Who out there doesn’t want to start generating more leads immediately? Every business owner out there will have searched the web to find out how to generate more leads for him or his sales team.
No matter how well you are doing, there are always more customers to sell to and you can never start soon enough. At this point, the keener among you might have done your research on our blog and found out that outbound sales is the way forward, as you pro-actively find new customers rather than waiting for them to come to you.
Deciding to develop a sales strategy for your outbound channel is a good first step in generating more leads. But for those who are new to outbound sales, taking that step often raises more questions than it answers. Where do I start? What tools do I need? Where do I get my prospects from?
You shouldn’t worry too much because all you need is:
The 4 key elements that will help you start generating more leads
An Ideal Customer Profile
Prospect data
The right campaign
An email automation tool
These elements combined create a sales process that dependably generates more leads than any other you have tried before. Simply applying each of these elements will get you started and will show you how to generate more leads for your business right away.
An Ideal Customer Profile (or ICP) makes targeting a cinch
Before you can get anywhere near generating leads, you need to figure out who your perfect customer is. This serves two purposes:
- With outbound, you choose your customers, not the other way around. To do this, you will need a guide to tell you which prospects are best to sell to. You can then input this information directly into a tool like Growbots to get a list of targeted prospects.
- The more you know about your customer, the easier it is to craft a message that speaks directly to them and their situation. The more your message resonate with your prospect, the more likely they are to respond to you, and the more money you will make.
- With outbound, you choose your customers, not the other way around. To do this, you will need a guide to tell you which prospects are best to sell to. You can then input this information directly into a tool like Growbots to get a list of targeted prospects.
Prospect data is essential to executing your campaign
It goes without saying that you will need the email addresses of the people you intend to email. There are two ways you can go about this:
- The manual process – first scrape the internet for companies that match your ICP and then use Sales Navigator to find the decision makers in these companies. When you find the people you want to target, use Email Hunter or Rapportive to find their email addresses. You don’t need to invest in any tools but it is a long, tedious process.
- The automatic process – put the data from your ICP into a tool like Growbots and get a list of email addresses in a matter of minutes. You need to invest in a tool but the savings in time and increased ROI pay for themselves many times over.
A well-crafted campaign is more important for generating more leads than any other single element
Getting a prospect’s email address is simply a way to access them so you can make your pitch. To get them to talk to you and generate more leads, you need to prepare a convincing outbound campaign. Use the information in your job story and ICP to craft a message that speaks to your prospects needs. You may need to make a few ICPs to match the different pain points found in different job stories.
Here are our guides on writing the first email of your campaign and the follow-ups. Ideally, you could use some help doing this. An email automation tool with a dedicated customer success manager can save you months of figuring it out on your own and you’ll start to generate more leads immediately.
An email automation tool generates more leads and is cheaper in the long run
The one major downside of the outbound process is that it is rather repetitive. Not really fun for anybody. By automating the messages and follow-ups of your campaign, you can do everything in a few minutes, leaving you and your team more 1-on-1 time with customers to grow your business.
Now the manual process doesn’t require spending much money on a tool or data, but don’t be deceived. As a founder, your most precious resource is your time and when you start employing a sales team, you will find that their time comes at a price as well. We first used Streak and then Yesware for email automation when we started Growbots. Now we only use the Growbots’ tool, both for prospecting and email automation, and have never looked back.
To prospect and send emails to 200 people takes about two days using the manual method, but as little as 5 (and up to 30) minutes using Growbots. This shows using the latter is obviously the fastest way to generate more leads and send messages.
It’s time to generate more leads than ever before
Okay, it’s now time for full transparency. It is possible to generate outbound leads completely in a lean way, scraping the internet, looking for prospect data, manually enriching the data, looking for email addresses, reading articles, and sending these emails with the free solutions currently available. And you should do that if you have $0 in your bank account – believe me, we’ve been there. The money you gain from this process will give you money for some shiny new automation tools that will supercharge your operation.
As I said earlier, automation tools save resources in the long run and generally allow you to do a lot more. Use the manual process only until you have enough money for automation tools. If you have the money already, then don’t waste your time doing tasks that can just as easily be done by a computer.
When you decide to go for an all-in-one solution like Growbots, your life will become a whole lot easier. Setup only takes an hour and you’ll be able to see ROI very soon after. The elements you need to kick off your new sales channel are bundled in one place: instant data on demand (generating 200 emails with one click), a powerful automated email outreach tool, and, most important of all, access to the knowledge and experience of a company that has built itself entirely on outbound sales.
Wondering how to generate leads for your business? Ready to kick off your new predictable growth channel? Download and read our free e-book on customer acquisition below:
