Lead Generation

ByMartin Rhodes

Overview

Businesses need customers. Sometimes those customers come looking for what they want. Other times businesses need to reach out to customers to sell what they have.

This means there is a potentially lucrative business opportunity to provide businesses with possible clients. Leads can turn into customers…and so Leads = Revenue!

And businesses will pay well for leads, even more for qualified leads and appointments.

Finding these leads is what we call ‘lead generation’.

What makes up a lead?

This question is best answered by the company you are looking to provide leads to. But there are some common information requirements.

In general, I have found that businesses want, at a minimum, contact information for specific members of a target organisation. This would typically be:

  • First Name
  • Last Name
  • Company
  • Position / Job Title
  • Email
  • Phone number
  • Social Media

Finding these elements of information can be laborious, but if you are well organised, much of this information you only need to capture once. Find once, sell many times.

Becoming a Lead Generation Specialist

A lead generation specialist is someone, or potentially an agency, that finds potential customers for their client businesses. They may offer a variety of products from, a simple list of potential clients and their emails to a qualified lead and subsequent appointment.

As the lead generation specialist, it is up to you to decide what level of product you want to provide.

So what is the business model for Lead Generation?

Lead Generation Business Model

Lets use the Business Model Canvas (BMC) to illustrate the business model. The sections of the BMC are:

  • Value Proposition
  • Key Activities
  • Key Resources
  • Key Partnerships
  • Customer Relations
  • Marketing Channels
  • Customer Segments
  • Cost Structure
  • Revenue Streams

Value Proposition

The value proposition is that you are providing a collection of leads to your customer at a viable price for that customer. You are an expert in ‘finding leads’ and packaging to the requirements of that client. If you can sell them to your customer at a fraction of the value your client will gain from each, then its a great Value Proposition for you both.

for example:

1000 leads for £1000 might yield 100 new customers for your client.

If your customer makes more than £10 from that customer, then the transaction is positive. I’d swap £10 for £11 all day long!

Key Activities

Your key activities you need to undertake are:

  • Identify the right market looking for leads
  • Find Leads
  • Package Leads
  • Find buyers for those Leads
  • Package and sell those leads
  • Repeat and resell to other clients

Key Resources

This can start as a minimalist solution with you doing the majority if not all of the work.

  • Your time
  • Internet
  • Telephone

Key Partnerships

Initially, you may not need any partners. If you are looking to build an agency or work with a group of Lead finders then a partnerships with other finders and potentially a sales person would be beneficial.

For example, I can sell but I prefer the more technical aspects of the role and so I might look for someone to sell my lead packages for me.

Customer Relations

Your Lead Generation skills are equally valuable in finding your potential clients as they are at find their leads.

Having a small and potentially growing list of clients that you build an ongoing relationship with ensures you have steady revenue. Additionally, if you select a Lead Generation niche that has multiple possible clients then you can resell your product multiple times.

For example. Real estate agents might need:

  • Advertising software
  • Marketing software
  • Tax support
  • Sign providers
  • Fleet Vehicle hire
  • Telephone and Mobile services

And so a comprehensive list of regional real estate agents and their office managers might be a great list of Leads for a variety of these service providers.

Marketing Channels

For Lead Generation, there are several marketing channels that might prove useful:

  • Your own Lead Generation
  • Freelance sites such as Upwork
  • Linkedin
  • Social media marketing – Facebook, etc
  • Your own network
  • Your own website with SEO

Customer Segments

Initially, I’d look for market segments that you already have contacts in or where you have credibility. I’d also be looking at markets that buy Leads or look for leads.

These are typically companies that have a higher throughput of customers who pay a good fee for their services. These might include (not an exhuastive list):

  • Real Estate Agents
  • Cosmetic surgeons
  • Dentists
  • Accountants
  • Investment brokers
  • Mortgage brokers
  • Insurance brokers

Cost Structure

As long as you can sell your Lead Packages at a profit then your cost structure is largely your time and the costs of data sources. If you are operating from a coffee shop or library then even your internet costs are free. You may need to pay for some advertising and copywriting services to improve your approach emails and marketing material, but as your reputation grows these costs will scale down.

Additionally, some data sources, such as Linkedin limit your search options unless you pay for a premium membership option. Which may be worthwhile if you are generating revenue from the scraping of linked in.

Revenue Streams

You are selling an information product, and information products are cheap to produce and easy to sell and resell. Once captured you can ‘slice and dice’ your leads in as many groupings as you can think of, providing there is a market for them. Our real estate leads can be recategorised across many strata including:

  • Size
  • Turnover
  • Agency / freelance / franchise
  • Region
  • Target market
  • Sales / Rental

And once you have a working process, you are also potentially able to sell your workflow as a course or even sell the entire business for a multiple of your annual income.

Some figures to consider:

1000 leads could be sold to one company for £250-1000. And potentially resold to other companies for a similar price.

5x 1000 leads repurposed across several clients could easily generate £10,000 per month.

Finding Leads

There are lots of ways to find leads but I like to webscrape a variety of online sources such as Linkedin and Job markets.

The internet is a very rich source of leads if you know how to find them and my partner site at Charming Python has a growing number of blog posts on how to scrape such leads.

If you are better at sales than the technical aspects of Lead Generation, there are lots of freelancers on Upwork that can help here. Even I have undertaken some webscraping for Lead Generation during my freelancing time.

Packaging Leads

Once I have the leads, I like to save them with lots of metadata in spreadsheets so that I can re-purpose the Leads I have spent hard effort and time harvesting. Spreadsheets are also useful because they are easily compressed and emailed as well as imported into Customer Relationship Management packages (CRMs).

Selling Lead Packages

If we assume that we are selling a package of Real Estate Agent Leads, we need to find a company that sells services to Real Estate Agents.

One of these might be landbot.io, a company that provides an AI agent to qualify land and property purchasers. Searching Linkedin in provides us with Enrico, who is head of customer success.

Next, we email Enrico a short message, such as

Hello Enrico,
I can see that Landbot offers a fantastic AI service that helps Real Estate Agents prequalify their leads. I imagine this saves your clients significant time and money in the sales process.
I provide great companies such as yours with lists of researched leads in a variety of categories. I have 1000 confirmed leads in Real Estate companies and agencies that might want to benefit from Landbot. If that sounds interesting to you them perhaps we can arrange a call and see if what I have is of value to you.

Yours
Oz

Assuming you get a positive response, then all you have to do is negotiate the deal and bank the cash!