What method of Brain Storming should I use when looking for COMMITTED leads?

I've been using UW for a few years. It is very useful but you have to be careful. Lot of unreliable people out there. Over the years, I've narrowed a couple of people I keep using. And have excluded others. Few things: 1- It's best to give clear instruction. I tend to build GSheet on what I need, interact a lot of Skype at the beginning 2- If you are searching for mails, do use email verification services. I find that people I work with tend to have a 95% success rate but, at the start, best to be on the safe side rather than burn your mail server (bounce rate need to be low) 3- Focus helps but if you are testing things out, you could use a platform like Reply.io to test out a few verticals and see what works or what doesn't work. 4- It feels your target markets are a bit too generic. Using UW, you'd have too wide a net. There are various ways to narrowing things down, from geos to title to company size or even keyword in company profile. Again, what is possible is to set a filter and share it with UW. Hope it helps, UW etc... are useful and best in my experience than the products out there. But it is a bit of work (no pain no gain). Happy to set up a call if you see value (am rather new to Clarity so not too sure how it works!). Best, H

Not totally clear on what you are asking, but if the questions is; does giving out a referral code to an existing user in hopes that they would refer another work? My experience (largely in B2B software) is not all that well, at least not without some sort of incentive. Even if your user is super satisfied with the product/service you are providing, simply giving them a code to give another person doesn't necessarily drive them to make the handoff. Now, two things. First, if you either incentivize the existing user with say a discount on his next bill or a free goodie, then he'll be more likely to do it... Even better, if you do that, plus give the referred user some kind of benefit, like a discount on his first bill, free trial or other goody, then it can work rather well. Second, all that said, know that referrals in general are gold. You should test and do whatever you can to get referrals. Generally @Leads360 we found that providing really high quality customer service (more so than even the best product) lead to referrals. To that point, our sales people worked in tandem with customer service in this way. Whenever a CS person realized they gave a great customer experience they would let the sales person know and they would then reach out to that customer while still warm from the nice touch and simply ASK for a referral. I was always surprised when we could get referrals simply by asking. I like to stick with 1 referral at a time, just ask for 1 person to be email connected with, don't overwhelm them with the statement "hey, can you refer your friends and colleagues to us", be specific. Something like "I see on LinkedIn you're connected with John B from ACME corp, I'd really like to speak with him about our product, would be willing to make an introduction for me".

