The Best Lead Generation Strategy For 2024 (Tutorial)

Hey, hope you're doing well. My name is Jimmy Fung. I'm the founder of a lead generation agency called Salesway IO. Pretty much in this video I will be breaking out exactly how you would scrape leads and generate meetings pretty much using Apollo IO. So a couple days ago, a couple of weeks back, I actually released a video talking about how I personally scrape leads using LinkedIn Sales Navigator Advance. And it was really useful. And if you take action on that video, you, you will come up with a lot of leads. The only challenge with using LinkedIn is number one, it is a steeper learning curve because the UI is just not quite as simple, not quite as intuitive as Apollo IO. And the second point is it's very expensive. So I know in that video I suggested using the free trial, but obviously that's not a long term strategy, right? Because if, let's say you don't record it properly and your trial expires or down the line, you want to actually use LinkedIn Sales Navigator for a more long term strategy. You, it will cost you a few hundred dollars every single month. So here in Toronto, Canada, it cost me somewhere between 250 to $300 a month because there is that exchange rate. So it changes a little bit. So my point being is it is very expensive and I understand that a lot of people, especially if you're a beginner, even if you do have a few hundred dollars to invest into LinkedIn, your money is better spent elsewhere, to be completely honest. Right. I personally would rather spend that same 250 bucks on getting more domains or getting more email addresses rather than using it for L. LinkedIn. That strategy does work really, really well. And down the line, if, let's say your agency, you're making tens of thousands of dollars a month, you're at 10,000, 15,000, $20,000 a month, then yeah, obviously you could easily afford LinkedIn Sales Navigator and I would strongly recommend that strategy. But as a complete beginner, it's just not that feasible, to be honest. Right. And that's why I recorded this video. Personally, I use Apollo around 60% of the time. I script leads. It works extremely well, but there are very subtle differences. If you've ever tried scraping Apollo, then you will quickly realize that their marketing is a little bit of, it's very misleading. Basically they tell you that you could get unlimited email credits, which is simply not true because there's a cap to that. And more than that, it takes you a lot of time because you have to manually scrape Apollo 25 saved contacts at a time and you can imagine if you scrape 25 at a time how, how long will take you to get to 10,000 leads. So I made this video to really showcase that, how you can scrape Apollo and hope you enjoy the video and hope you, you know, answers, hope this answers any questions you might have. If you have any questions, make sure you follow my Instagram page. I really break down more specifically how you can go about building your own lead generation agency, get it to $10,000 a month with no case studies or no previous business experience. Make sure you subscribe to this YouTube channel and you know, hope you enjoy the content. Make sure you subscribe, make sure you comment below if you enjoyed this video or if you have any feedback as to what you'd like to learn next or how I could personally improve. So hope you enjoyed this video. Goodbye. So the very first thing that you want to do is you want to jump into Apollo IO. So this is an alternative tool, one that's extremely popular. And if you've watched some other YouTube videos or you've done your own research, most people actually Recommend Using Apollo I.O. to scrape leads. So I made a previous video talking about scraping leads using LinkedIn Sales Navigator Advanced. And there are certain pros and cons. For example, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the direct source because it's the largest social media platform for business people and business owners. So there is that as an advantage because they're going direct to the source. The cons, however, is it's very expensive, right? LinkedIn Sales Navigator Advanced here in Canada. It's costing me a little bit over $250 Canadian dollars every single month. And I understand that not everyone has the funds to do so. And if you do have the funds to, it's, you know, it might not be the most efficient use of your resources, especially if you're starting out as a beginner. So most people do recommend Apollo IO. It's extremely popular. And in this video I'll be showing you exactly how you would scrape Apollo. And I do this inside my own agency for all my clients. And it really depends on the audience and who I'm trying to scrape for me to decide whether to use LinkedIn or to use Apollo. But jumping right into the video, the first thing you want to do is jump over into Apollo IO. This is the pricing. So just to be transparent with you, there are a couple of different plans. Most people, when they are scraping their own leads, they would probably use professional, right? It does say most popular. And what I want to make clear is it's kind of a scam, right? I don't want to really use that word, but it really is because it does say unlimited email credits, but that's simply not true. Anyone who has bought this plan, if you buy this plan yourself, you will quickly realize that there is a cap. When I was paying for this a couple months ago, the cap was around 10,000 email credits a month, which is very low, depending on the industry size and how many emails you want to send out. So just I want to make this clear that when it does say unlimited, it is not unlimited. It is nowhere near unlimited. I'm not sure why they market it like this, but that is simply not true. So if you wanted to scrape, let's say, 20,000 leads or even 10,000 leads, you don't really want to be paying $79 a month to