Lead generation is one of the most important aspects of sales. If you can’t generate meetings with your dream clients, well, you can’t sell anything. And over the years, startup and running our own business, we’ve uncovered seven keys that you have to know when it comes to lead generation. You can start generating more appointments with your dream customers and close deals. If you apply these lessons and just take your sales and lead generation game to the next level.
So let’s go ahead and dive into the Seven Keys you need to know when it comes to lead generation.
The first key lesson we have to cover is that you want to send about 75 outreach per day when sending your cold emails or LinkedIn messages. So if you’re doing email, you want to do 75 emails per day, and if you’re doing LinkedIn, you want to send 75 LinkedIn messages per day, as well.
Now, these numbers will change over time, and over time, they will continue to decrease because the platforms don’t want you to be spamming people but right now, the number is around 75. So if you want to maximize your potential outreach and keep your pipeline full with potential opportunities, make sure you’re doing this every single day or at least five days a week for the working days.
And if you send more than 75, if you’re sending cold emails, you take the risk of burning your domain address, and your emails aren’t going to be able to send using that domain or, if you’re doing LinkedIn and you’re sending more than 75, especially over 100. Then you might get banned from LinkedIn, and you have to start all over.
So make sure that doesn’t happen to you and do 75 consistently every single day. And if you’re doing cold, email and LinkedIn, you can do 75 here, combining that into a total of 150, and that should be good.
Key number two is to write. Like you are writing to a friend, we review many cold emails and LinkedIn messages that people send to us, and we coach them through how to write this better. And the common mistake we see is that a lot of people write very formally.
They’ll say something like Hello, Sir: My name is I’m from this company, and I would like to schedule a meeting with you. It sounds so robotic, and people don’t respond to that kind of talk that well. Instead, you want to keep it more casual but professional and talk like you are talking to a friend about a professional matter. Let’s say you’re giving career advice to a friend. That’s essentially how you want to talk to another person. So, an example, let’s say an email, and you can say: Hey John. I just saw that you wrote an article about XYZ, and I really enjoyed it, and I loved your perspective on XYZ. So it’s casual but professional. At the same time, you don’t want to write super formal because it’s too much, right. If you were to write formally to a friend, they would think it’s weird. The same with a cold email. They would also think it’s weird as well. So keep it more casual. Write as if you were giving professional advice to a friend, and you’re going to be good to set when it comes to your outreach.
Key number three: when you are sending your outreach, don’t give much information. So if you’re doing cold, email or LinkedIn messages, you only want to give enough information to get someone to agree to a meeting. If you’re giving too much information, you’re sharing all the different things you can do. You’re sending PDFs and white papers and video links and things like that. People don’t want to spend time clicking on it and watch it. You know what we mean because they don’t understand the value prop, but you want to keep it light, simple, very clear in your email or LinkedIn message. One call to action, which is just to book a meeting. So don’t give too much information. Just understand what the prospect’s problems are. Show a little teaser on how you might solve that problem and ask for the meeting and that’s gonna be it.
And key number four is to have a clear call to action. And, as we said before, when you’re sending a lead generation piece of outreach, whether it’s a cold, email, or LinkedIn message, you want to have a call to action at the end of it. What is it that you want the prospect to do at the end? And, typically, what we would always recommend is to book a meeting, whether it’s sending a link to your calendar asking for when they are available, and you are just accommodating it. You always wanna. Have a clear call to action, typically at the end of the email, so that the prospect knows exactly what to do if they’re interested
They know the steps they can take to communicate with you and move forward with the deal.
And you want to make sure you avoid things like. Let me know, or let me know if we can get a coffee because it’s vague. A lot of people don’t want to respond to that. Make it extremely clear what the next step is and make it simple to book a meeting.
Key number five is to follow up. So many times when I talk to people – and we ask them, do they do cold email, they say yeah And then they say it doesn’t work and I ask them: do they follow up and they say no and I’m like? Okay, that’s probably why. So when it comes to the cold email, let’s say you’re sending to 100 people. You want to make sure that you follow up two or three times, right. I would recommend three times, so the total would be four.
