More ways to find potential sales leads

Establish an Advisory Council of Market Leaders and Visionaries. Get their feedback on your product or service and once they are excited enough about your direction, ask if they’d be willing to make introductions for you.

• Build a “refer a friend” function into your product or service.
• See what connections you have in LinkedIn to potential buyers; whom do you know who could make a customer connection? Offer a finder’s fee if introductions are hard to get.
• Invest time in thought leadership. Publish and share insights that buyers will pay attention to. Become a leader in the value pool you’re targeting.
• Use LinkedIn to find people who are in the right role and current organizations. Further filter based on where they used to work. If you’re trying to find innovators early on, it may help to find functional leaders who have moved industries — they can be more respected by their current executive teams as sources of innovative new ideas. Can you find potential buyers who moved into a new role in the past ninety days? They may be looking for opportunities to have an early impact (the downside is that they may also not know how to navigate the buying process in their new organization).
• If you must send emails to someone cold (such as from an email list of from LinkedIn connections), send a short note in plain text, sharing credibility (e.g. customer impact) and asking for a referral to the right person in the company.
• If you happen to catch them by phone, ask “Did I catch you at a bad time?” “If you were me, how would you approach your organization?”
• Offer to go at risk. If your product is $100 and, in the early days, you don’t have the prior customer proof points, offer to sell it for $50 if they put $50 in escrow. Then agree on an outcome (or process) measurement such that the escrow goes back to them or to you at the end depending on if the product was successful. This is better than offering a trial period — typically, buyers and users aren’t committed in a trial period.
• In my experience, it’s as much work to give a product away for free as it is to get someone to pay. And people tend to undervalue what they don’t pay for.

Aaron Ross, in his book “Predictable Revenue”, tells the story of how he led Salesforce’s initial $100 million of revenue growth. He offers a few words of advice about sales lead generation: that it shouldn’t be done by salespeople. Salespeople are among your most expensive resources; they should not be doing your most commoditized activity. Their Rolodexes will help in their first few weeks, but what you need is a sales lead generation process that creates leads for all salespeople and is not subject to their own abilities and capacity to do lead generation.

It can take a few months to get an inside sales-based lead generation engine going, but he recommends investing in one once it’s clear you have Product-Market Fit. Dedicate a full-time role to prospecting.

Prospecting should also help prune the list of qualified leads, not just create them. Are there warning flags that hint that a potential prospect is going to be a waste of time trying to follow up with? Ross gives example flags such as, “They just installed a ____ kind of system” or they are “Know-it-alls”.

Teach your customers how to buy from you.

One devilishly important lesson is the understanding that, simply because a prospective buyer likes and wants your product, that doesn’t mean they know how to get it. It’s up to you to find a sponsor and lead the sponsor through the steps. If you’ve sold your product to ten other customers, undoubtedly you know far more than any prospective buyer at the eleventh customer about how to run the process, how long it takes, the types of roles who need to be included, and what the pitfalls are likely to be. And, frankly, you probably have far more time and mindshare to give to the process of closing the deal than the busy executive on the other side.

What you need is a playbook that you and your sales team members should consistently use and rely on. The playbook reminds you where you are in each conversation and what the upcoming steps should be, and it provides tools you can give to your counterpart to help them through the buying process.