How to Generate Sales Leads | Generation Strategies for Dummies

Knowing how to generate sales leads is important in developing an effective and comprehensive strategy for your business. It's important to come up with a plan that includes a sales lead generation process that is effective and efficient.

Some do it by conducting expensive marketing campaigns to attract potentially interested buyers and consumers. This would involve a television commercial with a phone number or that leads to a website.

The website might be running a promotion that leads to capturing the person's contact information and generate warm leads that way. This method of generating leads can be very expensive and time consuming.

Here are some easy ways that can get you started on the road to developing a sales lead generation strategy for your business that is cheap, easy and scalable.

Using sales lead generation companies can be a cost-effective and time-saving sales strategy that can help you find good leads without having to spend a ton of time. Some good companies include infousa as well as salesgenie, which is a subsidiary of infousa.

I've used infousa and salesgenie in many of the companies that I've worked with as well as in some contract work that I've done. It worked well for me when I was looking for sales cold calling.

They are a great source of leads because you can search by thousands of different criteria. You can search by region, zip codes, names, keyword, industry sic codes, industry keyword, etc.  Infousa sells leads in bulk and you basically pay per lead.  

Salesgenie, again a company of infousa, I like even better because you subscribe on a monthly or yearly basis and you can basically get all the leads you need with one flat cost.

The whole idea behind salesgenie is that you get as many leads as you need in a day or week. To facilitate that, salesgenie is set up as a web-based software program that requires you to manually click on every single lead you want to download.

In addition, they have a limit, I think of about 1,000 leads per day, which is reasonable since you'd never be able to call or even mail more than 1,000 leads per day, especially if you're a small business.

I know there are others out there, but I like infousa and salesgenie, because they are cheap, their leads are pretty good and you can do sophisticated search queries.

Google Sales Leads

You can now also get sales leads generation from Google Adwords. All you do is sign up for this service and Google will send prospects to your website. Once they go to your website, you can capture their contact information.

Another way to generate sales leads is to do it yourself or have someone else do it for you manually. The great advantage in doing it yourself is that you can evaluate and qualify leads yourself.

You can do this yourself basically by googling companies or industries you'd like to pursue. Then you do research on them, find out from the website who you need to call, then make the call. This method can be very time consuming, but I've found a lot of my best leads this way.

For example, I was working for a software company that provided a list of leads from a company like infousa and salesgenie. I wasn't getting any traction one day and I decided I would just google the industry I was going after and I ended up finding some great leads that weren't on my list. I found that one of the great advantages to doing it this way was the companies that end up first on your industry google search end up being the largest and best in the industry.

That also means they will also make the best clients. This method of sales lead generation seemed so obvious to me, but because I wanted to be efficient and not spend all my time researching instead of being on the phone, I almost missed out on some really great leads by doing it this way.

#1 - Association Directories

Company directories. Almost all industries have associations where you can find member directories or buy member directories online. This can be a very effective method because companies that are members of associations and listed in directories tend to be successful, established and will make good clients.

#2 - Inc 100 and Inc 500

Inc.com. In addition to infousa and salesgenie, I found that the Inc 100 and Inc 500 lists are good sources of leads. The are constantly updating their lists, have tons of data on each company the profile and have links to their websites, and sometimes will even include a contact. This could be very useful in your sales lead generation sales strategy.

#3 - Infousa and Salesgenie

Infousa and salesgenie. I'll again reiterate infousa and salesgenie because of how strategic it is. Use many methods, but don't neglect this method. Infousa and salesgenie will be your bread and butter for leads. The other methods are good and essential supplements to this method of sales lead generation.

#4 - Google

Like I've said before, just googling your industry, companies and subjects can be a great source for sales lead generation. Again use it as a supplement to infousa and salesgenie, but still use it in your sales lead generation sales strategy!

Also, you can use google by doing an adwords campaign to generate leads. When a prospect clicks on one of your google adwords ads, it will lead to your website which will ask for contact information. Google adwords is a great way to generate really warm leads.

#5 - Conventions

I've found that going to conventions and expos are great ways to get leads. If you can't afford to get a table, don't bother. Just walk around, chat, go to booths of potential clients, etc. This might be more effective anyway to generate sales leads than having a table yourself. Don't neglect the power of networking.