Generate Your Own Leads in 2024 Instead of Waiting For MQLs

Don't confuse lead generation with cold outreach!

Most lead gen videos on YouTube have nothing to do with generating leads. They confuse prospecting and cold outreach with actual lead gen and it pisses me off!

You on the other hand have had it with getting crappy MQLs and decided to take matters into your own hands. Good for you!

Is it easy though? Not when only 1-4 out of 100 prospects respond to your messages. And that’s if you’re not landing in their spam folder to begin with.

Okay but how do you generate leads in the first place? Secondly, won’t it hurt your activity metrics if you take time from you day for doing lead gen? I bet you don’t want your manager breathing down your neck! I certainly wouldn’t! And does this mean you don’t have to do cold outreach anymore?

These are just some of the questions we’ll cover in this video. And by the end you’ll know 3 ways to capture your own leads that are definitely worth your time. Let’s do this!

Three ways to generate your own leads

Gated content

Let’s start with the traditional way of capturing leads. Create content your target group is interested in and turn it into a lead magnet. For those who don’t know, a lead magnet is a type of gated content that is easy to search for and you need to give your personal details (like an email address) in exchange for getting access to the material itself.

And I know what you’re thinking: shouldn’t this be Marketing’s job?

Normally yes. And if you have a team around you I’d suggest collaborating with them on creating these materials. You’re on the front lines talking to customers all day. Marketing relies on your input. So by working together on these materials they’ll look better and will free up more of your time to have conversations with buyers.

But if you’re a good social seller you’re writing social media posts anyway. Posts that grab the attention of your ICP so you can stop pitching and let your content speak for you!

You can easily go a bit deeper and compile your past posts into lead magnets of their own. Tools like Canva and Figma make this super easy. You just have to take care of three things: First, makes sure these materials are focused around real problems your Personas are facing and contain insights that are difficult to come by on their own. Even with all the AI solutions out there. Then you’ll want to upload these materials to somewhere you can track engagement. The cheapest way is to create a landing page for it using a free email marketing service like convertkit or mailchimp. After giving you their email addresses, visitors will receive your material via email. There are two other alternatives I’ll show you in the next section. But for now you’ll want to leave a link to the landing page on your profile so it’s one of the first things people see. Do these and people will want to download it.

But all this is worthless unless you’re driving traffic to these materials. So what can we do to make these easy to find for your target group? I’ve covered this in my previous video so check that out if you want a deep dive. But the TL;DR is to do three things: First, when you’re creating content for social media, make it contain keywords your audience would search for. Secondly, send connection requests to people who fit your ideal persona and don’t pitch. Let your content speak for you and remind people there within the post that they can download this amazing material from your profile. And lastly, get in front of your target group by leaving 10+ comments a day ****under posts of influencers and your prospects. If these comments are valuable, people will naturally check out your profile and stumble upon your lead magnets. And when they click: Boom! You’ve captured your first lead.

Lead magnets in outbound

Alright, let’s rip the bandaid off. You still have to do outbound. But HOW you approach prospects changes! Instead of sending generic emails and asking prospects to book a call with you, you’ll be able to lead with insights. Insights which you’ve carefully curated into the materials we’ve just talked about. These assets are made to cover one specific challenge of one specific persona so you can easily reuse these when reaching out to prospects cold. But now you’re leading with a point of view. And that shows prospects they’re better off with you than without you.

But people don’t like to sign up for newsletters on landing pages when they don’t have a reason to trust you. So what can you do?

You could create interest in your email and ask if they’d like you to send them the materials. That’s good, but how do you know who’s interested and needs a nudge and who doesn’t care at all?

Normally you’d have to rely on email tracking to see if your email got opened or forwarded. But these haven’t been reliable for the past years, have they? As a way to cut down spam and phishing attempts, email servers have started crawling these emails to make sure they’re safe. And these make it seem like the email was opened even though your email might be sitting in the spam folder. Or the promotions tab if you’re targeting personal email addresses.

So let’s look at two ways where you can measure engagement without having to get a reply to your emails.

Similarly to the landing pages you can upload your materials to a digital sales room and send the link in your cold email. People clicking the link will be asked for their email address to view the contents. These won’t sign up prospects to a newsletter so it’s less friction. But still, they have to hand over their email address. So for outbound I prefer using linkedin smart links. This feature is available for LinkedIn Sales Navigator Advanced and Advanced Plus users and it’s a way to share trackable documents. As long as the visitor is signed in with their linkedin account they’ll be able to access your materials. No email address required and you’ll see who’s viewed your document, when, which pages and for how long! Now you can follow up with the right people at the right time.

Multi-thread to uncovering silent stakeholders

Now you already have two ways of capturing leads, but it won’t be enough. Especially if you only have one contact within an account! What happens if that person leaves? Or just ghosts you? You have to start from scratch. So let’s protect ourselves from having a single point of failure like this. Before I tell you what it is here’s where my head is at: Ideally we want to close a deal with these leads, right? And the bigger the better.

The larger the impact the bigger the deal size. But there’s a small caveat when you’re selling in a downturn:

1. A series of layoffs mean there are fewer people to do the same amount of work,

2. people are taking fewer risks to keep their jobs, and

3. even if they have confidence in your solution they might not have the capacity to execute your project.

So if the impact isn’t big enough the project probably won’t get funded. There is a way around this though that also just happens to help with Account-based lead gen.

People are more open to share what’s on their mind when there’s no one around to judge them. But people feel safer when decisions get made in groups. We have these opposing truths. Then, the more people are involved from more areas of the company, the more insights you gather around what the impact of your product is on the organisation as a whole. That’s good! Also the more stakeholders you talk to the lower your chances that getting ghosted by a single individual will derail your opportunity. So the solution is multi-threading into accounts.

1. Don’t stop at one person, but rather prospect multiple people, personas, and departments within the account

2. If someone gets forwarded the material you created and they open it, you get notified. And when that happens reach out to them as well, and

3. (if they found your material useful) ask for intros to others within the account or even to people at their previous company.

After every call you have with a user or prospect at an account ask them:

1. who else do you know of that’s facing a similar challenge?

2. who else might be impacted down the line if you don’t find a solution to this?

3. what goal or OKR is supported by solving this and who owns it?

And when you’ve talked to enough people, identify your Champion(s) an co-create business cases with them.

Outro

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