If you’re a new entrepreneur, you’ve probably found yourself worrying about one main thing: sales. It’s common to feel that the biggest problem in your business is not being able to sell as many products or services as you’d like, especially when you are just starting.
In this confusion and fear, you might find yourself reading books or enrolling in courses trying to learn how to improve your sales techniques. But what if I told you that sales might not be your real problem? Many new business owners struggle more with lead generation than with closing sales.
By understanding the difference between sales and lead generation, setting up the right tools, and consistently applying various strategies, you can start attracting the clients you need to grow your business.
Understand the Difference Between Sales and Lead Generation
Sales is all about closing deals and converting people who are already interested into paying customers. If your phone’s ringing and your inbox is full of inquiries, but you’re still not making sales, you have a problem with sales. On the other hand, if your phone isn’t ringing and your inbox is empty, then lead generation is where you need to focus your efforts.
Lead generation is the process of attracting potential customers and getting them interested enough in your services to reach out. Generating leads is a fundamental point in an individual's journey to becoming a delighted client. Without a steady flow of leads, you have no one to sell to, and that’s where the real problem lies.
Lead - Someone who has shown some interest in your business. Maybe they’ve visited your website, followed you on social media, or signed up for your newsletter. Leads are your potential customers.
Knowing if someone is a cold, warm, or hot lead helps you figure out how to interact with them. Cold leads need more introduction, warm leads need more nurturing, and hot leads are ready for you to close the deal.
Cold Lead - People who show no interest in your business and are not familiar with what you are offering. You may need to educate them about your services and convince them to buy from you.
Warm Lead - People who have already taken a closer look at your business —they’ve browsed around, maybe asked a question or two. They’re interested, but still deciding if they want to buy. You will need to convince them you are the right solution for them.
Hot Lead - People who are ready to buy. They’ve engaged with your business multiple times and are close to making a purchase.
Lead Nurturing - The process of building relationships with your leads. It increases conversion and turns leads into loyal customers. On this link you can read more about it.
Setting up Foundations
Before any lead generation process starts, it is important to gather as much relevant information about potential contacts as possible. When you have that information, you need to set up the right tools to attract those potential contacts: Lead Magnets and Landing Page.
Lead magnets are like “baits” that will attract your leads. Lead magnets are valuable resources you offer potential clients in exchange for their contact information. This could be a free consultation, downloadable template, webinar, or even a free trial. The goal is to make them to leave their contact details so you can follow up.
Here are some examples of our lead magnets:
A landing page is a dedicated web page designed to capture leads. They should be designed to convert visitors into leads - focused, free of distractions, and feature a clear call to action.
Taking Action: Strategies to Generate Leads
When we sorted out the basics, it's time for action. One of the fastest, but also most expensive strategies to generate leads is through paid campaigns.
Paid Campaigns are advertising efforts where you pay to promote your business on various platforms. These campaigns are designed to drive traffic and generate leads quickly.
Pay-per-click campaigns are a type of paid advertising where you pay a fee each time someone clicks on your ad. You can run PPC ads on search engines (Google Ads) or social media platforms.
What do you need for a good Pay-per-click campaign?
Identify and understand your target audience. Know their demographics, interests, and behaviors to tailor your ads effectively.
Your campaign needs engaging visuals and compelling copy. These elements should clearly state benefits of your service and encourage viewers to immediate action.
You should define your Campaign Goal. What do you want to achieve? Is it to take them to your website, encourage them to send you a message, or fill out a form?
It’s common to run multiple campaigns simultaneously and test them for at least a week. Based on statistics, you’ll be able to see what works best. For example, one image resonates better with your audience than another, or a particular message gives you more conversions. Continuous testing and optimization are key to improving your campaign’s performance.
Here is one example of our Facebook Ad Campaign:
Finally, you should find an expert to run your campaign. Finding someone who is both knowledgeable and dedicated enough to monitor and adjust campaigns every couple of days.
Finding the right person can be challenging. Many experts specialize only in specific areas, such as optimization, and may not want to do visuals and copy.
When launching a campaign, you’ll need to pay for both the performance specialist’s fees and the ad spend budget. Investing in a skilled professional who can deliver high-quality leads is far more valuable than going for a cheaper, less experienced alternative that might just waste your budget due to lack of experience.
Pay-per-click advertising is the fastest and often costly way to generate leads in a short period. However, achieving meaningful results requires testing and patience. A campaign should run for at least three months to gather sufficient data and make informed decisions. This process involves continual testing and adjustment to ensure the campaign performs optimally.
Keep in mind that success of a campaign depends on several factors, including the expertise of the manager, the budget, the industry, and the time of year.
LinkedIn Outreach
We will discover one secret: Most successful lead generation strategy for us was LinkedIn outreach. This strategy involves identifying and connecting with your target groups on LinkedIn. First decide on who you are targeting and prepare an intro message. Each day, send connection requests with personalized intro messages to 20-30 profiles relevant to our industry.
