Generating high-quality, accurate leads for your business are absolutely necessary, whether you’re a small and midsize business or a Fortune 500 company. Without sales leads of ready-to-buy prospects, your sales team won’t have anyone to sell to, and your company won’t be able to generate new revenue.
The problem is how exactly do you find a top-notch leads without wasting time and money on solutions that generate stale data or inaccurate leads?
Don't fret. We put together this resource to share with you the best ways to generate leads today and some pitfalls to avoid when growing your sales lead pipeline.
What Exactly Is a Sales Business Lead?
Just to make sure we cover the basics – a business sales lead is a contact, either individual or company, who’s not quite a buying customer yet, but there’s potential for them to become one because they have an interest (maybe even a need if they don’t know it yet) in your product or service.
Basically, a sales lead is someone who isn’t yet a client of yours, but has interest in your product or service. This article from Indeed provides examples of sales leads.
Typically a sales lead contact isn’t just the individual person or company name, but it also entails the information you need to reach out to them for the first time with value-driven and persona-driven messaging that slices through the noise.
This information can include their name, position, email address, cell phone number, and/or direct dial.
Related: How to find CEO contact information
The lead information you get will depend on the platform you choose to provide the data. Some platforms will have more contact lead information for sales than others, and some will be more accurate than others.
With good business leads, your sales and marketing teams will know who to sell to, and not only will they be able to eliminate a lot of time-consuming busy work, but also speed up their sales process.
If you’re new to sales, you might be wondering: how to find accurate leads to sell your product or service to.
How Can I Find Business Leads?
Traditionally, sales lead generation falls on the marketing team. It’s their job to generate leads through advertising, social media, and email marketing, just to name a few.
Leads are clearly vital. But it can be difficult to fill your pipeline with a steady stream of prospects. From outdated data to simply not knowing who to sell to next or where to go for leads, there are plenty of obstacles that can make it feel nearly impossible to generate new sales opportunities.
There are several different ways you can generate business sales leads to flood your sales pipeline, but they aren’t all created equal.
In fact some of them will give you stale data, waste your time, and potentially put your email reputation at risk.
Leads are imperative to every company, big or small, because there is no business without leads! A steady, consistent stream of leads brings in organic traffic and the revenue your organization needs to survive and thrive.
The more leads you can pull, the more revenue you can generate, and the easier it is to scale your business.
Related: How to Buy Sales Leads
Check out the methods and tools you’ll want to avoid in your quest for quality leads below…
1. Paid Advertising for Qualified Leads
Social media platforms like Facebook can be a great resource for leads.
When you drop an ad, Facebook will let you hyper-target and narrow down your audience to specific filters like general interests and age.
One of the bigger learning curves with Facebook is that you aren’t going to come out the gate with an ad that gets tons of impressions and drives leads. Instead, you’re going to have to test out different ads to figure out what gets your target group to click (What copy do they like? What formatting draws their attention? What visuals cut through the noise? These are all questions to consider) and what makes them keep scrolling.
And this process of testing out ads can get pricey after a while, depending on your budget.
To help you develop your own fire Facebook ads, try out Supermetrics. This tool will give you all the data you need on your paid ad performance as well as your organic reach.
And to build up your brand’s social media presence (which is key to the success of Facebook ads) check out this helpful article.
2. Leverage Email Campaigns
A solid email campaign that makes your target audience feel understood is a great way to not only generate leads for your business, but to also increase familiarity with your brand.
When a prospect gets an email directed to them, they will feel like they have a better sense of what your organization is all about in ways that a generic Facebook ad could never do.
The problem that you run into with email marketing is all the testing and data analytics you have to go through to really start generating big results. Just like with Facebook, it’s going to take some time before you create a fire campaign.
In order to execute mass email marketing that’s still targeted and personalized, check out Mail Meteor.
3. Buying Leads for Business
You can always skip all the testing and the trial and error, and just buy business leads.
After all, it’s always convenient to just pass along your credit card information, input the demographic information about your target group, and get immediate access to tons of inbound and outbound leads.
However, the problem you run into with purchasing leads is quantity over quality.
Yes, you can get thousands of leads, but more often than not, the leads you get have been spammed into oblivion and passed over dozens of times.
Best Way to Generate Quality Leads for Your Business
Now that we’ve gone over some of the pros and cons with lead gen alternatives, if you want to avoid the hazards of buying leads or the lengthy trial and error periods (where your team isn’t finding any leads and generating much revenue) try Seamless.AI today.
Unlike other alternatives out there that retrieve stale data, Seamless uses artificial intelligence to verify contact data (email addresses, cell phone numbers, etc.) in real-time for any professional, so you’re getting the freshest leads on the market.
All you have to do is input the target criteria you’re going after (we have several filters, from technology to industry), and Seamless will help you find all the leads of ready-to-buy prospects, build your lists, and enter the data into your favorite CRM in an effortless, automated process.
What’s even better is, Seamless will provide you with a success coach to guarantee that you’re using this platform to its greatest potential, along with pitch intelligence to strengthen your marketing efforts.
