5 Free Ways to Instantly Generate Hot Qualified Leads #228

The one plea I hear over and over is “Pat! I NEED more leads! I’ve run out of people to talk to!” It’s painful to have a great offer and nobody knows about it. What’s a seller to do? In this episode I’d like to share a strategy on how to instantly generate hot qualified leads.

By qualified I mean people who have a genuine need or desire for your product or service. By hot I mean people who once they see your product, they immediately see the value and can’t wait to become a paying customer today.

Follow this strategy and you will be talking to REAL prospects instantly. I’ve also included few tips and tactics to kick this strategy off. Let’s find some leads!

The Strategy

The Strategy for generating hot qualified leads has two goals:

Visit places where your ideal clients hangs out.
Strike up a conversation and turn strangers into friends and friends into customers.

Sounds simple, right? People are inundated with pitches, offers, and can’t miss deals. It’s difficult to discern whose honest and who’s not. To turn a stranger into a friend, you’ve got to build trust and that takes time. Trust demands a certain level of friendship. To find new friends we’ll leverage your value proposition to discover places rich with your ideal prospective clients

5 Free Lead Generation Tactics

Here are 5 ways to discover and uncover new qualified leads. You may be familiar with some of these. But have you tried them all? Depending on the industry, some may work better than others. Find what works best for your situation.

In Person Networking

Meeting someone in person is the premiere way to connect and instantly build a relationship. Common channels to meet people are:

Attend live meetings posted in Meetup.com
Subscribe to shared forums in social media and join the conversation.
Most of the people you meet are not qualified to be your customers. But once you get to know them, they may know people who are a good fit. Treat EVERYONE like they’re an opportunity.
Attend trade shows. You can meet people a couple ways. One is exhibiting at a booth to collect leads or another is to attend as a guest and finding clients among the attendees and exhibitors. That’s right, depending on your business, exhibitors might be great prospects.
Get scheduled at as a guest speaker. Do not sell or pitch your product or service during the presentation. Talk about issues that surround the pains and desires your offer addresses. At the end of the presentation tell them you’ve barely scratched the surface and you have more to share. People will reach out and connect. Through your networking introduce yourself to the host. They are always looking for new content.

Direct Outreach:

Reach out to people you’ve never met with cold emails, cold phone calls, cold LinkedIn mail, or direct message tweets. Use the Get-To-Know-You process (see below) to slowly build rapport and convert into a conversation.

Referrals

Ask people you know to introduce you to friends who might find value in your offer. Do this on a regular basis twice a year. Most will not know anyone, but every so often you will get a great lead. People want to help, don’t be shy, ask. Heck, they may be interested themselves.

Content Marketing

Write a dozen great articles (in my case podcasts) that give value to prospective customers. Writing will help you better understand the value of your offer and clarify your thoughts. The goal is to be persuasive and have the reader take action. This content will be used for multiple purposes. Post them on social media, share to your email list, make it a free give away (called a lead magnet) on your website.

Website

Have a prominent signup form to gather emails on your web page. Give away something free (see above) and place the people on your email list, Make sure all the branding on your brochures and ads match the website. Don’t confuse people. The goal is to have the visitor take action and sign up. Since they took the initiative to signup, you know for certain they are a qualified lead. Have all sign ups forwarded to you. This is all dependent on making your website search engine optimized (SEO).

The Get-To-Know-You Process

The primary goal of sales is to turn strangers into friends and friends into customers. Rapport is a state where two people profoundly understand each other’s feelings and ideas. This is the ideal situation for any seller. Building rapport is a process that takes time. The Get-To-Know-You process slowly builds trust and a relationship with the strangers you meet. You are in search to discover if they are indeed a qualified lead. Follow the steps patiently and in order.

Introduce yourself without pitching (in person, social media or on the phone)
Ask them about them (challenges, problems, hopes, dreams starting with small talk)
Listen carefully and search to see if they have a problem/desire you solve
Agree to connect online via social media or email or if in person exchange business cards and shake hands goodbye. Wait.
Connect online, share some advice you believe will add value to their business (or life). Wait. Don’t be pushy.
Ask if they enjoyed the content you shared. Wait.
Set up an appointment to chat about their problems and challenges.

The target of this Get-To-Know-You process is to first schedule an appointment and second get them to show up. This is the most difficult part of a sale. If your prospect is qualified AND they understand the value of your product they will agree to meet. This process takes time. Steps may be added or removed depending if you’re working online or offline.

If they see the value of your offer they will buy. If not ask them why they don’t see the value. In either case you will learn something that will help you in the next deal.

The Follow Up

It’s easy for people to forget you. You don’t want your hard earned qualified leads to go stale. You must follow up, at least 8 times. Create an email campaign that sends reminders and interesting articles every so often. This can be automated but make the emails look simple as if you just typed them.

The Commitment

Look at the above process and channels and set a few weekly/daily goals to prospect. If you set aside time to attend meetings, or meet people on LinkedIn, you will soon find yourself in many conversations. From the those conversations you will find qualified prospects or people who know prospective customers. In either case it’s about building rapport, trust and relationships that are mutually beneficial. Start small and with time bump up the challenge.

The Secret

A few years ago I was doing business development for a SaaS startup that had a killer app. It far exceeded the competition but we had tiny sales. We had this great product but nobody knew about it. It was a secret. Eventually the secret got out and we dominated the market. We did it by using this strategy of turning strangers into friends and friends into customers. You can too.