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Menulaunched a software devleopment shop and I am looking at how or whom to reach to get leads.
I want to get salespeople in place that will contact these connections. I'm curious to know how other places have reached their clients.
Answers
Lead generation is very important - more importantly, being aware of what works best to keep a steady stream of leads coming in to the top of your sales funnel. There are a number of ways to ensure you have leads, but before you get there, it's important that you understand your customer. By creating a thorough persona for your customers, you will have a better idea of how to reach them and what to say to them.
After this foundation is set, there are many different lead generation techniques you can employ. Usually this will involve a content strategy and lead nurture approach that will keep your company top of mind for the moment your lead is ready to convert to a sale. Additionally, by having a content plan, you can give your sales team the support they need when making those connections.
I would be happy to talk with you to better understand your business and help you by laying out a lead generation and lead nurture plan.
Hope this is helpful!
Thanks
-JL
Instead of getting lead , Create leads find potential Business , analyse their problem and offer them software solutions
Hi!
Lead generation is vital for many businesses to keep going and get a steady amount of revenues.
But it should not be the first thing to think about.
The first thing to think about is always related to your customers. And that's why the creation of the user personas is helpful to understand more about them.
Using empathy maps is a good exercise (I suggest you to use this exercise with different members of the team) to really understand more about the feelings, desires, problems that your potential customers have. And that will help to communicate with them in a better way.
After that you can think of better ways to attract leads. There are different ways and some can work better than others. Some examples are:
- Google Ads (search and display campaigns)
- SEO
- Social media
- Online communities
- Word of mouth
The important thing for each of these platforms is to create content that can be interesting for your audience and can help them to solve the problems that they have.
I hope this can give a general idea of the possibilities offered by online marketing.
I am always happy to answer other questions that you might have!
Cheers,
Giacomo
There are many different ways. Either you find someone from this industry to reach your customers or you already knew where is your target customers then you try to approach them by cold call.
I'd love to share my secrets for generating tons of cash flow from clients. Lets chat soon!
The launching of a shop on software development is synonymous to starting a business, keep in mind the following ways to generate software development leads:
1. Targeted and Personalised Email Marketing: Traditionally, email marketing is easy process to generate leads for any business provided you have right verified contact database with you. As this is easy approach, most of the businesses take this approach and execute it. In my experience, most of the businesses do not do this correctly and generate more problems for their brands like domain blacklisting, marked as spam, making prospects angry etc. These are serious problems and should be tackled with right strategy to target prospects, who may want to do business, with personalised messaging. If executed well and nurtured well, email marketing will offer 1000% ROI on your investments in quick time. It can be a real winner.
2. Business Website and Social Profiles: In my experience and research, I have found that many companies do not pay much attention to their website and social profiles. This sounds like a too much effort, but this should be treated as long term strategy to build your brand and start getting business in long term. This is Ultimate lead generation machine in long term. Following are some common problems I found: -
1. Website does not give clear messaging and have complex way to find relevant information for a prospect.
2. Social profiles and website messaging are not in sync.
3. Wrong promises are made on website which does not resonate well with prospects.
4. No unique value proposition is used
5. Showing no customer/Fake customer testimonials
6. Not having blogs or blogs are just general articles.
7. No clear flow or website and no/unclear call to action (CTAs)
Whatever approach you are using to generate leads, nowadays prospects research about vendors online and on digital properties. If messaging is not correct and consistent, then it will not leave good impression to prospects and they will not respond to you.
3. Social Media Outreach: Social media is good to know prospective companies and people responsible for various initiatives in those companies. It provides particularly good insights about a person and company. It is extremely easy to connect with those prospective people, collaborate with them, engage with them and do business with them on sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook etc. Each social network offers different free and paid ways to connect with right prospects and service them. Before you take this approach, you need to have consistent and clear messaging for your business. You should have clear brand promise and how can a prospect get benefit from your product or services?
4. Freelancer Portals Lead Generation: Based on my research, many small and medium IT services business rely on freelance portals (like Upwork, AppFutura, Guru, GoLance etc) for their lead generation. These platforms provide targeted leads for your business, but these platforms are hyper competitive, and you may need to sell your services at less prices.
Because of hyper-competitiveness, these platforms require lots of effort to create, manage and build reputation on these platforms. Many businesses just spend more and more effort on these platforms to get business, but ROI of such investments are questionable.