So you send the first initial email: maybe you get a 5 % response. Send another follow-up email. Three to seven days after that, you might get another 4%, send another email three to seven days after the first follow-up, then you might get more percentages. So, overall, you might get, let’s say, a 10 to 25 % response rate using this kind of follow-up formula. Now you always want to make sure you have a follow-up sequence, whether you’re doing it manually or have software to do it for you. We would recommend the software.
And that’s because the magic is in the follow-up. You’re not always going to get the meeting on the first go.
You have to have ways to keep following up with your customer because maybe they were busy when they read your email, the first time and the second one they’re like. Oh, this is interesting, and then they take the meeting. So always make sure that you follow up.
Key number six is working double down. And what I mean with this is that there are many different methods you can use when it comes to outbound lead generation, whether it’s cold, email, LinkedIn, cold, calling, or even if it’s inbound, like writing a blog SEO. Video marketing, right? So, there’s an infinite number of ways to generate leads.
Now my recommendation for you is to double down on that if you’re starting and getting something to work. So, for example, if you’re trying cold email for the first time and you’re getting a bunch of meetings from cold email, there’s no real need to try LinkedIn and cold calling. If you want an experiment, sure. But there isn’t a need because if you’re getting a ton of meetings using cold email, keep doing it. Go even harder and use what you already know that works and just scale it out. So let’s say, for example, you’re getting 15 meetings a week from cold email, you’re getting five on LinkedIn, and you’re, getting five on hard calling.
If you try to split your time doing all three at the same time, these numbers aren’t going to increase that much because it’s difficult to scale, and you only have so much mental capacity and good hours of work you can do per day. So, if you’re getting, let’s say, 15 meetings a month on cold email and the other one’s five. Well, I would forget the other ones and double down on cold email and get that 15 to 30, get that 30 to 60, and your calendar will be booked to the brim.
So if something’s working, I really recommend you just figure out why it works and double down and just scale it out. You don’t need to keep adding different channels. If one channel works, why would you need to do anything else? So, especially if you’re starting, you don’t have the bandwidth and can’t hire people to do the work, you double down on what’s working.
And key number seven is to have fun. And now this one’s a little counterintuitive, and it might be a little different. But when it comes to prospecting and lead generation, I know it’s not that fun always. A lot of times, you’re going on LinkedIn, you’re just clicking these buttons, and you’re collecting emails, writing emails and sending them out, and it’s a lot of work and labor, and you might only get one or two or five meetings from doing hours and hours of work.
However, you got to make it fun. You got to find ways to make it fun, almost like a game, because if you don’t enjoy it and it’s just a grueling process, you will hate coming to work every day. Well, you’re just going to hate your life, and you won’t even be successful in sales because it just takes such a mental toll. But if you start getting excited and creative on finding the emails, how fast can you do it? How optimized could your system be to increase your response rate and your AB test? Well, suddenly, it becomes this fun science experiment, and it becomes enjoyable.
So, no matter what product or service you’re selling and how you’re generating leads, you’ve got to make sure you’re having fun. You must enjoy the process or understand how this is beneficial to your life and your business and how you can generate income for yourself. So find ways to make it fun and exciting.
If you hate your job every day, maybe what’s the point of even doing it? You might probably just find a different career. Still, if you’re in sales, you’re doing lead generation – and you want to make this work, stick it out, find ways to make it fun, whether it’s to gamify experiment with different things and really just enjoy the process.
It’s really gonna help you stay consistent on a daily basis so that you can actually start getting some tangible results. And so, with that said, those will be the Seven Keys to lead generation that you can use right now to start generating more leads and blow your calendar out with dream clients.
Also, let us know again if you have any challenges around lead generation, and we could help you. Ubique Digital Solutions will thoroughly guide you to all your lead generation problems and help you in your business’s digital marketing goals. We are delighted to keep in touch with you.
