The Best Ways to Generate Leads

Welcome to Inbound Sales Journey. If you want to hone your sales skills and learn from the leaders on inbound selling, you've come to the right place. This episode of Inbound Sales Journey is brought to you by Do Inbound, the world's first project and process management platform built specifically for inbound marketing agencies. Learn more@doinbound.com now here are your hosts, Ryan and Gray.

Welcome to episode number 97 of inbound sales Journey. Today, Gray and I are going to be talking about new ways to generate leads for your agency.

Yep.

So Gray hit me. We're going to just dive right into it.

Let's do this.

Tell us how to do it.

Dude, I have way more energy than you ever. We've got an energy mismatch.

No, I'm ready.

All right, let's generate some more leads. So first of all, you put down generate leads. So. So I'm thinking of this in terms of getting a lead somehow to come through your site or reach out to you in some manner. So I'm not thinking of this in terms of outbound prospecting, which to be quite honest, there's a couple ways that when I'm talking with a young agency owner that say you don't have a whole lot of options in the early days when you're trying to go out and you need customers now and your options are you figure out who are the target accounts. It's basically very, very small level, not actual account based marketing, but abm. You go find the right person there, you start a relationship and you see if you can sell to them. That's one that's like the primary approach. You also have just reaching out to. I mean the place that everybody needs to start is your friends, your family, like what's, what's the network that you already have built and let them know what you're up to, let them know the types of services that you provide and don't be afraid to just ask like, hey, is it worth a conversation? Is this pain point that you guys have? You know, you guys are trying to improve your lead generation as well. And that's, that's what our whole business model is around. For most people who are starting a business, you have some kind of network that you can reach out to. So that's kind of the starting point for most agencies. But some ideas or resources that we'd have, I'd say number one is you gotta pick your focus. So this is both the niche that you're gonna serve. Like what industry or vertical am I gonna start out in. And that doesn't mean that's the only industry that you'll ever work with. That doesn't mean that you'll never switch and realize, well, this is probably not the best decision. Maybe we should go somewhere else. Or that you only have to pick one initially. But when resources are limited, picking one area to focus on is the way to go for sure. And resources are always limited to some degree. So narrow that focus down and do this in two ways. One is that industry, that vertical identify who your best customer is. But number two is identify what are the services that we're going to do really well, that we have a system and a process for and we can deliver and have strong results with it. So don't go start an agency. Say we're going to be a full service marketing agency and we don't care what your industry is and expect to scale right away because you're competing with. There's just an indefinite amount of like you're just scrolling through lists and lists and lists and lists and lists of people on the Internet right now who say that they're full service marketing agency.

Who serves very similar looking websites.

Everything looks the same.

Even the naming structure, the number of coffees people drink.

Don't get me started on that. Too late. You did it. Listen, can we please stop putting how many random cups of coffee your agency has allegedly drunk drank on your website.

Just offended half of our listeners?

Yep. I realize that there's a very strong possibility that I did that. But you know what?

The opinionated podcast. Here we are.

Put your big boy and big girl pants on and listen to me for a second. Nobody cares and it just makes you look like every other agency out there. Be a little bit different.

Great. When you say be a little bit different. This is. I'm gonna make this as short of a bunny trail as possible. But not saying, should they. I was gonna say, should we go for another random statistic and see if it catches on?

Please tell me something that matters. If you want me to spend my time looking at your website, tell me stuff that matters and that impacts my life.

Man, you're feeling feisty.

I sure am.

All right.

I'm irritated by it. It's just like, who cares? Oh, this agency's drunk 10 times the amount of coffee. Clearly that's the person I want to work with. There's no reason for it. Anyways, I understand you're trying to be folksy. You're trying to folksy have a, have a personal appeal and say we're human in this way. But there are lots of ways to showcase that. And the same way that 95% of other agencies do, it is not the way that you want to do it. If you want to stand out.

All right, off of that gray, what I heard you say for number one, I guess we'll say is picking a niche for the industries you're going to focus on, but also for your agencies. The two niches, the agency niches, what services are we going to provide that we're going to be excellent at? That we're going to narrow down.

