How I Generate Leads for my Business

In the previous lesson, we talked about lead generation funnels and why they are important to filter out the high quality leads from the low-quality ones.

Filtering high-quality leads is important because when you are doing high-end B2C sales or low-end B2B sales you will have more leads and a good mix of low quality leads in it.

When you are generating leads via digital marketing a good mix of untargeted and uninterested leads will come into your system.

When you are prospecting for B2B leads and reaching out to businesses, you are generating very high-quality leads.

For example, Clever.com is software for schools for delivering education online. Their minimum pricing starts at $5000 per year. Most of their customers are enterprise customers.

In such cases, they will just reach out to their target customers via a sales force and start converting the leads.

If you are towards the middle of the pricing spectrum you might not have that luxury. That's why we need lead generation funnels.

Before we dive deep into lead generation funnels and how they work, in today's lesson I want to give you an example of my lead generation funnel.

To create a lead generation funnel, you need a lead magnet. The lead magnet is the first part of the entire funnel. Without a lead magnet, you will not be able to generate a lot of leads through inbound marketing.

My lead magnet is my free digital marketing course with 25 videos. For people who want to learn digital marketing, I give away this course for free. But to sign up, people need to give me their name and email ID.

Once they give me their name and email ID, they become my lead. I created this lead magnet a few years back. Once my lead magnet was ready, I went ahead and started driving traffic to it.

First, I used search traffic to get the leads. I used to get more than 5000 visitors a month via the search engines to my blog.

I converted the visitors into leads using this lead magnet. Then I started driving traffic to the lead magnet using Facebook Ads. And then I started using Google Ads to drive the traffic. (Hire Digital Marketing Company to Generate Leads for you)

Once they enter their name and email ID, their course will start. I deliver one lesson every day for 25 days. Until 25 days I do not sell anything. The videos are designed to provide value and build trust with the audience.

Trust building is an important part of sales. Without trust, sales cannot happen. In an offline sales model, trust is usually built via personal relationships.

If a salesman is good at his craft, he would build trust with his prospects and he would close the deals. But when you are generating 100s or 1000s of leads, you cannot have individual conversations with each person who is in your funnel. That's why marketing automation helps in lead generation funnels.

An automated sequence of emails builds trust with your audience on automation. You don't need to lift a finger. Setup the email sequence, get the leads and the trust-building happens automatically. But as we all know, without sales the funnel is not going to sustain itself.

"Sales" is the power source of the funnel. Sales give us transactions and transactions will give us profits.

When we make profits, we can reinvest the money back into the creation of lead magnets, back into traffic driving mechanisms like SEO, SEM, and Display Ads, and back into CRM and Marketing Automation tools that help us build trust with the audience.

So how do we sell in B2C when there is a funnel?

As we have discussed in the previous lesson, we need to pick out the high quality leads from the low-quality ones to engage them in a sales process.

That's where the concept of lead scoring comes in.

I score the leads based on their behavior. For example, let's take 2 leads. 1 lead is highly interested and there is a high chance she will buy. One lead is not so interested and has a very low chance of buying.

The highly interesting lead will open all my emails and read through all the lessons. The less interested lead will hardly open any emails. If I give 1 point for every email open and 3 points for every click inside the email then I can find out who are the highly interested leads and who is not so warmed up to my offer. (Learn Digital Marketing to Generate Leads for your Business)

I would end up calling the highly interested leads and engage them in a sales process.

"Sales" is a separate topic in itself and deserves a series of lessons on its own but you get the idea.

What are Lead Generation Funnels?

In the last three lessons, we talked about lead generation for high-end B2C products and high-end B2B products.

We also understood that low-end B2C products that are simple don't require lead generation.

The effort that is invested in lead generation is not worth it because the profits that we make from each sale is not going to be enough to justify the efforts in lead generation and sales. Also many times, the end customers do not want to share their contact information and talk to a salesperson when they are buying something simple. They just want to make the payment, purchase it, and use it.

If they have to give the contact information and wait for a salesperson to get back, they might not like it. Imagine the last time you ordered something from Amazon. You just ordered it. We don't want to talk to someone in such cases even if someone is available to talk to. It takes time and time is limited. Time is money.

So lead generation is only required when the price of the product is high and the product is complex. Like a house or a car.

However, as a business, if you are generating a lot of leads then you will not be able to call all the leads and serve them.

