In this blog post, I’m going to talk through how you can generate brand new completely from scratch leads for your marketing funnel business.
I’m going to show you where to find leads, where to find new prospects that you can start getting in contact with, where to generate new leads and a lead list as well as researching where your current leads and where your potential leads hang out.
If you’ve got no leads on the horizon, no lead generation process or attraction process, this process on the board behind me is going to outline everything you need to generate new leads from scratch that I’ve learned completely from beginners all the way to my process that I still do well use today.
Maybe your problem is that you’ve got no idea where to find lead from scratch.
If you’re completely starting from fresh or you feel you’ve exhausted all your other options, or maybe you’re going down a different path like with a new niche, you want to understand where and how to find new leads.
A lot of funnel builders made the mistake of thinking that there aren’t new leads out there, like everyone’s been sold to already. There are no new businesses out there and that’s just not true.
Some of my favorite customers to work with are customers who have been with another company for a long time because they’re often looking to shake things up.
Using this process, you can generate 20 to 30 brand new leads within the space of a week that you can start having a regular conversation with.
If you’ve got zero niche, zero ads, no portfolio and you’re looking for a really simple three-step plan to generate new leads from scratch, here’s my three-step plan, that I use to generate hundreds or even thousands of leads completely on automation with no ads, no niche, no portfolio or anything like that:
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I’ve got four columns here that maybe you can write down on a piece of paper or take a screenshot or something and fill this in.
Actually, there’s the fifth box and what we’re going to do is go through this.
These are the five stages of generating leads from scratch.
1. What do you want from a lead?
The first thing is to understand what are your requirements for a lead.
It’s really important to understand that if you want to go generating leads, what do you need?
A really easy place to start is a name. Obviously, like who are you get in contact.
What’s their actual name? It’s not enough to say, I want to work with Samsung or work with Echelon Three or something. You have to understand the actual individual that you are going to want to talk to.
If for the time being you’ve only got a business name, that’s a good indicator that you need to dig a little bit deeper and understand about the name of the person you want to go after.
We need their name. We also need their contact information. Now, typically that’s going to be an email address.
You could get their phone number as well. Like a lot of relationships start with a phone number. It’s a really easy way to generate a lead as well, especially if you want to get through to them and actually have a direct conversation with them.
I don’t consider LinkedIn connections much of a contact information because it’s a social platform. If they don’t check LinkedIn or if they disappear, then they’re not going to be much use to you.
Whereas an email address is a lot more personal and people check their emails and they’re also easier to write to and they’re much more private and personal. I’m always going to want to get an email address over anything else.
These are the bare minimum. The next two things that you’re going to need are needs.
What are their actual needs? What are they looking to focus on or work on or fix or change or improve within their business?
What do they want from a relationship with a supplier like yourself? You might not get that straight away, but at some point you’re going to need that.
Next up, you have authority. Are they the decision-maker?
Do they have the purse strings? Do they have the ability to make the decision?
There’s nothing worse than making a pitch to a customer and them saying, “Oh, I need to go take this to my manager.”
You need to make sure that the person you’re getting in contact with is actually the person who you’re able to give the invoice to because if it’s anyone lesser than that, you’re basically doubling the amount of work and effort.
Everyone says, “Oh no, I’ll take it to my manager.” You go, “Great, that’s really good. I like the fact that you’re Robin, but typically I only deal with Batman. I’m going to need to talk to your manager.”
There’s a lot of ways around that. You need to understand at least who is the decision-maker in the business.
2. Create a target hitlist
The next thing I’d like to do is create a hit list.
Some people call this a wishlist. This is going to be a list of 20 to 30 businesses or people.
Ideally, you want to try and get at least this information. You might not have their contact information to start with but you can get at least their name and you want to work on a hit list of 20 to 30 businesses that you would love to work with.
These basically represent your ideal client or your target client. It might be that you do end up working with these clients.
I’ve got a hit list. I’ve got clients here, big corporate clients that I want to work for and work with, but it might be that these are clients who either represent the exact type of business that you want to work with, or they represent the people who you literally want to work with.
If you don’t have a hit list of 20 to 30 ideal clients, it’s almost impossible to start generating new leads because you’re not working from anything.
It’s kind of the equivalent of saying, “I’m really hungry and I really want to go to dinner.” Then when someone says, “Okay. What type of food you like?” You go, “I’m not telling you that.”
You have to know what you’re working with before I’m able to get you more of it. So, have a hit list.
If you don’t have a hit list and you think, “There are no businesses out there that fit my profile.”. That just means you haven’t done enough research.
This can take anywhere from two to three weeks. Do your research spend a lot of time going into this.
3. Research events, groups, forums, sites, podcasts, channels and profile
I think the community is the most undervalued part of lead generation.