This is a good question, thank you for asking it. I'm sure there are many business owners and newbie entrepreneurs who constantly wake up with the sweats trying to make ends meet by increasing their lead generation, strengthen their pipeline, and increase conversions. At the end of the day, it's all about converting, right? I'll give you what I consider a basic guideline for building a pipeline of good reliable high-quality leads that are easier to convert. We use this methodology for our clients and for our own marketing agency. www.Unthink.me is just a 4 people team with a few contractors helping us on certain projects but the structure that I have created for ourselves is what allows us to work with only certain clients we like and the ability to charge as low or high as we want. For context, we have clients that pay as low as $100 per month and some that several thousand and that is because we get a lot of client requests and proposals, etc. Let me start by saying that you are right and wrong at the same time. Many very large, publicly traded, tech companies rely heavily on cold-calling while mailing is still king for certain industries. Here is a basic methodology guideline you should consider and keep top of mind with any effort you put out there for lead generation or customer facing effort. Voted Best Personality 1. Don't forget that people, humans, work in these companies. If you are able to truly understand what you sell, the value, the critical pain points it solves (with no fluff or ego boosting mentality) you should be able to clearly identify who will get the most value out of what you offer in any company you plan to target, or industry for that matter. You should also be able to understand their needs and their goals. As you decide on campaigns, pitches, offers, products, pricing, and placement this insight will determine better decisions and better outcome. Present yourself in a way that they can relate to, in a context they appreciate and with a medium they enjoy. Clarity On Them 2. Have a stupidly clear positioning statement if you want your prospect commercial clients to pay attention, remember what you have to offer and give you the benefit of the doubt to prove yourself first. At the end of the day, when you get a contract with another company - you are simply given the opportunity to prove yourself and continue the relationship. By starting with a clear and simple positioning statement you give yourself the opportunity for questions, curiosity, and most importantly branding consistency - imagine that everywhere your prospect sees or hears about you, they are exposed to the exact same pitch or statement about what you do for companies like theirs... It's powerful! * Position is the actual value service of what you sell, while the positioning statement is the pitch you use in every medium. Start with a good, potentially viable and scalable position with a niche industry or market and particular use and try to own that before you want to expand your position on a broader market (this is off the Blue Ocean Strategy approach, I follow). Hit'em Where They Ain't 3. Segwaying from the last statement, having a good position and statement will only work if you know where to go pitch right? Again, it's all about reducing those lead costs while increasing conversion rate off the pipeline. For that, you need to be where others are not. Your competitors may not be as sophisticated as you are, maybe they have grown some unorthodox way or maybe they are as clever as you and maybe more. So try to win a battle without having to fight directly with your competitors for clients through pricing, innovation for innovation sake and find both losing the fight through loss profits, lack of attention and clarity and your clients getting all the rewards while you slave yourself to a sinking ship. Instead, spend time doing your homework on what different industries use your service or product for, what other companies might need what you offer, where would this companies' leaders congregate (their watering holes)? Go present yourself there, in the lesser known niche markets, the lesser known watering holes. Thought: You could try to fight and bleed your company's profit for 1% of a large generic market pie, or you can go after a smaller less understood pie elsewhere and with a lot less long term effort you could own 100% of that small pie. Educate 4. At Unthink, we use Hubspot, a content led generation tool for marketers. We handle other Hubspot client accounts. When it comes to building a B2B pipeline you will heavily depend on content and education more so than advertising budget to constantly bombard and interrupt someone's feed on social media or Google Search. If you invest in creating education content that proves you are a market leader and product expert with the best interest of everyone at heart you will be more likely to be liked and trusted when someone needs your type of product or service. We Hubspot because it enables to produce great content and manage our pipeline, but don't be fooled - in itself it does not help generate the content nor drive leads simply provides tools to create and manage them... Whether you use a paid or free tool, create content and educate as much as you can. Once you know who your customer is, where they hang out and the pie you want to go after then you should know what type of content they want and you can create it for them. * Think about it, me writing here gives me content ideas and allows me to position myself well through a non-invasive channel while providing actionable guides to others. Strategy Is Not King 5. This pains me to admit, after all I am an MBA Strategist and have been helping many startups as a stealth partner or advisor exactly on strategy - how to compete more efficiently. But it's actually my years of experience that force me to admit that the most brilliant of strategies can be outperformed by someone who can execute passionately. While I have also seen great strategies fail due to lack of execution, testing, or any other marginally expected effort. thought: A lot of B2B marketers/owners rely heavily on the idea that if they belittle others or make themselves look like experts or promote their years in business or experience that it's enough. And it's not. Client's could care less about your experience or expertise - again people like doing business with people. Show your scars, leverage failed projects as ice breakers on email campaigns or on social media, stop pretending your company is perfect and show your bad reviews too! Strategy Is Queen 6. It may not be king, but it is definitely Queen and at least in my house, Queen rules. A strategy will dictate where your efforts go and how much of them. After all, why would you invest all into something if you have no clue as to how much potential it has or how difficult it is to sustain? There are various strategies for conversion such as the lesser logic (www.BetaBulls.com for example, starting to promote that their code is good enough for fighter jets but amazing for corporate needs). Or the Recency Effect which might drive an accounting service like www.BluePearlTax.com to heavily look for startups who are being audited or need to pay back taxes so that they can help them reduce or eliminate their financial responsibility. Something that just happened and has a huge impact in our lives has an incredible potential for driving us towards buying or trying something we wouldn't otherwise. Leverage the recency effect if you can when you can and drive it with a no-brainer value proposition without assuming people will be smart enough to see the value - instead clearly state it for them. Also deciding whether maybe your business as is now or for ROI purposes if you would benefit from being the Good Enough option? If you take the good enough option, your prices should most typically be lower than the best alternate, wider known brand, but not as low as the one scraping and fighting on price - instead you position your company as a human, person led company that has its struggles, its potential and its dedication towards the end user and what you lack elsewhere you make up for in commitment and price driving up the value. Sometimes people look for good enough but many companies struggle to position themselves as the best or cheapest that they forget the middle grounds making the decision that much harder for these type of consumers which delays the pipeline build and the conversion into leads and then into customers. Maybe your pie (whatever niche in a market you chose) can be owned by being the good enough option? I will give you an example using our team, Unthink is becoming widely known as the most helpful agency. Since we have clients worldwide we figured we would leverage this because being helpful translates into any language and culture. We also clearly state through our communications that we let our clients negotiate their monthly budget which allows us to bring big business tools and experts to small growing companies. We break these branding statements because another thing to consider with anyone is that the more you say the less people hear. Especially when it's about yourself and not for them. This messaging has allowed us to constantly get new client requests, the opportunity to prove our worth no matter the budget, and the transparency that companies (people) ask for when they are hoping to make a connection with a partner who is invested in their success as much as their own. This has an added perk of clients reaching out and talking to us when they aren't happy instead of publicly shaming or simply instantly cutting us off. Typically their unhappiness is a matter of a simply missed communication and our clients average at around 2 years with us until we have either built something sustainable or it's out of our scope of interest. I hope this has been helpful if you would like I would really appreciate your follow in any of our platforms. Get in touch and stay engaged. www.Facebook.com/iWillUnthink https://twitter.com/OfficialUnthink https://www.facebook.com/groups/MySmallBusinessResource/ - Humberto Valle #Unthink

