22 Lead Generation Ideas We Used to Get 300k+ Leads (for 2024)

22 Lead Generation Ideas We Used to Get 300k+ Leads (for 2024)

You need a reliable source of new leads for your product or service. Otherwise, your business is dead in the water with no consistent customer growth. Enter: Our guide of the best lead generation ideas and strategies.

Marketing and sales teams spend an absurd amount of time and financial resources on lead generation. From creating valuable content to launching ad and email campaigns, prospecting on LinkedIn, producing videos—phew, makes me tired.

But you don’t have an unlimited budget of time and money to pursue every lead generation idea that tickles your fancy. You need results now.

Ready to cut through the noise? Let's talk about the lead generation ideas we’ve used to gather more than 300,000 leads over the last few years.

We’ve broken down this guide to lead generation ideas for startups into a few major categories. Use this to create a menu of lead generation tactics your business can lean on.

But first off…

What is Lead Generation?

Lead generation is the process of finding people or companies that might be interested in your product or service, getting their attention, and (ideally) getting their contact information.

In most cases, lead gen falls into the hands of the marketing team. This can take the form of:

  • Using SEO to get more traffic to your website
  • Creating a lead magnet for website visitors
  • Setting up email marketing
  • Guiding these new potential leads through the sales funnel

Remember, the types of leads you’ll gather depend on the quality of your lead gen efforts. The aim is to develop new marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) that will eventually convert into paying customers.

Content Marketing Lead Generation Strategies

Content Marketing Lead Generation Strategies

These B2B lead generation ideas are primarily focused on using content marketing to create a steady stream of inbound leads. Inbound marketing is a great way to build brand awareness in the early stages of the buyer’s journey. Let’s explore these ideas.

1. Create High-Quality Blog Content

We've been publishing valuable content on the Close blog since 2013. This has been the backbone of our lead generation strategy, filling up our sales pipeline with high-quality leads.

Our very first post that featured just a simple embed of an MVP video demo of Close. Fast forward to today, and we’re regularly publishing pieces like:

  • A 17,000-word guide to sales pipelines with examples, infographics, and templates
  • Case study breakdowns of the most effective selling strategies at work in top B2B SaaS startups
  • Detailed takeaways from how several early-stage startups are using cold calling to generate millions in sales

Depending on the demographic you're aiming for, your content can also include testimonials, whitepapers, interactive flipbooks, and other long-form content. Also, don't sleep on SEO (search engine optimization.) Make sure you're including keywords, building backlinks, and overall providing value to potential customers.

That said, investing thousands of hours into creating in-depth content doesn’t equate to guaranteed success. In fact, although 84 percent of businesses in one survey said they have a content marketing strategy, only 11 percent considered their strategy excellent.

Implement AI strategies to revolutionize your content marketing – learn more here.

What’s the Primary Goal of Your Content?

The foundation of your content marketing strategy needs to rest on building relationships with the right people. These are the ones who are likely to convert into customers.

So first, determine exactly what your motivations are for investing in content as a lead generation idea. Then, think about how that’ll be translated into execution. Answer crucial questions like:

  • Which problems can we solve for our target customers through free content?
  • How can we out-teach the competition and differentiate ourselves on these topics?
  • Where do our target customers spend time online? Do they read blogs? Participate in LinkedIn groups? Search on Google? Look for solutions on Quora?
  • Would we rather have 100 readers that are all in our target market, or 1,000 readers and only a handful of target customers in that audience? This will greatly inform which topics you should write about.
  • Which content medium do our target customers prefer to consume content in?
  • Do we have the core competencies to produce high-quality content? If not, how can we attract and leverage the right people?

At the end of the day, you need to care deeply about helping your customers solve real pain points. If your main motivation is selling more subscriptions to anyone with a credit card, you'll end up with shitty content.

Obviously, transactional content that asks readers to buy in the first sentence doesn’t sell.

You need to be a teacher—one that’s invested in the future of your students (customers).

How Does Content Get Discovered?