If you generate 1,000 leads a day and you have 10 salespeople who can call only 10 leads a day then what will you do with the rest of the 900 leads?

If your sales team tries to pick leads randomly and call them, there is a high chance that a lot of these leads will not be interested. It would be an inefficient use of the time of the sales team. And you as a business cannot hire 100 salespeople because that would be too costly.

As a thought experiment, consider that you can hire 100 salespeople and each person calls 10 leads a day. And you are generating 1000 leads a day. What do you think would be the conversion?

Let's say out of every 100 calls to the leads, 1 person converts into a customer. At this conversion ratio, you are going to generate 1 sale per salesperson for every 10 days on average. That means each salesman can convert 3 leads into customers a month.

Recap of the numbers:

Leads generated per day: 1,000
Total salesmen: 100
Calls per day per salesman: 10
Calls per month per salesman: 300
Conversion ratio: 1/100 (1%)
Conversions per month: 30
Conversions per month per salesman: 3

Now the biggest problem you will face is that 3 sales are not good enough for you to make enough profits and pay the salary of the salesperson.

The salary or the commission you pay the sales guy is going to be more than what you make as profits.

So what we need to do here is increase the conversion ratio of each salesperson.

Instead of each salesman converting 1 lead into a customer out of 100 leads, we need to get each salesperson to convert 10 leads into customers out of 100 leads. And this can happen only if you create a lead generation funnel.

There is no lead source in the world which will give you high quality leads out of the box.

Every traffic source online will send you all kinds of leads and we need to filter through them. It's like mining for diamonds. You need to process a lot of coal before you can find the diamonds. That's what a funnel does for you.

A funnel will filter out the high quality leads from a heap of leads and gives you the best quality ones.

Getting back to our example, remember we are generating 1000 leads a day and we do not have 100 salespeople. We have only 10. Each salesperson can call only 10 leads a day.

So what we need to do is find out what are the top 100 leads out of the 1000 leads so that we can assign 10 leads to every salesperson.

We find out the high quality leads in such a way that the buyer is in one of these 10 leads.

It's like predicting which area of the coal deposit will have a higher concentration of diamonds and processing just that instead of processing the entire coal deposit in that area.

That's why we need Lead Generation Funnels. The funnel is a filtration mechanism to find out the best leads that can be engaged with. With a funnel, we can get the same conversions with 1/10th of the sales team. The funnel does the rest of the work for us. That's why marketing automation is important. It cannot automate all the tasks, but it can make us more efficient.

Recap of the numbers with a funnel:

Leads generated per day: 1,000
High-quality leads identified: 10% (100 per day)
Total salesmen: 10
Calls per day per salesman: 10
Calls per month per salesman: 300
Conversion ratio: 10/100 (10%)
Conversions per month: 300
Conversions per month per salesman: 30

In the process, the funnel also builds trust with the leads and converts the cold leads into warm leads.

I hope in today's lesson you understood the importance of lead generation funnels.

In the next lesson, we will look at an example of how a lead generation funnel can be applied to B2C leads, and in the lesson after that, we will look at how the same technique can be applied to low-end B2B products as well.
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Lead Generation for B2B and Enterprise

In previous post, we talked about why it is not required to generate leads for B2C when the products are simple and low priced.

Consumers need not go through a long decision-making process to buy such products and most of the products are purchased on impulse.

There are cases where you will need to generate leads for B2C products, but we will look into it in future lessons.

Today let's discuss Lead Generation for B2B and Enterprise products.

Is lead generation required for it?

Absolutely yes.

Without generating leads for a B2B product or service it is very difficult to sell it.

The products are high priced and also complex in nature.

For example, if I have to sell my digital marketing services to a company, I have to generate leads.

The number of people who can be my potential customers is very low and I cannot do mass marketing or advertising for my services.

Do you think I would end up getting customers for my digital marketing agency if I put a billboard in a busy junction? It might help in brand awareness, but people are not just going to see an ad and buy a complex service with a 6-months contract.

When you are selling high-end services and products for B2B and Enterprise, lead generation is also easy.

You might be thinking that isn't lead generation difficult in such cases?

No.

Lead generation is easy - but the sales and conversion process is difficult.

To sell well, you need a brand, a personal brand, and a good offer combined with a strong sales pitch.

Let's look at an example from my own experience.