do so. And more than that is, once you go onto this plan, let's say you are fine scraping 10,000 leads. What you will do is you will have to set up the filters and you will have to manually save 25 leads at a time. So even if you were trying to scrape 10,000 leads, it's a massive pain in the ass, right? Because you're scraping, you're saving 25 emails at a time. How many of those do you need to get to 10,000? Right. I'm not the greatest at math, but you would need a ton of those 25 saved contacts at a time to get to 10,000. So what I'm saying to you is paying for Apollo is simply not worth it. Basically, and I don't advise anyone to do this when you're building your agency. A lot of the top guys. What I have personally done is after a few months where I'm making a few tens of thousands of dollars every single month, people actually start paying other people, like developers, to develop them custom scrapers. This does cost anywhere from 1 to $5,000. I know when I did this for, when I was using Apollo myself, I think I paid a guy three or four thousand dollars to build me a custom scraper. But it is very expensive. And the algorithm for Apollo does change a lot because Apollo catches on. And obviously they don't want people, you know, scraping 100,000 leads without paying for the custom plan, which is very expensive. So basically what you want to do is you want to hop into Apollo. This works best if you go on the basic plan. Or what you can do is you can start with a professional plan or a basic plan and do the free trial. So the free trial is 14 days. And if you're smart about it, about your time, you will be able to scrape a ton of leads using the free trial. So that's what I recommend you doing. Just set up a free trial so that you don't technically have to pay. Or if you're doing this a lot for your clients, I would recommend you jumping on the basic plan because it could be pretty annoying setting up 14 day free trials for every client or any single time you want to scrape leads. So I do recommend you either doing the free trial or jumping on the basic plan. So once you get that set up, what you then want to do is jump into Apollo IO. This is the dashboard for the actual scraping software and this is exactly what you would do. So, for example, to my point about using custom scrapers, two to three months ago I actually had a custom scraper. Hence over here, if you look into the saved contacts, I have almost a million contacts because the custom scraper allows me to bypass those limits. But at the same time, you know, they break really easily, those custom scrapers. And they are very expensive. And I would imagine, imagine beginners or people who are looking to get started, you wouldn't want to spend $5,000 building a custom scraper for this. It's just simply not worth it. But down the line, when you're making, let's say $20,000, $30,000 a month in your own agency, it might be worth it, right when you want to start bringing things more in house and making sure as many things are under your own control as possible. So as a complete beginner, what you would do is again, you would get the free trial or the basic plan. You would jump into Apollo and, and let's say for this specific example, I am scraping marketing agencies. What you then want to do, the first thing you want to do is on the left side over here is there's a bunch of different filters. You would have to configure these different filters based on your icp. So let's say you're reaching out to marketing agencies of, you know, agencies with 50 employees or below. And you want to reach out to the direct decision makers. So those people would probably be like CEOs, founders, VP marketing, VP sales, those type of people. The first thing you want to do is head over into the job title and you would just write in, let's say CEO, you might want to put founder, co founder. You could probably do coo, oops, VP Sales, VP Marketing, head of sales, head of business development, which is essentially head of sales and Those would probably be kind of the filters. You could put director, sales, director of sales. Right. And depending on who you target, if you're Targeting companies below 50, these are generally the titles if you're targeting larger companies. So some of my clients, they're targeting enterprise level companies, right. So I actually had a client a couple of months back, he was a recruitment agency and he was reaching out to these Fortune 500 companies that, and we were able to help him sign VMware and InterLink Mortgage. So VMware, it's a publicly traded company, it has probably tens of thousands of employees. So obviously you would want to add in more different job titles, for example sales managers or head of recruitment, recruitment managers, stuff like that. So it really depends on the type of company you're targeting. But in this specific example, since we are Targeting companies below 50 employees, this is probably a reasonable amount of job titles. You could obviously go ahead and play with it, try different things, add in different job titles. You could also go to ChatGPT and type in a prompt to find out, hey, ChatGPT. At marketing agencies with 50 employees or less who would oftentimes be the decision makers for lead generation services or business development. You can search that, it'll spit out a giant list of job titles and then you could put that in here. But for the purposes of this video, we'll go ahead with these nine job titles. Once you have that, you could probably put location. So I'm in Canada and most companies that I like to work with are countries from the big five, Big five meaning the big five English speaking countries. So Canada, us, uk, Australia and New Zealand. So we could put that, I'll put North America because it's Canada and us. We could put United Kingdom, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and depending on who