Lead generation
Sprinkles of lead gen advice
I’ve shared my marketing spend ROI spreadsheet before, and you can also find it in my Mehdeeka spreadsheet (second tab). In it, I spoke about how important it is to track cohorts of leads over time, as something that didn’t seem to be successful immediately might actually bring consistent results over time, ultimately making it a high performer.
You’ve really got to constantly remind yourself that lead generation is all a big experiment that never ends. Eventually you’ll start to see which campaigns bring in which type of lead - some will be super effective at bringing in lots of small opportunities that buy fast and add up in dollar value, others will be slow and steady, and others still might be really low volumes but for some reason every three months a HUGE customer closes from it that makes up every cent you spent over those months and then some.
I’ve written at length about lead generation, and I’ll include all the previous Mehdeeka’s about lead gen at the bottom of this issue. For this one, I want to cover good follow through for larger effort campaigns like an event, trade publications, or something more experimental like a podcast ad.
Event follow through
Ok so attending conferences is not just a brand exercise. There’s a spend, so there should be a measurable return. You should definitely have a number of ways to collect as much contact information as you can and you need a way to measure the quality of those leads.
Competitions and giveaways are great, but you’ll attract low-quality leads who have no intention to buy. However, their company name can help you create an outbound list for your SDRs to chase. So, for competition-y type events, you might just want to collect name and work email (and double check it’s a work email, or add company name as a safeguard).
Brochures are great, but they’re out of date, cost money to print, are wasteful, and lugging them around sucks. Instead, ensure everyone at your booth has a tablet or iPad loaded up with PDFs that are neatly stored, and their work emails are logged in. Whenever they talk to someone, offer to email them a copy of the PDF. This way, your sales rep already have their foot in the door for the follow up.
Alternatively, create a special landing page for the event on your website where people can select which brochures they want emailed to them and have a simple content gate of just email address set up. Leave one or two unmanned tablets on the tablet so people can self-serve, just make sure your landing page refreshes after they’ve sent an email to themselves.
There’s plenty of other ways to get contact information. Don’t forget your post-event follow up. Where possible and where it makes sense, this follow up should come from the sales reps. Where I feel like most people trip up is that this follow up should be pre-written, planned, and drilled into the sales team before they actually go to the event.
They should know which day after the event is reserved for follow up, exactly what that email will say, and the plan for everything after that all the way to converting the lead to an opportunity or closing it.
An example flow is everyone who doesn’t open the sales reps’ first email gets an automated email from marketing with a super-relevant-to-the-event piece of gated content (remembering that you didn’t collect every piece of info at the event), anyone who opens it and downloads the content goes back to sales, everyone who opens it but doesn’t download the content goes into an automated nurture journey, and everyone who never opens it gets one or two more automated emails from marketing that follow the same kind of pattern.
This same follow-through preparation should be in place before you try anything for the first time as well. How are you going to know whether that channel is actually viable if you throw one thing out and then get surprised it didn’t work?
The importance of tracking and UTMs
Ok so how do you know if something actually does work? It’s all through tracking and UTMs. If you cannot put some form of tracking on it, it is not lead generation and I wouldn’t bother.
Everything that a lead does should be logged somewhere, so you need a good integration between your website and your CRM. I have only kind of recently realised how low the level of education on proper website standards is, so hopefully you find this helpful, but if you’re really familiar with websites feel free to skip.
If you are getting an agency to build or manage your website for you, here’s a bit of a checklist to run through with them
Can content be gated and can that gate be customised or changed depending on the piece of content?
Does every form submission have a UTM on it? Including newsletter signups, content gates, inquiries, demo bookings, etc.
Can you self-manage creating landing pages, managing content, customising form fields, and linking it to your CRM?
If the answer to any of these is “no”, go find a new agency ASAP.
My last note on UTMs is that they should be super legible, anyone should be able to read them and say “yeah I know what this is talking about”. Your sales team especially needs to be able to see (and understand) the UTMs of a lead so they can open a conversation with the relevant questions and ice breakers.
Remember, though, customers can see your UTMs so don’t write anything dumb.
Previous lead gen Mehdeekas: