Business cannot grow in a vacuum. If you want to thrive, you need a stable and accessible source of inbound leads.

Greetings to all! For those who don’t know me yet: I’m Alex Trotsenko, head of Againagain.agency, which provides outsourcing and outstaffing services to companies. I have been doing this for quite some time and often share useful cases on my blog. If you are interested, please join.

Classic Internet marketing options still work and deliver good results, but their effectiveness is gradually decreasing. I am convinced that the future of business belongs to those who can find new ways to make use of applications, in addition to the usual promotion in social networks, SEO and the like. They will provide you with a certain percentage of customers, but at the same time, many leads will never become potential clients, perceiving your message as just background informational noise.

That is why we at Againagain.agency are increasingly trying not to “hit head-on”, but to act in circuitous ways, teaching our lead generation specialists to pave non-standard ways to find clients.

Unfortunately, no. For this approach to work, you need to already have a certain number of customers who have already evaluated the quality of your product/services and are able to launch the so-called Bush telegraph, making you unconscious advertising at the level of ordinary conversations.

If you are lucky enough to find good clients, stick with them. Try to make contact with them cyclically instead of one-time for such customers. That means, every time a client has a need for a specific product, he will come to you again, rather than looking for another supplier. And that same client also increases inbound leads by speaking favorably about the quality of your products or services in conversations with colleagues. And once you have regular customers and a margin of financial strength, you can act more boldly and choose new customers more pickily, without fear of losing business if advertising does not bring the desired results.

Do research on your target audience. Who are the people who order from you? What reason prompted them to contact you?

Let me give you an example of a restaurant that contacted us due to a constant lack of customers. After conducting a study of Central Asia, we discovered that the majority of visitors here are tourists who were attracted by local dishes and exotic surroundings. Having thought about how to generate sales leads, we came to the logical conclusion that the path to them should run through a travel agency and direct contact with guides, who, after the excursions, will unobtrusively recommend to groups the excellent cuisine and national flavor this restaurant has to offer. As soon as an agreement with the guides was reached, the flow of visitors to the restaurant was no longer interrupted.

Where should companies look for a source of lead generation?

I strongly advise using a cool ABC/XYZ analysis that focuses on the company's customer base. I will not describe the principles of its operation; all this is publicly available on the Internet. In general terms: it is easier to master than, say, virtual bookkeeper, and the analysis results will clearly demonstrate to you what amounts each individual client brought to your company, presenting a clear sequence in descending order.

Now you need to select the most profitable of your customers – those who brought 20-30% of annual turnover, and remember the history of interaction with them, including how the person came to your company. If you have managed to accumulate a sufficient number of clients, some patterns will definitely appear. For example: “This client was referred to us by Michael from a company for which we provided sales development services, and this one was referred to us by Lauren from a company that we helped optimize their call center.” Based on the identified patterns, you can build and test hypotheses to create channels for attracting new leads.

Continuing the same example: after analyzing the client base, we found out that several customers from category B came to us on the recommendation of Michael and Lauren, who worked as system administrators in large companies and have attended events organized by us to improve the quality of the services they provided.

Taking all this into account, we formulated a hypothesis on how to increase inbound leads and began developing a referral program for system administrators, attracting them to cooperate. Soon we received new channels for prospecting and a clear understanding of where to put our efforts to increase sales.

It's great if you have a USP that sets your company apart from its competitors in the market. It is such a powerful tool in itself that it works without much effort on your part. In fact, you don’t even need to think about how can improve sales lead generation – customers willingly come to you themselves.

There is a less effective, but also quite successful way. When examining your list of clients, remember which offer aroused the interest of a particular customer, and in the future, you will be able to use it more productively, understanding which audience the offer works best for. As a result of this very approach, several of the most lucrative clients came to us thanks to the offer of online advertising with payment based on results. Starting cooperation on a small scale, they later began to order more and more services and have brought significant amounts to our budget.