For instance, we might reach out to 30 company owners daily with a tailored message, such as:
To see significant results, you should dedicate at least one hour daily to this effort and be prepared for a longer-term commitment. Results typically start to show after a month, so don’t stop after 2 days if you don't see results right at the beginning. Here are some screenshots of our successfully booked calls from LinkedIn outreach to give you a little extra motivation:
At Remote Bob we have the entire education on how to do LinkedIn outreach and which rules you should follow, but we will go into more detail about that in a separate blog.
Attending Business Networking events
You can find these events on platforms like Meetup or Eventbrite, where you can register for both online and offline events. Aim to participate in about five events each week. At these events, engage with attendees, talk about your business, and hand out your business cards.
For example, our CEO, Barbara Maheshwari, successfully found around 15 new clients in the first year of Remote Bob. Without any budget, Barbara attended many events and talked about her business, people were interested in her story and started becoming Remote Bob’s clients.
This is a great strategy if you are good with communication with people, have time and don't want to spend your budget. Networking is a cost-effective way to build relationships and generate leads through personal interactions.
Email marketing
Email marketing involves sending emails to a targeted group of recipients to promote your business. It’s used to build and maintain relationships with potential and existing customers, drive sales, and increase brand awareness.
How to do email marketing?
Start by building a list, either through purchasing from trusted sources or collecting leads from events or your online campaigns.
Use a captivating subject line that will encourage recipients to open your email.
Create a message that includes personalization - for example recipient's name.
Clearly communicate who you are, why you’re reaching out, and what you are offering.
Create engaging content that shows how you are and how you can solve potential clients' problems.
Use strong calls-to-action to guide recipients to scheduling a call or downloading a resource.
Create follow-up sequences to nurture leads who don’t respond initially. We recommend you to send 3 emails during 2 weeks
Use A/B testing to experiment with different subject lines, email content, CTAs, and sending times, analyzing performance metrics to optimize future campaigns.
When conducting email campaigns with big amounts of cold leads, avoid platforms like Mailchimp or MailerLite due to their strict policies. Instead, use tools like Apollo, Constant Contact, or ActiveCampaign because they have better tolerance for sending mass mailing.
Partnerships and Affiliates
This strategy involves collaborating with other businesses or individuals to generate leads. To start, identify potential partners and affiliates who align with your business goals and target market. Look for those with strong credibility and a relevant following. For example, we can agree with working spaces or associations of entrepreneurs that whenever they hear that someone needs a virtual assistant, they recommend us and we will give them a commission.
When proposing a partnership or affiliate arrangement, clearly outline the benefits for both parties. For partners, emphasize how the collaboration can drive mutual growth. For affiliates, detail the commission structure and performance incentives.
An affiliate is someone who promotes a company’s products or services and earns a commission for every sale or lead they generate. They share special links or codes that track their referrals. It’s a win-win: they get paid for their marketing efforts, and the company gets more exposure.
If you want to establish your own affiliate program, it’s important to set up a clear process and guide your affiliates through it. You’ll need to establish how commissions will be tracked, the ways affiliates should promote your business, and the payment procedures. Everything should be part of a well-planned system.
For example, in your affiliate agreements, you can set specific timelines for promotional activities. The contract might state that the affiliate must post agreed-upon content within three days of signing or publish a blog post about your services within seven days.
A well-structured program will not only keep affiliates engaged but also ensure your business benefits from reliable, quality leads.
Rakuten is a top platform for finding affiliates that match your requirements to promote your business and later get provision from it. Rakuten provides approved affiliates with unique affiliate links to share on their promotional channels.
Social Media Marketing
This involves using various social media platforms to attract and convert potential customers into leads. Start by creating engaging content that resonates with your audience’s needs and interests, avoiding generic content. Design eye-catching visuals with consistent styles. Engage with your community daily by interacting with industry profiles, responding to comments, and running interactive polls or giveaways.
If you choose this strategy, dedicate enough time to developing a strong presence so people can notice you. For entrepreneurs with limited time, it’s often more effective to concentrate on one social media channel. By doing so, you can build a more focused and impactful presence, leading to better results over time.
Find out about How to Boost Your Social Media Channels in our last blog.
SEO Optimize Blogs
Consistent, long-term SEO Blog optimization can drive significant traffic to your website. Regularly publishing SEO-optimized blog posts that include relevant keywords that your target audience is searching for, quotes from industry experts, and guest contributions will improve your search engine rankings and increase organic traffic.
To maximize the impact of your SEO blog strategy, focus on creating valuable and engaging content that answers your audience’s questions, addresses their pain points, and offers actionable insights. Optimize your blog posts with meta tags, descriptive alt text for images, and internal linking to related content on your site. Regularly update older posts to keep them relevant and improve their ranking potential.
If you focus on this strategy don’t expect results overnight. Algorithms take time to recognize good content but if you are consistent you will see great results after 6 months.
Speaking Gigs
Last strategy to generate leads to be a speaker at events or podcasts. This can spread your brand visibility and people from the audience will see what you offer and may get interested in your services and contact you later.
You can read our blog about How to Get Speaking Gigs with the Support of a Virtual Assistant on this link.
No matter which lead generation strategy you choose, consistency is most important. Whether it’s daily LinkedIn outreach, weekly blog posts, or monthly newsletters, sticking to a regular schedule is the only way to achieve meaningful results.
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