With Seamless, the time it will take you to get to that massively successful ad campaign on Facebook is much shorter (don’t believe us? Check out these stories).
Since you’ve seen the good and the bad with lead gen, don’t wait until you run out of business leads. Try a Seamless.AI demo today and find your next big opportunity.
#1 Sales Leads Generator on the Market
Webinars and content writing are all great, but the #1 tool you can use to fill your pipeline with the world’s best sales leads…the #1 platform that has helped thousands of users generate millions in sales is…
As opposed to stale databases, where you have to waste countless hours running through outdated contact info to get an accurate email, Seamless uses comprehensive artificial intelligence. Our AI crawls through the web in real-time to find, verify, and validate the contact data of any professional.
With our automated features and Chrome extension, eliminate manual data entry and list-building and instead build lists of hundreds, even thousands of leads in a matter of minutes.
Additionally, if you sign up for our latest Job Changes feature, you can stay ahead in today’s volatile market and never worry about your leads going stale again.
Referral Sales Lead Generation
Another way to generate leads is through referrals (nine referral lead generation sources by industry). Market referrals are the second-highest source of quality leads.
Think about it, if you’ve already got customers who love your product or service, there’s a good chance that they know people who work in similar industries, in similar roles, and have similar pain points and goals that would be a great fit for your solution.
Plus, no amount of sophisticated and creative marketing or sales pitching can match the effectiveness of a colleague who is excited to share a product with you that helped them crush their goals and numbers.
Clients who buy from you are familiar with your brand and they can speak on the value of your solution. An amazing client is living, breathing proof of the transformation your company can deliver, taking people from their biggest pains to achieving their greatest goals.
With nothing to gain or lose, other than wanting their colleagues or friends to succeed, a current client can pull in lots of qualified, warm leads for your pipeline.
In order to start bringing in referrals, simply reach out to your best clients, and ask them to introduce your product or service to anyone in their network who they think could benefit.
And if you want to make sure that the client hits a home run in terms of explaining the value of your solution, provide them with some key talking points.
Referrals can’t be beat! But you usually can’t rely on referrals to consistently bring in the volume of leads your business needs.
More Ways to Generate Sales leads
Can't always count on one metho. This is why other great channels for lead generation include paid media and webinars.
Webinars are a great way to inform people about your product or service and immediately earn their trust as an authority in your industry by playing the role of the educator.
Related: Maximizing Inbound Sales
1. Follow Up With Old Prospects
No matter how seasoned you are as a salesperson, you’re going to hear “No” or “Now isn’t the right time” often (take a look at these objection-handling secrets to overcome the most common customer excuses).
Instead of parting ways and never reaching out again, save the prospect in your CRM, and follow up with them.
Remember, unless the prospect screams at you to never contact them again (along with some colorful expletives), just because they say “No” now, doesn’t mean it’s a “No” forever. They could have a change in their budget or a change in priority. And for that reason, consistently follow up with old prospects.
If they tell you now isn’t a good time, ask them to give you a ballpark range for a better time. And depending on what they tell you, reach out once a week or once every other week.
82% of prospects say “No” four times before they ever say “Yes.” So keep following up until you close.
2. Leverage Email
Reach out to leads through email. Instead of doing a one-off email where you pitch your product or service, put together an email sequence where you send nurturing, value-driven content that provides solutions to their biggest problems (relevant white papers, blog articles, case studies, etc.).
Doing this builds the client’s trust in you and your brand, and it warms them up so when you eventually pitch your solution, they’ll be sold and ready to buy.
3. Leverage Social Media
Social media, especially LinkedIn, is rife with professionals who would be ideal for your product or service.
In order to get their attention, you have two options (we honestly recommend leveraging both to generate the greatest number of sales leads).
- Start posting regularly. Instead of posting about your product and your company, post content that helps solve the pain points of your prospects (strategies, scripts, formulas, etc.). This will help you build up your authority and generate an audience of warm leads. Read this article for tips on how to build up your social media presence.
- If you want to get to the closed ones faster, pick up a copy of our CEO, Brandon Bornancin’s bestseller, Seven Figure Social Selling, and leverage the scripts our sales team uses to reach out and connect with leads directly on LinkedIn.
Before you start using our seven-figure social selling scripts, you’re going to need prospects to reach out to, which is where the next strategy comes into play…
In order to get their attention, you have two options (we honestly recommend leveraging both to generate the greatest number of sales leads).
Word of Warning With Lead Generation Tools
With all the benefits of sales leads, what, if anything, could go wrong with finding potential prospects for your business?
One of the greatest pain points with lead generation is quality. There are several platforms that guarantee customers they have the “best sales leads around” and the “biggest lead databases,” but often, you have to sift through mountains of stale data just to find a few good leads.
In today’s economy, with 82% of businesses failing because of issues with cash flow, it’s more important than ever to get accurate leads of ready-to-buy decision-makers in your target market.
If you’re curious to see the lead-generating power of Seamless, sign up for a demo today!
Whether you know it or not, millions of sales leads out there have an interest or a need for the very solution you sell…The question is, how do you get in front of all these leads?
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