How you promote your content is just as important as how you create it. You’ll only drive positive results for your business if your target customers discover what you’ve written for them.

While PPC and other paid methods can drive traffic, they’re harder to get started with for small companies. For us, organic search drives the lion’s share of traffic to our blog. That’s when someone searches for something like, “sales strategies” on Google, and they see this:

Lead Generation Ideas - Organic Search Rankings for Sales Strategies

We learned early on that many of our customers discovered us from searching for sales advice on Google. So, we now create mostly evergreen content intentionally designed to rank well in organic search results.

Climbing to the top of search rankings is an arduous journey. It takes a combination of time, backlinks from high domain-authority websites, social shares, and a slew of other marketing factors.

Whether you're selling software, wholesale merchandise, consulting, or real estate, organic search can be a powerful source of new leads.

Aside from increasing the organic rankings of your content, you can proactively find new readers by:

  • Engaging in online communities where your target audience spends time
  • Recording simple videos (like ours) for the video search engine YouTube
  • Leveraging your connections to amplify social sharing to the right audiences
  • Pitching other sites with a similar audience to take a related guest post from you
  • Using list-building tools such as ZoomInfo or competitors to build a solid email list

Getting your content noticed will take hustle.

2. Record Educational or Instructional Videos

The majority of our written content begins life as an educational video, filmed in just 10 to 20 minutes. Then, our content team creates a comprehensive post to publish in tandem with the video on our blog.

Videos for Lead Generation Ideas

Since 2013, we’ve uploaded nearly hundreds of videos, and they’ve been viewed over 2.5 million times.

These results came without any direct promotion, and zero paid ads driving traffic to get people to watch.

Consistency is key to getting traction from your video content. Put in the work, show up every day with a strong message, and you’ll start to see what’s gaining momentum. Of course, in order to produce a huge amount of versatile videos, you need creative automation.

Combine video with your written content and you’ll be doing two things at once. First, you'll add a new acquisition channel for your audience to discover your content. Second, you'll offer your readers the option to consume the content over video, rather than just text. This double-benefit makes video a solid lead generation idea.

3. Offer a Free, On-Demand Product Demo

Most SaaS companies ask you to schedule a call to eventually see a customized product demo. While this works for some, most prospects don't want to wait for a call to see the product in action.

Enter the on-demand demo. This is a powerful lead generation tool that brings potential customers with high intent.

Curious what an on-demand demo should look like? Check out the Close demo landing page to see one in action:

CHECK OUT OUR ON-DEMAND DEMO →

Explain the problems your product can solve, show off the user experience, and maybe even give some social proof. And of course, finish off with a clear, easy-to-follow CTA. This will help you build trust in your product as you generate new leads.

4. Publish Audio Content (Podcasts and Audiobooks)

Do you listen to podcasts? If so, it’s not a stretch to begin releasing your own that is geared toward building an audience and helping that community solve challenges in their business.

Even if you already have a sizable audience, giving your readers the chance to engage with you on an even deeper level—through the speakers on their daily commute, during lunch, or at the gym—will help you create more meaningful relationships that transcend just the lessons learned from reading your blog content.

Recent studies have shown that 104 million Americans alone listen to podcasts regularly, and 80 million listen to podcasts on a weekly basis.

In the first three years of hosting The Startup Chat with Hiten Shah, we had over 700,000 downloads. As we tackled pressing topics for a major segment of the Close audience—startup founders—we developed more dynamic relationships with people who were are target customers.

Lead Generation Strategies Podcast Startup Chat.png

Naturally, not every listener was a true lead for Close, we took the long-term outlook that anyone listening to a show about growing a startup is at least interested in building a business of their own one day—and as a listener, our CRM for startups is more likely to be top of mind when they are ready.

I even have a personal podcast where I share my very own, personal inner work journey.

Podcast recordings also make for great content to repurpose over to your blog. When an episode does particularly well with your listeners, create a written version for your audience to read.

If you want to get even more creative, try taking your highest-performing blog posts and recording an audio version of them, made available for free right on the blog post, as author Mark Manson does over on his blog.