Yep. And now if you're trying to generate leads, like today, go even farther down than like, we might have these three different industries that we're going to serve and we might provide these five different services. But pick one and pick one. Pick the best match. Take an educated guess on this one and go pursue that. So build out some kind of educational resource free tool specifically for people in that target audience and that has some correlation, hopefully a strong correlation to the service that you're trying to provide for them and then start getting that out there. Reach out to those people and ask them to share. There's a lot of different ways that you could do this. You could certainly find the communities that they're in online right now and share like for example, do inbound. We're targeting marketing agencies. The communities where people hang out are going to shift over time. So back in the day for a little while actually, what was really successful, I don't know if you know this, this is, believe it or not, what was really successful back really close to when we were launching was Google because it was the new thing.

Way is it not successful now and.

Good point, point taken. Agencies are just notorious for having the attention span of a 4 month old and constantly going to the new thing.

So Google, you are ripping them apart today.

Listen, it's the truth. The truth. Some people can't handle the truth. And if that's you, turn this podcast off right now, please. So anyways, Google was new. Everybody went there. We had a community, a group, a page. I don't even remember to be honest what it was called. And that generated quite a few leads. A plus, yeah, whatever it was called, that then shifted to LinkedIn. LinkedIn eventually evolved into inbound.org and inbound.org has evolved into a number of different places. But Slack right now is a good community. So anyways, the idea is figure out for this target market, where are those communities? This is the advice you hear from everybody, but actually spend a little bit of Time to figure out where are they. Go experiment in a couple different places and see what the results are. And there's a lot of different ways that you can get this out there. Obviously, you want to share it to people. Getting in front of influencers is helpful if they're actually going to do it, if they're actually going to influence in your favor. But you can run contests, you can target with paid ads. I mean, there's a lot of different avenues that you can go down to target these people. But it all kind of starts with a focus on who they are and where they are and building something for them and sharing that, getting it out in front of them. And that's going to start the conversation for you with at least some. Some segment of those people.

What are your thoughts on paid ads? Because I know that you just touched on that a little bit. Is that something you found to be effective? Did you guys do that a while ago?

No, we've. We've never done paid ads. Well, just to be very blunt, we have a couple customer success stories, but that was not. That's not my core strength. That's not Dimmer's core strength. That was thanks to Tristan on the team, who is actually good at paid ads. But we've never. That's never been the core of what we've done and never worked super well for us. But I mentioned that, and I think that there's. Look, there are a lot of different ways to go get leads. Ultimately, you need to start with who is my target here and what are their needs? But you need to factor pretty heavily into the equation, what are you good at? So for us, we've historically been really strong on the organic search side of things. That's been stronger for us than social or paid ads. The channels that we'll use are certainly going to evolve and change, and we need to develop new skills, which is why we've invested time and money to learn paid. And that's still something that is a growth channel for us and something that's going to. You're going to continue to see more from us here at Do Inbound now on the paid ad side of things. But that's not been our strongest suit. So pick what you're strong at and go leverage that and also understand the timeline. So if you need leads today, paid ads might not be a bad way to go. You may not have time for organic search. For us, like podcast, outreach has been a successful either guest blogging or basically tapping into other people's networks with valuable content. Has been really effective, both for Guava Box and for Do Inbound. So I think figuring out what are the things that you're good at, where can you provide value and doubling down on those, where there's alignment between that and the target audience, that's. That's the way to go.

Two legion ideas that I think we have been really successful at that I don't see a lot of agencies doing. Number one you kind of talked about was creating free tools and leveraging those. Do you want to chat a little bit more about, like, the process for figuring out how to know what tools to create and then promoting those?

Hmm. I don't. I don't have a good answer for that. I haven't thought through. I feel like this would be a great podcast episode, which is. Which is why you bring it up. I haven't really thought through what's the exact process? It's. I mean, historically, it's been, what are people asking for or looking for? What tools would we use? Like, the single most helpful sales tool that we built at Guava Box was the inbound revenue calculator. Super simple. All it does is replace a little Excel sheet. But there are a lot of reasons that we've gone into on the podcast and in emails and stuff about why that's been so helpful and why it's better than on Excel or Google sheets. Spreadsheet.