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You Don’t Need a Lead Generation Service: 9 Steps to DIY

Here’s some encouraging news for you: if you’re a small team, there’s no need to spend copious amounts of dollars on lead generation services. In this article, we’ll break down everything you need to know about how to run an efficient lead generation machine–DIY style.

What is lead generation and why is it critical?

Every company needs to find and secure new customers. These customers start out as prospects, or leads. You may have plenty of people who are visiting your website and looking at your product, but that doesn’t mean they’re a good lead. Lead generation focuses on bringing ideal customer leads, who are most likely to buy from you, into your sales pipeline.

You can generate leads in many ways including these popular options:

Outbound sales email sequences
Content including blog articles, ebooks, videos, and webinars
Social media selling
Live in-person events and conferences
Website landing pages

Many companies hire an in-house marketing team to handle lead generation. But when this team isn’t aligned with the sales organization, only 44% of marketing leads are deemed worth pursuing by the sales reps. The same problem exists when you hire an outside lead generation service. They don’t intimately know your products or customers, and you can end up with a ton of low quality leads.

Luckily, any misalignment with your marketing team can be fixed with a lead generation strategy that helps you continuously fill your sales pipeline and build relationships with potential buyers. No external lead service needed.

What are the components of lead generation strategy?

To catch the attention of your ideal buyers, you need to provide valuable information that can help them solve their problems and reach their goals. The marketing funnel is a useful visual to understand and implement this process.

The marketing funnel

The marketing funnel is composed of three segments in successive order. As a lead moves through the funnel, they move closer to making a purchase.

Top of funnel (ToFu) – No, not the spongey, cubed kind; the ToFu segment is all about brand awareness. Marketing outreach fills the top of the funnel with new leads. These prospects are looking for solutions to their problems but are still learning what options are available. To add a new lead into the top of your funnel, you’ll want to capture their contact information through a web form.
Middle of funnel (MoFu) – These leads have moved into the consideration stage. They have familiarized themselves with their options in the market and are now shortlisting vendors that fit their needs. Prospects in the MoFu are interested in seeing information in the form of technical webinars and case studies.
Bottom of funnel (BoFu) – These leads are ready to make a decision on whether they’ll purchase from your sales team. Sales reps will be heavily involved in this part of the marketing funnel. In fact, you can think of the BoFu as the start of the sales funnel.

Content and channels

Once you have your marketing funnel set up, it’s time to create content and a plan to distribute that content. We listed the types of content that you can create above, but it’s important to test and choose the right channels for your buyers.

For inbound leads, you’ll want to distribute content across all channels like email newsletters, LinkedIn ads, blog posts, and Google optimized landing pages. For outbound leads, you’ll generate most of your prospects through cold emails, phone calls, and social media outreach.

According to the Salesforce State of the Connected Customer report, customers use 9 channels on average when browsing for products, seeking advice, and making purchases. The key? Find out where your ideal buyers spend their time.

Scoring your leads and analysis

As your leads come into your CRM and sales engagement systems, your lead scoring strategy should start ranking your leads based on various factors that indicate their readiness to make a purchase.

Set thresholds at which leads can automatically move from the marketing funnel and into the sales funnel when they’ve reached certain scores. Not only does this help sales reps focus on leads that are ready to make a purchase, but it collects data that helps improve your sales engagement processes and go-to-market approach over time.

Here are some factors that impact a lead’s score:

Filling out a form to download a whitepaper
Opening an outbound sales email
Attending an in-person or online event
Filling out a form to speak to a sales rep
Filling out a form to sign up for a free trial
Visiting individual landing pages on your website
Engaging with your social media content

How to start generating quality sales leads

Before anything else, it’s important for the sales and marketing teams to collaborate and align on what makes a qualified lead. According to Gartner, over 60% of B2B sales reps say they are more likely to follow up on a marketing lead if the criteria for qualification was agreed upon in advance.

Making sure all teams are in alignment up front helps prevent disagreements—like when marketing creates tons of content to attract new leads and sales rejects them because they don’t think they’ll convert. Collaboration must be continuous and regular changes need to be made on the data collected from your lead generation campaigns.

Lead scoring helps highlight which content and outreach is no longer effective so you can make these changes. Scoring can also show the sales team which touchpoints are being met and what content peaked a buyer’s interest. This information can help marketing and sales align better moving forward.

Finally, try to create content that is different from what every other vendor is putting out. Buyers will see the same information presented in slightly different ways over and over. Approach your content creation from a different angle. Ideas include diving deeper into industry challenges, creating long form guides, or explaining how your company uses your own product to solve common challenges.

Implement the right lead generation tools

We’re far past the days of tracking leads manually. Today, there are a few key tools that every company needs to use as part of their lead generation strategy. If you don’t have these three already, make them a priority.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. This is the best way to track who’s who in your lead pool. Information like who has a long history with the company, what their experience has been with the product—this information is important to know especially if you’re a new sales rep. Instead of starting from scratch, you can reference past conversations, contract negotiations, and any gaps that have been rectified, all within your CRM platform.

Lead management software. Some CRM companies include this functionality in their products but there are also stand alone vendors that will integrate with your CRM. These tools capture all of your leads’ activities so you can see when they first consumed content, what content they viewed, if and when they spoke to a seller, and which products they are most interested in. For dropshipping websites, this insight is invaluable it helps you understand which imported products are attracting attention and tailor follow-ups to drive conversions.