Lead Generation strategy Audio Version of Blog Posts.png

Additional lead generation ideas with podcasts include bundling themed downloads of your best episodes, or getting your biggest fans to opt-in for exclusive content.

5. Offer Books and eBooks

Books have been one of our most successful lead generation tactics, responsible for 10k+ new leads. These help us learn more about the topics prospective customers care about, plus capture quality leads.

Win-win for us!

Lead Generation Strategy Producthunt Launch

Here's an example. Our book, Your Growth Hacks Aren’t Working, has been one of our most successful lead generation book campaigns. In total, it brought in more than 3,300 new leads soon after launch.

We launch our books on external communities, like Product Hunt. But we also use them for lead generation throughout our blog. We include regular CTAs to download our books on high-trafficked, relevant blog posts. We also deliver each new book to our existing audience, and ask them to share it with others.

6. Create Downloadable Guides

When it comes to lead generation, we treat our multi-page guides a little differently than books.

These in-depth guides take lots of thought, research, and expert opinion to complete. They are a whole, well-rounded explanation of a topic.

But here’s the catch: they’re available for free, ungated, on our website.

So, how does this generate leads if we aren't using a lead capture gate?

Well, as readers scroll through the guide, they’ll realize it’s a bit long. When they’re about to navigate away from the page, they’ll see an exit-intent popup inviting them to get the downloadable version of the guide and read it later. This marketing automation can take your lead generation to the next level.

Lead Generation Ideas With Downloadable Guides

Once you have a few different lead generation resources at your disposal, you can start grouping them together as we do with our Complete Sales Library—a compilation of all our best guides, books, and courses that can be picked up for free.

7. Build Copy & Paste Templates

In the B2B world, everyone loves using successful templates as a starting point when learning a new skill, experimenting with different tactics, or looking for inspiration. This makes them a fantastic lead generation idea.

To date, our cold email templates have been our single most-downloaded resource, fueled largely by our article on the most effective cold emails.

These templates alone have generated nearly 25,000 leads that are naturally interested in improving their cold email strategy (which is what our CRM is built for).

These templates perform very well because they’re so closely connected to solving a problem that our customers (and prospects) have. Then, when a prospect is ready to evaluate their sales tools, they'll often come back and see we're a great CRM for small businesses.

However, if we offered templates for something like planning out your content marketing calendar, we’d be attracting leads that aren’t necessarily interested in our offering.

Determining the right kinds of copy & paste templates you should create as a part of your lead generation strategy, is pretty simple actually… Talk (and actually listen) to your customers and prospects.

They’ll tell you exactly where they need the most help if you listen carefully.

  • Dig into their biggest organizational challenges and individual struggles
  • Uncover the small yet influential steps your prospects take to accomplish their goals
  • Ask about the places where they get hung up most when doing their jobs

By doing this, you can build templates that appeal to people who have the core problem your product solves.

And that, my friends, is the ultimate goal of any lead generation strategy.

8. Organize Joint Webinars

Hosting webinars with related (non-competing) brands who share a similar audience as ours, is a brand new lead generation idea we’re employing that’s already paying huge dividends for us.

Over the years, we’ve hosted or participated in several webinars fit for our audience.

Lead Generation Ideas Joint Webinars Combined Images.jpg

Two of our most successful webinars had just under 2,000 people register to attend (each), with about 1,000 of those attendees coming from the partners who co-hosted with us.

By hosting two webinars in one month, we generated an additional 2,000 targeted new leads, with comparatively low effort and at no cost since these leads came from our partners who promoted the events to their audiences via email and social media.

You can watch the recording of our webinars on cold emailing right here and the one on using data to enhance your sales process right here.

We also use webinars to generate more BOFU leads and to increase the conversion rate of leads who have started a free trial. Our weekly Close for Newbies webinar allows us to directly answer questions and walk new users through the product.

To further enhance your webinar lead generation efforts, you can also follow the six webinar lead generation tips outlined in the guide from ActualTechMedia on webinars.