5. Tele-Prospecting – Inside Sales – Sales Dev Reps (SDR): This is a most challenging and people dependent lead generation approach. This approach requires lots of focus, good people, good training and continuous monitoring and improvement to generate results. If executed well, this approach can be a game changer for your business. It can give you targeted clients who can stay with you for long term. Deal size for these clients would be bigger and you can command premium price if you can provide them solution they are looking.
6. Partnerships & Partner Portals: As world is getting digital day by day and freelance portals are having 100k+ vendors providing services. It is getting difficult for businesses to find right vendor for their needs. Hence last 2-3 years, there are mediator companies are coming with services to find, evaluate, screen and shortlist vendors on behalf of prospects and connect them. Companies like ContractIQ, Clutch, GoodFirms etc. As few people know about them, it is right time to find and connect with those companies and be on their panel. These partnerships may not result any immediate business but continuous nurturing with them will result a long-term sustainable business. In my experience, companies generate 5-10 qualified opportunities/month on such platforms.
7. Digital Advertisements: Google is pioneer when it comes to digital advertisements to drive leads to your business. 95% of prospects use search engines to find and evaluate vendors for their needs. Having on top of search results with appealing messaging will attract good quality leads for your business. These digital advertisements can be very costly if not executed well. This requires complete understanding of digital advertisements on a specific platform to improve your ROI. Following are some points you should keep in mind when using digital advertisements.
1. Identify transactional services/products which you want to sell. This works best on digital advertisements.
2. Identify your target prospect, their age, gender, geography, interest, behaviours. More you narrow, more specific you will get but make sure you have sizeable number to target.
3. Identify key pains/problems their target prospect face and research your keywords. Look at specifically how many searches happened for each keyword. This is really particularly important.
4. Design your ad copy with clear messaging and target pain point or benefit.
5. Have a well-designed responsive landing pages to land these prospects. Landing pages should offer brand promise with clear offering (transactional) and form or call to action to take next step.
6. Monitor performance and conversions for each ad-copy and landing pages and improve further.
8. Product Partnerships: An IT services can become partner with product companies they use to develop software solutions for their needs. These product companies have different partnership programs based on individual business needs. These partnerships will help you position your company’s product and services in front of your prospects. And they will feel confident about your expertise.
Some product companies also refer clients to you in your geography reason whom you can connect to train them, integrate product with other systems and customise it based on their requirements. This kind of partnerships requires focused effort to build relationships with product company’s representatives to get good ROI.
9. Awards, Brand endorsements & Join Local Communities: During your journey, it is good to collect as many strategic awards, affiliations and brand endorsements from 3rd party research companies, media platforms, and industry bodies. This helps you in building trust among your target prospects. You may also want to network and join local or niche communities to meet fellow vendors, prospects, and businesses. Such networking will help in spreading the word around and help you get more exposure and hence business. ROI of such investments/time is difficult to track but it will certainly help in building a solid brand for your business.
Besides if you do have any questions give me a call: https://clarity.fm/joy-brotonath
Related Questions
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What is the best method for me to monetize from my social media following?
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!LH
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What lead generation strategies have worked best for you?
Oh man, this is such a complicated question because it depends on the industry. I've worked with dealerships to OEMs to gyms to dentists and retailers - and it all depends. Doing a combination of digital and direct is always a great place to start because you have options under both categories. Try running a Google campaign while also cold calling. If that doesn't drive results, try Facebook and networking. The point is to experiment to find what works for you. You might have a strong in-person skill set where others might excel with ad copy. Use what you do best and keep at it! And keep trying new things. You'll find it!DR
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How can I research what entrepreneurial business endeavor I would have the most success with?
You can hire amazing research talent on Upwork. Before that though, you'll have to work out what your hypothesis is, what are you trying to prove? Given what you've shared, I'd guess that you're looking for recurring income. The easiest to start might be the goal setting program if it were truly uhique. The better bet to my mind is creating a series of online courses. The online education market is booming both for traditional sites like Udemy and new entries like invitation-only Zekqr. For a very successful model for building an online course empire check out Phil Ebiner and Sarah Cordiner. Both have built profitable online business and teach about it. When it comes time to implement, you'll want to get my course, Outsourcing Made Easy on Udemy or schedule a call with me. Best, DinaDE
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What lead generation strategy should an entrepreneur use to find ideal B2B customers?
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 #UnthinkHV
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How do you sell prospective student leads (email address, phone number, etc.) to online universities?
I know of a marketing executive at an online university. I will ask him your question and let you know what I find out. Cheers, FrankFF
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