Monetization is a FUN topic when you have a (1. targeted following who (2. wants what you have to offer (or is actively seeking it). You've already got people raising their hands but you need to move them from "rented space" (social media) to "owned space" (an email list that you own.) Adding too many steps to the equation just spreads your workload wider and pushes your end goal into the future. There is a very tactical approach that will convert these followers to customers but you've got to convert them to email list subscribers before they can be converted into paying customers. This is basic sales funnel 101. ;) My suggestion is to take snippets and offer those as a Free ebook or cheat sheet or even a practical guide with an end result in mind. It should be GREAT content, free content, that leads them to your email list. (Make this decision strategically --look at some data to see what converts best) From there, you can upsell your paid offers/ product(s) to your email subscribers. The Free offer can be posted directly on your social media updates (periodically ), you can also make custom Facebook tabs that push folks to your email list, and there are more options depending on the specific platforms you are using. You can add a blog (later) and post relevant content that leads them to sign up for your email list/free offer as the "call to action" at the end of the posts. BUT I wouldn't focus on this first because it's counterproductive if you already have an active following. Building trust and serving these people with valuable content will almost always guarantee they join your list and purchase your offers. The real issue that holds people back is consistent execution. So just go execute. ;) All the best!

I don't think they're dead - but changing communication trends have created new challenges. Calling someone on their cell phone is considered rude and people are increasingly ignoring their office phones. As for email, we are inundated with an ever increasing load in email - making cold emailing less and less effective. But the deeper question is "Is Cold Prospecting Dead". To that, I give an emphatic 'no'. Seasoned sales professionals like to prattle on about how its relationships, referrals, and the art of the pitch/close... but only because they've forgotten how hard it is to get the machine running. Aaron Ross' predictable revenue is a modified version of traditional prospecting. People have to become specialized, disciplined, and rely on tools to help you be more efficient. But the underlying concept holds true: In absence of higher yielding lead sources, cold prospecting is superior to doing nothing. If you believe that principal, then you do *everything* you can to grow sales that is *NOT* cold prospecting... but the key is to 'grow sales'. In absence of any more effective method/technique, get back on the phones and email and become a student of prospecting. Maybe the better answer is "Cold Prospecting is Dead for those that don't learn how to do it in today's changing environment" Pro Tip: Communicating through LinkedIn, Twitter, and other online channels is still cold prospecting. Setting up tools like Cadence to handle your prospecting emails is still cold emailing... just more evolved versions of them :)