BOFU Lead Generation Ideas

9. Offer Online Courses

Online courses offer multiple content delivery formats, giving you more ways to connect with your audience and share value.

A few years ago, we launched a Startup Sales Negotiation Crash Course. It was a combination of video lectures, written content, templates, activities that call you to take action, and links to supplemental related materials like blog posts, podcast episodes, and videos on our YouTube channel.

Lead Generation Ideas Sales Negotiation Course.png

With the proliferation of hosting platforms like Teachable (what we used), you can skip the complicated challenge of building custom pages on your website for course material, creating forms for gating the course, and workflows to deliver the content.

No idea what to do a course about? Then you’re doing something wrong.

Just like all of the other lead generation tactics we’re discussing, determining the right topic should be as simple as knowing your audience.

Run a digital marketing agency? Create a course about writing blog posts. Selling a CRM for startups? Teach a course for founders on how to do sales.

At the end of the day, you need to create a course that seizes upon this opportunity to help your target customers solve those most pressing problems themselves.

And then, you’ll be right there to swoop up new business when they decide to get a little help or outsource the entire project to you.

That said, courses aren’t right for every audience or use case. We decided to discontinue our course because it wasn’t giving enough value to our audience. So, pay attention to how your audience reacts to these different content formats.

10. Host a Virtual Summit for Lead Generation

During the fall of 2017, we hosted The Inside Sales Summit.

Lead Generation Ideas Virtual Summit.png

We recorded 55 video interviews with sales experts, leaders, bestselling authors, and practitioners out in the field—for an epic week of content that dug into every possible facet of what it takes to be successful in the world of inside sales.

Throughout the week we were live with the virtual summit, we generated a grand total of 7,827 new signups with this lead generation idea. A massive return in one week!

We clocked more than 23,000 web sessions, and the videos were viewed over 7,000 times.

Lead Generation Idea Virtual Summit Traffic.png

53 of the leads we generated from the summit became trial users of Close within the first month after the event concluded.

Of course, summit success depends upon partner (and speaker) promotion.

If you’re planning to launch a virtual summit as a lead generation idea, my biggest piece of advice is to get as many high-quality partner brands and speakers as possible, on board to promote the event to their audiences. And incentivize them.

We measured the success of our summit by the number of new leads we acquired, which means people that weren’t already on our email list—but they had to come from somewhere.

For this reason, we very thoughtfully chose the people we reached out to for interviews. Big influencers in the sales space like Grant Cardone, Jill Konrath, Max Altschuler, and others who agreed in advance to promote the event to their email lists in exchange for a 1-to-1 list share on the backend—meaning if they drove 500 signups, we’d reciprocate with giving them 500 fresh leads from the summit after it was over.

Structuring this as a win-win for our speakers was instrumental to the success of the summit as a lead generation idea.

11. Launch a Creative Side Project

Side projects can come in many different shapes and forms. Even without a ton of technical resources, you can still do something creative that generates attention and leads.

A few years ago, the ad agency Cummins & Partners wanted to sell out their first live conference, Creative Fuel. They had a limited budget, so they utilized next to nothing aside from a dash of creativity to launch a YouTube video and blog post titled: “The World’s First Crowd-Sourced 3D printed QR Code, Live Streamed Via GoPro To A Smartphone Or Tablet Device, Drone Delivery Ticket System Project.”

Lead Generation strategy Creative Side Project YouTube Video.png

If it sounds ridiculous, that’s because it was intended to be.

The agency’s satirical interpretation of its technologically-obsessed industry got a ton of press coverage from marketing blogs and publications around the world. Their video has received over 188,000 views on YouTube since its release.

If you want to provide something valuable for your audience, why not create a free tool they can use?

We’ve done this with SalesTable, our free spreadsheet CRM, as well as our Cold Email Generator tool.

Side projects can come in many different shapes—from building a mobile app, to hosting a live event or conference, launching a small (free) software tool that's designed to generate leads for your greater product, or otherwise.