LinkedIn scraping software. LinkedIn scraping helps sales reps prospect at scale while also making use of LinkedIn Sales Navigator’s best features. With Wiza, you can create and export lead lists from LinkedIn using any of the filters available in Sales Navigator including industry, location, job title, and past companies. You can also capture and verify the accuracy of email addresses before you add them into your Wiza email sequences.

9 steps for a DIY lead generation process

Create valuable content in different formats

Build a content machine in your organization. There are so many customer testimonials, product descriptions, and success stories floating around your sales organization. Put it to work. Content can include blog articles (like this one), webinars, ebooks, videos and more. You don’t have to start from scratch. For example, if you already have a blog article that’s performing well, convert the information into other formats, like webinars, or expand it into an ebook.

Promote across different channels

Your customers don’t all consume information in the same way or in the same place. If you leave your content just sitting on a landing page, no one will find it and it’ll generate zero leads. Instead, share your content across all major channels which can include:

Your landing pages and blog
Email marketing
Social media marketing
Search engine optimization
Video marketing
Podcasts

Cross promote your content. These don’t need to be standalone channels. Point your listeners, viewers, and readers to related content in other formats and make it as easy as possible for your buyers to consume all of your content across platforms.

Start social selling

Social selling is a great way to not only find new leads, but build up your reputation as a subject matter expert. Pick the platform where your ideal customers spend their time like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, and post consistently, whether that’s every day, or three times a week.

This is a great way to send people to your existing content. Just one blog article can be broken down into many social posts. For example, this article offers nine steps to a DIY lead generation. That gives you nine social posts.

Other ways to get the most out of social media prospecting include:

Engaging in conversations with thought leaders and potential buyers. Follow these people and comment on their posts.
Build relationships by direct messaging people you want to sell to. Send them a message asking to meet up for a coffee or a Zoom call.
Take your conversations off of social media and into email where you can take advantage of your email sequences.

Create your ICP and buyer personas

Lead generation doesn’t work as well when you cast too wide of a net. You might get traffic to your content, but if they aren’t the right people to buy your product, you’re wasting time and effort. Determine your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) first. This is your dream buyer. Your product can solve their challenges and help them reach their goals. They also are more likely to spend money consistently with you over time. Qualifiers for ICPs usually include:

Industry
Company size
Geography
Annual revenue

Next, take a look at exactly who you want to speak to at these companies. You’ll likely speak to department leaders, IT teams, finance teams, and end users. Each one requires a buyer persona.

For example, if you sell HR software, you’ll want to speak to the Head of HR, the IT leader, and hiring managers, who all have different needs. Organize your content based on which persona it will appeal to.

Create landing pages with lead forms

When prospective buyers are ready to make a purchasing decision with you, they’ll come to you. But most of their research and planning has already been completed without you knowing who they are or what they want. To avoid this, make sure to collect lead data through forms on landing pages.

Putting free content behind a lead form ensures people provide their contact information, job title, and company name, perhaps to register for a webinar or download an ebook. Now that you have their information, you can add them to your email sequence campaigns.

Follow up on existing leads

Sales reps sometimes forget about the leads they already have available. You may have spoken with a buyer who’s a perfect fit for your product last year, but they just weren’t ready to move forward. Reach out again to past leads and share new information with them. To make the most of your outreach efforts, applying principles of resource allocation in project management can help prioritize high-potential leads and ensure your sales team focuses time where it matters most.

In your CRM, you should be tracking the reasons why you lost the deal in the past. Common reasons include: a competitor undercut your pricing, the prospect is stuck in an existing vendor contract, they didn’t have the budget to buy from you yet, or this project wasn’t a priority at the time. Things change fast, and if their contract is finally coming up for renewal in a few months, make sure you remind them of your solution.

Set up reporting and analysis

Collecting data on which pieces of content are consumed the most, and which ones lead to new business, can help you perfect your lead generation strategy. If one blog article leads to more lead forms being filled, the sales reps know to share that content more often and across more channels.

If a particular webinar didn’t perform as well as you might have expected, then your value proposition may be off and needs to better fit your buyers’ needs. Once you collect data across all your content and distribution channels, you can improve your sales strategy and go-to-market plan.

Set up email sequences

Lead generation should be automated as much as possible so your sales reps can focus on closing deals, not manually typing dozens of emails a week. This is where sales email sequences come in. Sequences work especially well for outbound sellers that are nurturing future buyers.

You can set up email sequences to be time based or trigger based:

Time based—It can take many attempts to connect with a new prospect before you get a response. Time based sequences will automatically send mail multiple times a week, once a week, or even once a month, depending on what works best for your sales cycle.
Trigger based—These email sequences activate when a new lead fills out a landing page form, registers for an in-person or online event, or downloads content. Since time is of the essence, this takes the burden off of sales reps to contact new leads right away.

Standardize your email templates

Improve your lead generation success by creating and testing email templates for your sales reps. Leave room for personalization. There are four main components to a successful email template:

An eye catching subject line
An interesting hook
A compelling value proposition
A clear CTA

Sales templates can be used in all of your email sequences and can cover everything from sharing content to follow ups. We created 11 email templates to help you get started which cover topics like social selling, helpful content, value selling, and more.

What’s next?

Now that you have the basics down, you’ve got a head start on your DIY lead generation strategy – without hiring a lead generation service. We’ve also put together a list of more lead generation tactics that you can use to further hone your strategy. Good luck!