How to Generate Leads — Without Cold Calling

What is your greatest challenge in marketing? 

If you are like most marketers, it's getting more leads. According to HubSpot, the number one challenge marketers face in 2020 is generating more leads. 

Leadfeeder recently hosted a webinar with Jeff Sauer, the Founder of Data Driven and Jeffalytics, where he shared his process for getting and filling your pipeline with targeted opportunities who need your solution.

What if you could generate leads without sending a single cold outreach email, without having to do bulk outreach email programs, without having to cram in sales meetings to meet an arbitrary quota? 

Those high-pressure sales tactics work sometimes, but all too often they are off-target and gimmicky. 

And they won't help you in the long term. 

If you wanna create a long-lasting business and long term clients, you need to focus on sustainable practices.

You wanna go after the right clients at the right time.

Here's how to do it, according to Jeff. 

Note: Want to build a pipeline that guarantees qualified leads? Sign up and try Leadfeeder free for 14 days to close more deals than ever before.

Set a moonshot goal 

The first step is to really understand what your long term goals are — not what you want to accomplish by the end of the year, but what you want to accomplish in two, three, or even ten years. It's a moonshot goal. 

This idea adapted from the Apollo Space Program, the Moon Space Program that they had in the United States in the '50s and the '60s. It was a huge project that required a lot of little goals.

For example, your moonshot goal might be to become a leader in your field., to earn more of the market share. 

That isn't something you can do in a few weeks or with one retargeting campaign — you'll need a strategy to get there. 

Now, you'll want to make it a bit more measurable. So, you might say, I want to take over 25% of the market share of social media marketing tools in the next five years. It's measurable, and it's long term. 

Find a problem

The next step is to look for a challenge that will give you the opportunity to reach that revenue goal. 

Not every service is created equal. Some services are so hands-on and so labor-intensive, that you'll never be able to reach your goals with that service. For example, if your goal is to actually offer full-time social media management, then you'll be limited by the number of hours in your day and the number of workers you can find. 

Instead of offering full service, you might scale it back a bit to offer really niche services — like social media marketing for B2B brands in manufacturing. 

Decide what specific services you can offer to allow you to reach that goal over time and make sure those are scalable.  

Research your customers 

Your next step is to figure out who needs your service. Where do they hang out? What demographics do they have? Learn more about who they are and what they need. 

Then ask —  who else has that problem? Are there a lot of people having this problem? Is there any volume out there?  Or is it just one person having the issue? 

Too often, brands find one customer who has a need and think "Oh, there must be a need." But in fact, most of their customers have different needs, and they won't be able to scale. Sometimes the problem you solve is really specific to that specific client, and it's not repeatable over time. So you do want to listen to the marketplace and see if the market is also asking for that solution.

Jeff shared how this works for him, 

"I do some consulting around Google Analytics, and I can find out that there are a lot of people out there using keyword research that are having trouble with cross-domain tracking in Google Analytics. There's a pretty decent search volume if they add it up. I get thousands of people a month going to my site looking for information on cross-domain tracking. 

..In my case, I use kwfinder.com, and I'm able to tell that there's quite a bit of commercial intent. If I were to write something, for example, on cross-domain tracking, I think it would do pretty well. And so, this is a little tip. Kwfinder has a free version to start out, and then if you want to, you can pay for it as well."

It's a really great tool to help you understand if there is a demand for your product or service. 

Craft an epic solution 

You have your goal, and you have your problem — now it's time to create an epic solution. Now, you might be wondering, "What the heck is an epic solution?" 

It's basically giving away what you're looking to do. It's giving away a lot of your intellectual capital, and then having it come back to you in the form of leads. 

It might sound far- fetched. It might sound a little bit crazy, but it works. If you look at others, who have been very successful in their business, this is almost always what they do. They give away the results. They give away the solution. 

Those who don't have the time or the capability to implement that solution will hire that consultant or company to give them the results that they've talked about on their blog posts or on their case study. 

Be epic. Give away your best solution. 

Now, depending on your business, you might have competition that's out there not doing it, or you might have some other reason why you wouldn't wanna give away your solution, but in general, it works. 

So, be epic and give away your best — the leads will follow. 

Deliver that solution 

This is a stumbling block for a lot of brands — they found their problem, they found their epic solution, they're ready to give it away. 

But can you deliver that solution effectively and efficiently? Effectively means that you will make your client happy, they're going to be excited and tell their friends about you. Efficiently means that you will actually make a profit off of providing that service. 

If you provide a service that's effective but not efficient, then over time, that's gonna be a trouble for your business, because you're not making any profit. 

That means you can't reinvest your profits into promotion, into content marketing, into things like giving away your solution that will attract more clients.

Get creative in promotion 

Once you have your epic solution out there — is that it? Are the leads going to start rolling in? Not quite. 

Sometimes you'll need to promote yourself because it's not always easy to get placements for your items. It's not always easy to get predictable audiences. So you may need to pay a little bit of money to advertise your epic solution. 

This will result in leads that come in more consistently. 

If you're only relying on word of mouth or things like that, then it's going to be more inconsistent. Find partners, and you can recruit prospects, people that can work with you using outreach methods, using legal safe GDPR compliant outreach methods. 

This might be, for example, using Quora to answer questions and also to advertise. A lot of brands aren't using Quora, but there is a ton of value to be found there. You might also use a tool like Leedfeeder, which tells you who has been on your site so you can follow up or retarget them. 

Remarketing to blog post readers is another really effective way — they've read your stuff, they know what you do, so focusing on those warm leads can be really effective. 

Using social media lookalike audiences is another effective way to reach people who are likely to be interested in what you have to offer. They have similar interests and challenges, so there's a good chance they will need what you have to offer.

Does it meet your goal? 

Once you've got your solution, you're delivering it, your marketing it, it's time to forecast how it impacts on your moonshot goal. 

You ask, "Okay. Well, I had a goal. Am I actually meeting this goal? And am I on track to meet that goal?" So you give yourself a complete feedback loop, and you get to see if your strategies are actually working. 

If not, then you'll need to readjust, to try a new approach, maybe focus on a different problem and create an epic solution. 

Conclusion

If you focus on one single lead-gen tactic or if you try to game the system by creating something that is based on short-term results, you are selling yourself short. Sure, it might work for a while, but it's probably not going to work in the long-term. You'll always be going back to the drawing board trying to find that new tactic will drive leads. 

Instead, Jeff recommends focusing on strategies that are sustainable and focused on long-term like brand building, business building, and forming long-term relationships with clients.

Want to learn more? Watch the webinar in full where Jeff answers audience questions and gives a step-by-step walkthrough of his lead generation strategies. 

Note: Want to build a pipeline that guarantees qualified leads? Sign up and try Leadfeeder free for 14 days to close more deals than ever before.