Social Media Driven Lead Generation Strategies

Social Media-Driven Lead Generation Ideas

Each of these lead generation ideas are based primarily on using one or more major social networks to find prospects and turn them into qualified leads.

12. Optimize (and Scale) Outbound Connection Requests on LinkedIn

When you approach LinkedIn lead generation correctly, it still represents a massive opportunity for B2B sellers.

“Using Linkedin as a form of outreach is great because it’s complementary to cold email and hits your prospects on a different channel that might be less crowded than their inbox,” says my friend, Jake Jorgovan. He runs the done-for-you LinkedIn prospecting company, Lead Cookie.

“While a cold email is a much more direct sales pitch, a LinkedIn engagement is much more of a conversation,” he adds. “With LinkedIn, people use the chat feature just like they would Facebook Messenger or texting. Many people even have the LinkedIn app on their phone which sends push notifications directly to their mobile device. This makes outreach via LinkedIn its own separate channel that is worthwhile for any B2B sales team to explore.”

Jake’s process for scaling LinkedIn lead generation for his clients is simple:

  • First, optimize your LinkedIn profile to convert profile views into conversations
  • Start sending 100 outbound connection requests daily to narrowly defined target customers
  • Use a drip series of custom messages to these new connections to start conversations that convert to booked meetings
  • Finally, use tools like Dux-Soup to visit the profiles of other LinkedIn members in your target market, which in turn ramps up traffic back to your Linkedin profile—creating interest in your optimized offering near the top of your profile.

You can also use LinkedIn automation tools to implement this lead generation idea at scale.

13. Answer Questions on Online Communities as a Lead Generation Idea

The common thread with online communities like Quora is that they’re destinations where your target market may already exist and be actively seeking solutions to problems you can help them solve.

Lead Generation Ideas Quora Answers.png

A couple of years ago, we invested heavily in answering questions like this one, related to inside sales and startups (two topics our target market cares most about) on Quora.

While this example answer has performed extremely well, netting more than 255,000 views and over 1,000 upvotes since I answered it back in 2016, it’s an outlier in our experience. Most of our answers draw a couple thousand views and 10 to 25 upvotes over the course of the first year the answer is live.

The average Quora answer I submit typically takes anywhere from 20 to 60 minutes to write—with a finished product ranging from 500-1,000+ words in length, including a relevant image, some key data, and helpful links to authoritative resources backing up our philosophy.

Depending upon how much demand there is for the topic and question you’re answering—and of course the depth & creativity of your answer—you can replicate some of our most successful Quora answers by observing the general format we answer in.

Aside from the benefits of (tastefully) being able to link to your website where Quorans can click through to learn more, within your answers, answering questions in this community is a long-term strategy.

If you dedicate 30 minutes each day to writing a thoughtful answer to an important question in your niche, after a year you’ll undoubtedly have some traction. From there, the network effects should amplify your reach as your follower count grows and the positive effects of new answers compound over time.

14. Share Long-Form Updates on LinkedIn

Long-form updates are all the rage, but they’re also a surprisingly effective lead generation idea.

Lead Generation Ideas LinkedIn Long Form Updates-1.jpg

Scan your feed and chances are high you’ll see a few of these updates that have dozens of likes and comments.

These posts are thoughtfully crafted to drive engagement, which in turn surfaces your update to other users.

Here are some quick tips to create your own LinkedIn updates:

  • Start with a short hook to draw readers in
  • Transition from that hook into a story
  • Break each sentence or two into its own line to make the update visually appealing
  • To get more engagement, add a link in the first comment instead of in the actual update
  • Make your update authentic, value-driven, and engaging

Once you've built an engaged audience on the platform, you can start employing other lead gen tools that'll help you convert more of your growing audience into leads for your business.

15. Social Listening and Groups on Social Media Platforms

If you know the key terms and phrases associated with your target customers, social listening can be a very powerful lead generation idea for your business.

From searching for hashtags and topics on Twitter to interact with and drive discussion around, you can also get much more granular with your social listening strategy by specifically following and engaging with people who self-identify as affiliating themselves with terms your business is also related to.

