The ONLY Four Ways You Can Generate Leads

Today's episode is going to be a little bit of an in-between episode. We're going to talk about one topic for 5 to 15 minutes, just a little nugget between our more longer-form episodes. We're talking and expanding on multiple topics, and hopefully this will give you something to chew on in between the longer-form episodes and also give us the ability to publish more frequently. So let me know what you think. Engage with it on the Payroll on Podcasts LinkedIn page, send me a direct message. Would love to hear your thoughts and what you believe about this new format. So here we go. We're gonna talk about lead generation today. We're talking about there's only 4 ways to generate leads for your business. And in reality, if you don't have a predictable lead generation machine, you don't have a business because you don't have a way to get new customers or forecast how many new customers you're gonna get this year, next year, 3 years from now. Therefore, you're gonna have that unpredictability that's going to not cause you potentially to go out of business, but it's just going to give you an immense amount of stress along the way. So there's nothing more important to me beyond the ability to deliver on your product or service than finding new customers, which all starts with lead generation. So let's talk about the 4 ways that you can generate new leads for your payroll company or any small business for that matter. So let's think about it like this, and I borrowed many ideas in this— sorry, just quick interrupt myself there. I borrowed many of the ideas in this from the book Predictable Revenue and the book $100 Million Leads and combined it with many other things I've learned along the years. But I definitely want to give credit to those authors because those are two great books I highly suggest, and we always want to stand on the shoulders of giants and learn from those who have, uh, done the things we want to do. So let's rock and roll. There is two ways to think about this. So our audience we have our audience, and then we have our communication method. So our audience, we have two quadrants of our audience, people we know and people we don't know. And then we have, or people who know us and people who don't know us, sorry. And then we have one-to-one outreach or one-to-many outreach. And so those are it. Now that's formed a quadrant for us. We've got people who know us, people who don't know us, and we've got one-to-one outreach and one-to-many outreach. So let's look across the top side of this quadrant, which for me is one-to-one private communication. And first up, the hottest portion of the quadrant to me, the place where you have the biggest opportunity, you're working closest to the money, is one-to-one to who, to people who know you. So this is warm outreach. So these could be friends, family, people who filled out forms on your website, current customers, referral partners that you already have existing relationships with. These are people who already know you. So whether you're just getting started or you've been in the industry for decades, you've got a Rolodex. We all have at least 1,000 people that fit in this category. You can go in your phone, you can go in your email, you can go on your LinkedIn, you can go in your, you know, your other social platforms. We've all got this group. So we don't have any excuse not to be reaching out to warm leads directly one-to-one And again, they're the ones who can either help us to find referrals for companies that might do business with us or potentially look at using our products or services themselves. So that's the top of the quadrant. The hottest segment in my opinion is one-to-one outreach to people who know us. Next up, we have one-to-one outreach to people who don't know us. So that's cold outreach. Cold outreach can come in the form of cold calling, cold emails, cold DM messages, This is one-to-one communication, so it's gotta be one-to-one in some format and it's to an audience that doesn't know us. And for us, the two best ways of working one-to-one cold, well, the best way is doing it as a campaign which has multi-touch. So some sort of physical touch that in the form of a mailer or a package, then a series of emails and calls. So a combination, an omnichannel approach. And even social outreach as well. Like, that's the best way to approach this particular segment. We did a great episode. I'm pretty sure that Spotify allowed us to pin it now at the top. But if you want to go back and search for starting a sales process inside of the Payroll episodes, I'm pretty sure it's the most listened to episode and it just outlines exactly how I would approach a new territory, a new market, new market, or if I were a new business owner getting started. So cold outreach, and you know, the big point I'll make here is if you're trying to do cold outreach via email, a couple hundred emails a month is not gonna do it. You're gonna have to start to hit scale. So we're talking 10, 20, 30,000 emails sending from multiple domains. And I know some of you are cringing and your skin's crawling as you hear that, but it works, y'all. A percentage of those folks, a small percentage still book meetings. Now, any cold sales process takes longer to close and has a much less likelihood of closing than a warm process, but this still has to be a component of your lead gen strategy or you're just not gonna have enough. Your network's going to run out