more time.
18. Focus on Link Building
Your competitors are getting links to their sites on industry sites, blogs, and listings. These backlinks add value to their site for search engines and can also be sources for new leads to find out about them. Find out which sites are giving them backlinks with a free search on
MOZ Site Explorer. You’ll see who’s linking to their sites so you can target the same ones for your own backlinks and comments.
19. Use Pay Per Click Ads
The toughest thing about investing in SEO is that it can take months or even years to see the fruits of your labour. This is where paid channels such as pay-per-click advertising on Google, LinkedIn or Facebook can come in handy. They essentially allow you to drive traffic to your landing page and see almost immediate results. Be wary though, the cost per lead can be high, especially in the early stages when you’ve not yet optimised your campaign.
20. Blog Regularly
One of our most successful business lead generation ideas is blogging because it’s a great way to keep your website fresh and it builds up your visibility for Google keywords. The B2B sales cycle is often longer than the B2C one, so blogging is also great for building trust in your brand and helping to nurture leads through your sales pipeline. But don’t write blog content that only speaks to your potential customers, write it for other experts in your industry and then reach out and encourage them to share your content. A simple message to a blogger in your industry can do wonders for your SEO. For instance, “Hey, I enjoyed your recent blog post about X. It inspired me to write a similar piece about Y. I would love to get your feedback – here is the link.”
21. Create Campaigns for Past Customers
The best of our business lead generation ideas is focused direct mail and email campaigns on customers who have done business with us over the past five years. We also arrange these customers by their buying patterns, which again helps to create small, targeted lists that can then be personalized. Personalization is so, so effective when it comes to B2B. Within our email campaigns, we offer the customer an incentive such as a first look at a new collection, multi buy offers, free samples books or an industry report.
22. Release an eBook
An eBook acts as a great incentive to get people to sign-up and provide you with their contact details and other useful information that you previously would not have access to. For instance, you could ask them to describe their biggest pain point and provide their mobile phone number in addition to their name and email address. Remember, website visitors are only willing to give up so much information, so the better the value offer, the more information they will give.
23. Create & Participate in Podcasts
Podcasts are easy to make in-house and you can also participate in short radio programs and webinars being hosted by other experts in your industry. This helps to position you as experts, builds awareness of your business in your marketplace and opens the door to word-of-mouth and business networking opportunities.
24. Understand Your Cost Tolerance Early
When using pay-per-click advertising create a plan with budget expectations and performance targets such as cost per lead and cost per sale. If after three months, with AB testing to refine and improve, you’ve not gotten below those targets then pause to reconsider the channel. A good benchmark for cost tolerance per sale is to invest up to 25% of the lifetime value of a customer account. This will get you moving in the right direction.
25. Don’t take Your Foot Off the Gas
Business lead generation ideas are great to put in place, but many business owners take their foot off the gas when business is good and they’re busy fielding sales opportunities. This opens their business up to instability and risk in the future because a shortfall of leads opens up in their pipeline. Don’t forget to consistently generate leads on a week-to-week basis to maintain the health of your sales pipeline and protect the future g
1. Ask For Introductions, Not Business Referrals
2. Use Data to Inform Your Approach
3. Go in With a Plan
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