Here’s how easy it is to filter by Twitter users who talk about or list “inside sales” in their bios.

Lead Generation Ideas Twitter Social Listening.png

On Facebook, groups are still the best destination for finding prospects that you can engage in meaningful discussions with.

Lead Generation Ideas Facebook Groups.png

Find and join groups where members are clearly active and rallied around a particular subject matter that’ll allow you to regularly weigh in with your expertise (as related to your product or service).

Like with all groups on your social channels, work hard to avoid being overly self-promotional about your offering by sharing tons of links or talking about your product. Allow genuine interest & appreciation to be the driving factor in starting one-on-one conversations with group members, and those will more naturally lead to authentic relationships that could blossom into new customers.

Instagram can also afford you many opportunities to build close relationships with other influential people in your space—giving you the ability to forge partnerships that can help ramp up your Instagram growth and get your offer in front of more leads.

These social media lead generation ideas can be used in harmony with retargeting lead generation campaigns.

16. Leverage Niche Online Communities

Just about every niche has an actively managed online community or two that can be used for relationship-building (and, if you’re very careful, lead generation).

Communities like Product Hunt, Hacker News, and Indie Hackers can be incredibly insightful destinations for uncovering targeted prospects who’ve expressed interest in similar products or services as what you have to offer—by either upvoting, liking, commenting, or sharing a competitor’s product.

Take this example of another sales CRM product that was recently on Product Hunt, below.

Lead Generation Idea Product Hunt Outreach.png

You can click into the list of users who’ve upvoted the product (showing an interest in it or support of it) and click through to visit their individual profiles.

Lead Generation Strategy Product Hunt Twitter Outreach.png

Most Product Hunt members have a link to their website and Twitter account in their bio, making it relatively easy to reach out and get in touch.

While this lead generation idea is hardly scalable at this granular of a level, you can outsource the legwork by hiring an affordable virtual assistant to visit the profiles of every user who’s upvoted a competitor’s product, and have them build a spreadsheet with relevant contact information to then begin your more targeted outreach.

If you’re a marketer, communities like GrowthHackers may be more your speed.

Offline Lead Generation Ideas

Offline Lead Generation Ideas

Not all lead generation efforts need to be driven by online campaigns.

17. Speak at Industry Events and Conferences

One of the best ways to build your personal brand and elevate your thought leadership within your industry, is speaking at local events all the way up to international conferences.

Since day one here at Close, this has been a core lead generation strategy of ours because it regularly gets us in front of hundreds (or thousands) of people in our target market for a presentation where we get to impart some of our sales expertise.

Before the pandemic, I was speaking at 10 to 20 conferences per year that were well-attended by startup founders, sales leaders, and practitioners—about topics mostly related to scaling your startup sales process.

Lead Generation Ideas Steli Efti Speaking at Conferences.jpg

While it’s difficult to calculate the exact financial return we get from an individual conference or local event, it’s clear that there are always spikes in traffic, email subscriptions, and trial signups during a conference I’m speaking at.

Over the years, we’ve gotten very good at optimizing these in-person event opportunities to attract sign-ups and product trials by ending the presentation with a clear call to action for everyone interested in learning more about what we do.

I also share my personal email address and phone number on the final slide of the presentation, encouraging people to reach out with a specific question—or to shoot me a quick email right then and there in order to get a free copy of our recent book. QR codes also act as a quick call to action in the physical world, with the underlying advantage that the traction you get can be measured.

I know, I know… who doesn’t want to be featured on Forbes, Fast Company, and TechCrunch?

This lead generation idea can be a tough equation to crack on a regular basis. That said, we’ve been able to strategically position ourselves as an authoritative source for advice on all things startups + sales. How? Through the hundreds of in-depth blog posts, videos, and talks.

We invested heavily in creating valuable content. This has now made me a thought leader and go-to expert for getting bylines and quotes featured on most of the major business and tech publications.

