I’m now reading a book called Scorecard Marketing. It appears this one is about lead generation, which is a well timed read considering the challenge I face selling Lloyd Banks tickets, is finding qualified leads. Throughout all my reading I’ve spent very little time on lead generation, which in hindsight is another blunder.
Since most of my life, I have not been surrounded by G-Unit fans, I don’t have this collection of Lloyd Banks fans to call on.
I also bought 50 dead pickle pins on a whim last night. So ideally I can find some willing clients to purchase those off me. Once you establish your brand, decide what you want to actually do and are ready to go, you need people to sell to.
One of the most powerful things you can do is develop/acquire a lead list. To start off, I’ll give you an example of how to go about doing this so you don’t run off like this is another boring business blog. I mean it may be, but a newsletter is a great way to get a qualified lead list. Anyone giving you their email address, knowing you are going to send offers, is a qualified lead.
What is lead generation?
I’ve not met a single person in the local Montreal Hip Hop scene who has introduced themselves as a lead gen for concert promoters/artists. There has got to be an entire occupation built around this role. Someone who exclusively specializes in getting people who would care about an event to come.
As I wrote that I realized street teams were actually lead generation firms. Handing out clients to the people they felt would be most interested in buying tickets. Or at least all the fly ladies and dudes with money they could find.
A lead is someone who may end up purchasing your product or service. This is usually broken into temperature tiers:
Cold lead - This is someone who has no interest ahead of time. They are first encountering your product or service when you talk to them. These are the harder “cold calling” sales out there.
Warm lead - This is someone who has heard of you or has expressed some interest in what you do but is not sold yet. There is a lot less work that goes into selling this person. Converting these folks consistently is where salespeople shine.
Hot lead - This is one someone comes in, ready to go. They have already decided and just need you to process the transaction. These are wonderful, but are a bad way to measure your skills as a salesperson. Anyone can close that.
Lead generation is the process of attracting warm to hot leads for salespeople. A lot of this is happening online. A lot of successful people use content and interactive web tools to get data on people. Once you have data you can customize your pitch and make it better, warming up the temperature of the lead.
Basically lead gens are professional filterers of people.
Start with a newsletter to generate leads
Before we go too deep into this, Google/Bing your local data protection laws. When you store personal data, such as government names, the person may have rights to deletion and things of that nature. This includes you, the budding entrepreneur reading this. Most tools you work with have built in systems to manage this. Mostly just be aware and move as you were going to.
A newsletter is a great way to generate leads. It will still take me some time to get my newsletter game on point. It’s not like you just flick a switch and a newsletter appears. Your newsletter is an exchange that is worth pursuing and planning. You get their email, and permission to contact them and you just need to send them some emails worth reading.
You will need to think of some content for the newsletter. This could be storytimes or facts. It could be monthly updates of what you are up to. Most importantly you can add links to buy stuff from you.
If you do some aggressive corny stuff to get email addresses, such as pretending to be someone you are not, those leads may not be as hot as you’d like. As long as you do it in an honest way, the email addresses you collect when you set up your newsletter campaign will be some of the best leads you can generate.
Especially when you start off. These are the people who really went out of their way to stay informed with what you are up to. A powerful way to convince people you are worth some money is to have a fat email list. Trust me, if you can prove 200-300 people engage with your newsletter content, you will start to see some dollars rolling in.
I’m going to check out Substack and see what we can do to utilize it. As we flush out our newsletter project, we’ll keep you posted more.
Pay attention to the people who take interest in what you do
In order to get better leads you will need to understand the profile of an ideal lead. This will include demographic information such as age & gender but will also include psychological factors like willingness to take risks or levels of impulsiveness.
Maybe your campaign is meant to be flashy and get people to sign up without thinking. Other strategies are a slower seduction, meant to seep into the brain and convert even the most cautious of people. You need to understand who your clientele is, or at least make an educated guess.
There are definitely lead generation brokers online. Let’s say you had an unlimited budget and could go out there and just buy a fat lead list. What would you even ask for? While getting a list that had music fans in Montreal would be good, getting a list for people that liked emo Hip Hop in Montreal may be better for me. Another reason you want to be really specific with who you are looking to target is so you can use the most powerful ad tool ever, Facebook Ads.
The more you understand your client personas, the more information you can feed a tool like Facebook ads. Then when you run your ad, the actual conversion rates will go up. So if I can find a combination of keywords that leads to button wearing pickle haters, I can spend 25$ on FB ads and sell 100$ worth of buttons for the people.
To recap, you want to think about lead generation. To do that you need to consider who you want to sell to and what resources you have. A great starting point is a newsletter. Focus heavily on who fucks with you and what common traits they have.
Live Long and Prosper Everyone
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