I sold a digital marketing funnel building service to a big publication. The publication was Your Story. I had a feeling that if they did digital marketing well, they would be able to scale up their revenues fast.

I wanted to get in touch with their CEO and I was able to do it. It took a lot of patience and persistence, but when I got in touch with her, I requested a meeting and I got it.

In the meeting, we pitched our services and we closed the deal along with some advanced sales and negotiation tactics.

Here, the lead generation was not difficult. We knew their contact details. But I was able to get a response from them because I had a personal brand for myself as a Digital Marketer and they have heard about me. I also did a very strong sales pitch and used my negotiation skills to close the sale.

Let's take another example of a company with products and services for high-end clients. Wipro serving HDFC Bank. If Wipro has to sell their software development services to HDFC, they will not be generating leads online nor will they advertise their services. They will get in contact with the right decision-makers.

Getting a response from the decision-makers and closing the deal is not easy, but the lead generation is not difficult. You just know who your target customers are and you get in touch with them. Your target customers will be very low in number.

So what I am trying to tell you here is that lead generation is NOT required via digital marketing if you are selling very simple B2C products , or very high-end B2B and Enterprise products.

Lead Generation is required when you are selling high priced complex B2C products or low priced B2B products. We will discuss this in the next lesson

If you have any questions about this lesson, let me know.

Do we need lead generation for B2C

If your business doesn't need lead generation, then there is no point in trying to learn how to generate leads, right?

So when does a business not need lead generation?

A business doesn't need lead generation when it is selling low priced consumer goods that are simple in nature.

When consumers need not go through a tough decision-making process to buy something, and when they do not need a lot of time to decide, generating leads is pointless.

Here are some examples of low priced consumer goods:

• Candy
• Soap
• Pen
• Cookies
• Body spray

These FMCG (Fast-moving consumer goods) products are simple, low priced, and attract a lot of repeat buyers.

Companies that sell FMCG products do not need lead generation.

Imagine how difficult it would be if you had to generate leads for someone who is interested in a bar of soap, have a salesperson call them and convince them to buy the soap and close the deal.
It is not practical because the amount of profit that you make from the sale of the soap is not enough to pay for the sales person's time and you would end up making losses with the sales process.

It is also not required because the decision-making process for buying soap is simple. Only when a product or service is complex and has a lot of questions to be answered about it, a salesperson needs to be involved.

Many FMCG products are simple products and decision making is usually impulsive. In such cases, brands will engage in marketing activities to raise brand awareness about the brand and get a strong market positioning within the market that they are operating in.

For example, Gillette is a good brand for men's razor blades and they have a strong market position as the leader when it comes to razor blades. They do not generate any leads for the sales of their products. They just advertise and build brand awareness.

What would you do if you had salespeople that do not take a salary or a commission from you? Would you employ them to sell your low priced, simple B2C products? Probably yes. But in the real world, you cannot hire people at no cost. But you can close yourself digitally and use marketing automation to sell without any human effort.

Can you think of all the products and services that do not require lead generation?

What is a Lead and What is not Lead

As Digital Marketers we use the word so much. Get Leads, Convert Leads, This Lead, That Lead, and so on. However, what is a "lead" in the real sense?

That's what we are going to learn today

There are a lot of people out there in the real world who would want to buy your products and services. You are here with a product or service that you want to sell. How are you going to reach out to your potential customers?

A lead is called a lead because it leads to a sale.

A lead is a connecting link between you (your business) and your prospect who is out there in the real world.
A lead usually consists of the following 3 things:

• Name
• Email ID
• Phone Number

Sometimes the leads do not contain the names. Sometimes it is either the email ID or the phone number.
The Email ID or the phone number helps you reach out to your potential prospect and have a conversation with them so that you can tell them about your products and services.

• If you want to have a sales call, you need leads.
• If you want to invite people to a webinar, you need leads.
• If you want to invite people to an event, you need leads.

What are not leads?

When we are talking about what are leads, it also helps to talk about what are not leads.
A lot of people focus a lot on building their social media following. But they are not your leads.
All these are not leads:

• Facebook Fans
• Instagram Followers
• Twitter Followers
• YouTube Subscribers

You are having a connection in someone else's platform and that is not going to be helping if you want to sell something to them. Many times, you will not be able to get 100% reach (or even 30%) because they are the users of the platform and not your users. Hence you will not be able to reach out to them on demand.