at some point. All right, so one-to-one private, people you know, people you don't, warm outreach and cold outreach, and now we've got one-to-many. So your public communication. So on the people who know you component, these are your social audiences, these are people, you know, again, that maybe you email your newsletter to, These are people that you broadcast content to regularly. And so this is your free content. These are your podcasts, these are your YouTube videos, these are your social media posts, these are your newsletters. And even I would put SEO in this category. So these are people that are searching for and finding you. Now they know you and then they're moving around the quadrant from there. Maybe now you've done some warm outreach, but, and when we look at this and how it fits into our bag at Guru, So we can do a pretty good job of all 4, and I'll get to the 4th one here in a second. But this one creates about 60% of our leads in a month is the, well, our inbound leads, excuse me. So the, you know, we do a lot on the top quadrant here of cold outreach, and that's a little bit different, but our inbound leads, we get about 60 to 70 on average a month from our content. And those obviously vary in quality. That's not marketing qualified or MQL leads, but those are, you know, good leads that we close business from every month that come in from SEO. We create a ton of value online. We create a ton of social value and, you know, the market rewards us. And for those of you, many of you are familiar with my philosophy on give the recipe away for free. There's no reason for us to withhold anything. I think if you go and check out our 42 free HR templates page, every time I talk to somebody that downloads that from our company, they They're like, man, I expected this to be a bunch of fluff. We literally went in and found every template that our clients want from us once they get started, the most popular ones, put 'em all in one place and give 'em away for free. And, and the clients and prospects love it. All right, so one-to-many, we've got free content. And then we, the final quadrant is paid ads. Now paid ads has kind of been the purple squirrel of our industry. Not a ton of success when you start talking to people. When I go to an IPPA conference and ask people if they're having any success with ads, I haven't found one yet. We've recently, I'm not going to say cracked the code, but we've started to get, we've got a good funnel set up, good landing page, good copy. It's to a downloadable asset. And so it's sending people to download a particular asset, but it's a very niche market. And so, you know, something I've heard recently and I've probably repeated 100 times and I'm pretty sure I'm butchering it, but it's if you're in a coffee shop and someone drops a tray of mugs everyone in the coffee shop looks. If somebody drops one mug, maybe a couple people close to it look. If somebody says your name, only you look. And so we want to say somebody's name with our marketing. And even with ads, we can do that. So the example would be, you know, download these free HR templates. You know, you might get a business owner, you might get an HR person, you might just get somebody who's looking to get into HR. Whereas if you say executive directors of nonprofits, these HR templates are made for you. Now you've said that person's name and that's where you want to be with your ads. You'll pay higher cost per click and have a higher cost all around, but you'll get better quality leads and you'll convert them at a higher rate, which is the goal, right? So I'm very willing to pay for those leads and have another episode queued up about cost of customer acquisition, lifetime value of customers, how to think about setting quotas. Let me know if you have interest in that. I haven't really refined that into a full episode yet, but all right, so paid ads and look, one other bonus tip here is if you're using Facebook ads, you can just Google right now Facebook ads library. And then in there you can search for any of your competitors. Gusto is a good example. You can see all of Gusto's ads, which ones they've been running, how long they've been running them for. It's a tremendous resource.. And you'll see with Gusto's ads, I mean, most of their ads are for their accounting partner program. So that tells you a lot about where their focus is, but you can also see the longer somebody's been running an ad, the much more likely it's working really well. So now I can deconstruct that funnel and look at how I can reconstruct it on my own, uh, for my own products or services. So those are the 4 ways that you can get leads for your business. And again, if you don't have a lead generation machine, you don't have a business, you've got a hobby, man. So make sure you're setting up a lead generation strategy for your your company and pick one quadrant to get started with and make sure that it's consistent and then continue to build. And this has gotta be something, this has gotta be a blueprint that you can drop into any business you use, that you can drop into any territory and make sure that you can create leads so that you've got a sustainable company for the long term. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate us 5 stars on your player of choice. Make sure you're subscribed so that you get the latest updates from each episode. Thank you so much for tuning in to another episode of Payroll On. I'm Matt Vady, and I appreciate you.