This is because a lot of people think that lead generation is about being really good at pitching and it’s not. It’s actually being really good at stalking.
Good salespeople are professional stalkers, not professional talkers. What this means is you need to start looking at things like the forums that your customers are a part of.
You might say, how the hell do I know that? Do some fucking research, right?
Spend more time being more annoying and start asking people. Let’s say that you have the name of your customer and you know that they are the CEO and owner and you think there’s no way that they just hang out on a CEO and ownership forum.
First of all, you don’t know that. Secondly, forums like gyms, golf, sports, movies, there’s tons of different ones.
We’ll often have a CEO corner or a business corner or a self-business corner or something along those lines. A lot of people who have one particular interest, birds of a feather fought together.
There might not be a SAS business forum. Although I guarantee you there is, and we can probably spend enough time digging around and trying to find one.
But if you are looking at forums and these are the old-school chat room style places that people still use, millions or billions of people still use them.
Everything from video games to movies, to sport and fitness, has got these forums and even specific topic forms around that community.
The next thing is looking at things like groups. This is your classic, like Facebook groups. This is LinkedIn groups.
I haven’t used the new one. What is it, clubhouse? I haven’t used it yet, but maybe there are things like on there.
You need to find out the different groups that they’re part of. Join them. Don’t spam them, but join them and start.
There are channels, so a bit like a Youtube channel. These guys will be looking at YouTube content. They might not be looking at the exact YouTube content that you think they are.
The CEO of a vegan food company might not be looking at vegan food channels, or there maybe they are. But maybe they’re looking at CEO channels, financial management channels.
Maybe they’re looking at video content on running better businesses. Maybe they’re looking at their different influences.
Another one, events. This is so underutilized. The amount of events that are happening even now during a global pandemic still online is astronomical. Yet no one seems to use them.
Events have sponsors, right? Sponsors have forums, groups, channels, and all the other things we’re about to talk about.
Speakers, when they get on stage to talk about a specific thing, they’re either your ideal customer on the hit list or there’s someone who has some kind of influencer channel. Maybe they’ve got a book and this is all beginning to inform the era of where your current customers or your potential leads hang out within their community.
Finally, if you want so here’s my absolute killer secret that no one seems to use. Speak to the event organizer, email the event organizer.
Say, “Hey, I didn’t manage to make the event this year or last year or whatever.” Make up some excuse, whatever. “Could you please send me the speaker list or the topics list of what the event was last year.”
First of all, you never know they might be looking for speakers, right? You might’ve wormed your way in there.
But secondly, that’s basically a list of all the things that people are willing to pay to access, to learn more about. That is a list of problems so that then feeds into the need section.
You’ve also got podcasts. There are fucking billions of these things at the moment that your audience is potentially listening to.
If you go, “Oh, I don’t know.”
It’s because you haven’t researched enough. Time it. Time the amount of time you spend researching it.
If you walk away after doing all of this, if you spend two solid days, just two days building this. Two days building your community, two days doing research, and two days thinking about your requirements.
I’ll guarantee, you’ll come away with a list of 20 to 30 businesses that you could start targeting.
You lose or come away with a list of areas where future potential customers who you’ve never even heard of or were already hanging out.
4. Research audiences interests on Facebook
Research. This is the part where you have to get really deep into it.
This is where you start looking at interests, topics, pages, all of this plus more.
What I like to do is go on audience.io and I like to search using that tool for interests.
Now, what audience does is take all the Facebook interests?
They’ve got something like a database of 200,000 or 300,000 interests. I’ve got another video for it, which I’ll link up in the corner talking about how to use their tool.
It’s a one-off fee, no subscription or anything like that. There’s even a free trial available where you can basically get a list of thousands of different interests that Facebook has tagged your niche as being interested in.
I want to create a list of around 30 to 50 different interests that I think my audience might be interested in because that’s going to come into play later when we start doing advertising and paid outreach.
So with all of this, you’re going to have a better understanding of who your potential leads are.
5. Tell other people who you work with
This part here is the thing that hardly anyone does and that is to tell people.
Imagine that, we actually live in a world where we can communicate and market to each other.
When you say to people, “I want more leads, I’m looking for more leads for my business”. And they go, “Great. Who are you looking for?” You go, “Just small businesses. I don’t really know.”.
Bullshit. You now have four different areas. You’re looking for people who are interested in these things.
Do you know anyone you’re looking for, people in these podcasts and these events and these channels?
I’m looking for people who look and sound a lot like these businesses, and then I’m looking to work with Bob Brown from CEO Tech Industries.
Do you know him? Do you know anyone who might know him?
The number one reason people struggle with lead generation is because they themselves don’t know the types of leads they want to go after.
What I need you to do is understand the types of leads that you want to go after and start fucking telling other people.
Remember, here’s my three-step program for generating leads from scratch, hundreds or even thousands of them:
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