Lead Generation Ideas Fast Company Article.png

Another tactic is to build a relationship with an editor at publications where your target audience spends time. Then, pitch yourself as becoming a regular contributor. This gives you a clear channel for sharing your advice, tactics, and techniques (without being overtly self-promotional).

Later, it's easy to bridge the gap when readers want to learn more about what you offer. That makes this a potentially lucrative lead generation idea if you’re not afraid to put in the work.

19. Create a Customer Referral Program

B2B marketers, salespeople, and business owners alike will all tell you that their highest quality leads come from the referrals they get from current customers.

When you have a great product or service and work hard to create a fantastic customer experience, it becomes much easier to ask if your happy customers have a referral to share, a potential client or customer who may be interested in your solution.

Since new referrals already come with trust in the person who referred them and a pain point that needs to be solved, this really can be one of the best lead generation ideas you can pursue.

20. Be Interviewed on Relevant Podcasts and Radio Shows

If you didn’t originally discover us from content here on the blog, chances are high that you first heard of me on a top startup podcast. I've done hundreds of interviews.

Lead Generation Ideas Steli Efti Interviews on Podcasts and Radio.jpg

And the beautiful thing about doing podcast interviews? There’s an echo-chamber effect. When other podcast hosts hear your interviews, they'll want to get your voice on their own podcast.

So how do you find the right podcasts and radio shows to pitch to? Start with roundup lists like this one that you’ll find from a quick Google search. Ask people in your industry which shows they listen to—or have been interviewed on before.

21. Host Regular Meetup Events

Meetup events can work incredibly well—whether they’re built for existing customers or to drum up interest in your product. Got a community that shares a common interest? Then this lead generation idea is for you.

We’ve long been avid proponents of running customer meetups. The main goal is to build a community with (and for) our own users. But we also invite them to bring others who are interested in scaling their sales process.

When planning a meetup events for prospects, make sure you’re delivering actual value to everyone. This could be that in the form of an educational presentation, a collaborative workshop, or otherwise. (In other words, don’t just do a product demo.)

Use tools like Meetup or Eventbrite to organize your event, keep track of RSVPs, and send reminder emails internally.

Here are some lead generation ideas that you can use to build a meetup:

These bring the obvious benefits of exposing new people to your business through meetups. But you can also create community intimacy, foster brand loyalty, and problem-solve for your most motivated members.

22. Go on Local (or National) Television

It’s safe to say that sitting on the couch with Ellen or being a featured guest on CNBC’s Squawk Box would drive some serious attention to your website the day the show airs.

Lead Generation Ideas Lewis Howes Ellen.jpg

But short of landing a major interview like that, what’s the lead generation potential of local television?

Some local television outlets will ask you to pay to play if you want to be a guest. But if you build a reputation as an authority in your space, you can become the person everyone wants to interview.

However, this will be a very relationship-driven lead generation strategy.

Get started with these simple steps:

  • Network at face-to-face events where media decision-makers are present
  • Seek out the low-hanging fruit first with podcast and radio interviews
  • Connect with and regularly share the content that key local journalists publish
  • Most importantly… do or create something remarkably newsworthy

At the end of the day, there’s no replacement for doing something truly unique (as related to your business) that places you in high-demand for interviews by local stations. It’s better to pick and choose your television appearances from a steady stream of inquiries than to be tirelessly pitching yourself day in and day out.

A Solid Lead Generation Process is the Key To Sales Success

We’ve discussed quite a few different lead generation methods in this article today—some standard, some a bit out-of-the-box.

But you won’t use all of these methods for your lead generation campaigns. You need to choose the ones that work best for your audience and your business.

How will you know? Track the right metrics, especially conversion rates. Build a lead nurturing sequence to keep up with new leads you generate, and watch the close rate for different methods. Use lead scoring to focus only on the personas that are more likely to convert to long-term customers.

As you develop a lead generation process for your business, you’ll need a place to track, engage with, and ultimately close those new leads. After all, without a clear lead management process in place, those valuable new leads will simply slip through the cracks.

With Close, you can easily import new leads from your favorite lead generation tools, and work smarter to turn them into successful customers.

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