you want to target, if you are able to speak other languages. So for myself, I mainly only speak English, but I know people who, let's say they are in Germany and they're able to speak German. It is a massive advantage to be able to reach out to people in Germany because you have that language advantage. And most people, I would imagine they don't understand German, right? Or if you're in Spain, most people don't understand Spanish like that. But you could target those people if you understand how to speak the language and their common pain points. But, but for the purposes of me only speaking English, as I would imagine most of my viewers are as well, you would target these big five and you could obviously target other countries like India for example, or Pakistan. Those are English speaking countries. But you just have to keep in mind of the buying power, right. Some people from different countries there aren't necessarily able to afford $3,000, $4,000, $5,000 USD a month. So for example, if people in India, right. That's a lot of money, $5,000 USD compared to someone in the United States who, if you reach out to the right people, they could easily pay that or put that on a credit card. So that's something that you want to keep in mind as well. Although in the beginning of my agency I did target a lot of people, just pretty much worldwide, any English speaking countries. And I booked a lot of sales calls and what actually happened was I started jumping on a bunch of sales calls with people from these other countries and they weren't necessarily able to afford the services because again, it is a lot of buying power. So just keep that in mind. Will be moving forward with these five countries. So that's location and employee numbers. You could put 1 to 10, 11 to 20, 21 to 50. What I have found is in theory you could reach out to companies with 5,000 plus employees because we're doing cold emails and that works for that. For those type of companies you just have to change the strategy a little bit. And you also have to keep in mind that obviously speaking with the CEO or speaking with the head of sales of a company with 5,000 employees is, is a much more challenging task than speaking to the head of sales of company with 20 people. Right. Because they're obviously much more busy. So just keep that in mind as well. In terms of industry and keywords, this is kind of where the magic happens. What you then want to do is there's a couple of different ways that you can go about doing this. What I like to do is I like to just put in marketing and advertising. If we're targeting marketing agencies, we see that there are 90,000 of these companies. 90,000 of these people actually, right. Of those companies, like founders, CEOs, head of sales in those big five countries and there's 90,000. But a lot of these are not qualified in the sense where under marketing advertising there's a bunch of different filters. We want to work on marketing agencies, we don't want to work with, you know, software companies for marketing agencies because that might be grouped in here under industry and keywords at Apollo. So that is one of the downsides is their categorizing of industries and keywords is not the greatest, but it does get the job done if you do very specific things. So for example, what you can then do is type in very specific keywords. You could write marketing agency, right? And by doing so, by putting that keyword, you really narrow it down to a thousand. You know, these are very specific marketing agencies. We could write in the word agency. Another common keyword for marketing and advertising might be social media management. You could write ads, you could write email marketing. You might want to work with SEO companies landing page. And this is how you would do it, right? So you just have to come up with a bunch of these industry keywords depending on who you're working with. Based on these keywords that I put down, we see we have 26,000 contacts to reach out to. So what you want then want to do is you want to scroll this list a little bit to double check to make sure these people are as qualified as possible. So these are, it looks like a lot of these are marketing agencies or digital marketing. So There are some SaaS we don't want to work with SAS. What you then want to do is press over to exclude keyword and you can write SAS or you can write software. You can remove stuff like recruitment. And by doing that, we just removed almost 4,000 people who worked at these companies that were not relevant, like software companies, because we don't want to do that. You want to play around with this and you know, obviously you want to spend more time to really figure out how you would go about doing this. We see this automations. We could remove the word automation and let's say you don't want to work with SEO companies. Then you could write in SEO here and it will instantly remove them. But so you just then want to scroll this list to really figure it out. So this list looks pretty good. So far we have 22,000. Again, you have to do your own research to really figure out what are very specific keywords. I have another video talking about how you would research your specific niche that you choose. So make sure you go ahead and watch that. And once you have that, you just have to understand what are the very specific services like specifically. Okay, you are a marketing agency, you're providing marketing services. But what exactly does that mean? Does that mean you're providing Facebook ads? Are you providing SEO services? Are you providing email marketing services? So you have to really understand those specific services. And then if they, you know, if you're scrolling this list and let's say you are only trying, trying to target ads agencies then remove stuff like SEO or email marketing because you only want to work with ads agencies. But let's say we are moving forward with this list. This is, I'd say this is pretty decent. The company keywords, marketing agencies, agencies, social media management, excluding softwares, sasses, recruitment automations. These are some common keywords that you just want to remove. You might want to remove PR because a lot of people confuse or a lot of, I guess, Apollo, they confuse PR with marketing, which are, which is similar but not necessarily the same. You could remove content, right? Editing maybe. So this by itself, you're really narrowing down that list. And now you know that people are very, very targeted, very specific. And you're able to be very personalized with the way you go about emailing these people and contacting them. One thing you do want to keep in mind is the more keywords that you exclude, the more specific your list will be. The more specific it will be towards ads agencies, if that's what you're targeting to. What you do also want to keep in mind is oftentimes these businesses, especially if they're larger, on the larger side, let's 20 employees or more, they are offering multiple services. So there are a lot of services that are parallel to, you know, let's say ads, right? So like for example, an ads agency, they might end up doing UCG or they might end up doing email marketing. So if you're really specific, you end up removing those type of companies as well. So that's something to keep in mind. What I will advise you to is if you're a complete beginner, you're looking to sign your first clients. You do want to be a little bit more broad because that opens up your total addressable market. You know, for example, I said this in a previous video, you reaching out to these 11,000 companies, you're much more likely to sign one client, find one person willing to pay for services than reaching out to a list of only 500 people, right? It's simple mathematics. It's simple probability. So what you want to do is let's assume that this list, you scroll through this list and this makes sense. You realize this is who you want to target. What you then want to do is you want to scrape this list. So what I mean by earlier in the video when I mentioned you have to save 25 at a time, even if you are on the pro plan, you will have to highlight this and select all 25 people. So you select this page and then you would have to save it yourself into a list that you create. And you have to do this 25 at a time, right? So if you wanted to scrape 10,000 people. You would have to scrape 25 people at a time up to 10,000. And it will take you literally hours, they might take you days. Even if you hired a virtual assistant to do this, it's a waste of their time and a waste of your resources because you would have to pay them. So I don't recommend using this because. And that's why people start building custom scrapers, because it allows them to just scrape 10,000 people with a click of the button. But obviously in this example, we're not looking into that answer. We're not looking into that solution. So what you then want to do is make sure you're selecting total. You want to go up here to the URL and you want to highlight it, you want to copy it. And what you then want to do is this is a tool that I recently found out about. I started using this inside my own agency. And essentially you're paying someone else to scrape this list for you. So there's 11,000 people. Let's assume to keep the numbers simple, we want to scrape 10,000 leads, right? We obviously don't want to be doing that ourselves, nor do we want to be paying for the plan that allows us to do that, because it's again, basically a scam, right? We want to hire someone else to scrape this for us. So we highlight the URL. We then go over to this website. It's called magically genius.com and. And as you can see from the title, they advertise it as get leads from Apollo in the affordable and fastest way possible. Again, I'm not affiliated with these people. I never spoken with their, with the founders or anyone from this company. I just use this a lot recently because essentially you're able to scrape these leads in a really quick and easy way. So you just want to scroll down. I will put the link to this software down in the comments below. So make sure you go down over here and you just want to scroll over down to this page. Essentially we are putting in the Apollo search URL. So I put that in there, right? Again, it's up here. Make sure you're selecting total. You don't want to be selecting Net new or saved, because that's a whole different thing. So select total 11.8. And then for leads, let's say you want to do $10,000. 10,000 leads. Sorry, you could do 11, you could do 12,000. Whatever you want. Let's just use 10,000. And we see that it literally costs you $30, which is much less than a plan, right? The Apollo plan was $79. So this is saving you almost 50 bucks, which is quite significant. And the pricing is really good, right? As in you're scraping 1,000 leads. It'll be $3, right? Which is very, very low. So let's say we're doing 10,000. You would then scroll down, select 10,000, and your bill is $30, which is really not bad because 10,000 leads could easily last you a month. So $30 to have 10,000 leads, that is a really good price. And you press next. You will enter all your information. You put in your credit card bill, and then you would press let's go. And after you get this, you will get an email directly from this company. So depending on the email that you put over here, it will scrape you. It will scrape all the way to your email address, and that's how you want to go about doing that. It will go to your email address. It will come out as a CSV file or a Google Sheets Excel file, and then you want to import that into Google Sheets, and you will be good to go. And at that point, you will have 10,000 leads. So this is the method that I use to scrape Apollo.