Lead Generation: How to Find and Connect with Qualified Leads

Imagine yourself selling all sorts of nuts from your stand at the local market. The scent of your freshly roasted peanuts and the appealing look of your carefully selected cashew-pecan-cranberry blend is drawing everybody to your delicious products. Anyone walking by is tempted to purchase your nuts – aside from those with serious nut allergy, of course. Every person is a potential buyer and may convert to a sale right there and then. You’re successfully targeting your potential leads!

Now imagine yourself selling 6-week courses for getting startups to the next level in their growth process. Courses for start-ups don’t particularly smell like freshly roasted peanuts. They cannot be physically presented at a market stand the way your cashew-pecan-cranberry blend can. And they certainly don’t tempt everybody, without a nut allergy, to purchase right there and then. You need to find a more tailored way to target!

Here we introduce: Qualified Lead Generation.

Lead Generation entails all activities regarding the identification and cultivation of your potential customers. What makes a lead Qualified, is the probability of reaching a conversion with this lead. The higher this chance, the more qualified your lead. But how do you find these people? Or even, how do you identify who these people are in the first place? But most importantly: how do you urge them to buy your 6-week course? This requires you to take three crucial steps that we will set out in the text below.

Step 1: Identify your Qualified Leads
Reaching a conversion means selling your 6-week course for startup growth. Now, identifying who would initially be interested in your course, is the essential first step. Perhaps you already have a set buyer’s persona, or maybe you’ve had some perfect clients in the past. It’s important to have a benchmark, off which you can judge to what extent your leads are qualified to convert to a sale. So make that comparison and identify on what basis someone qualifies.

The characteristics of a Qualified Lead can vary greatly. But, for selling your 6-week course, it’s clear that you want to target startup that want to grow. Here you have two crucial characteristics. Translating this into a physical person you want to reach, is next. Go for someone that actually has something to say, like the startup’s founder. You’d also be looking for a startup that is ready for the next step. Maybe only consider startups that have been around for more than a year? Now you narrowed down your lead list and filled it with qualified leads!

Step 2: Go find them!
In contrast to your nut business, people are not very likely to be naturally drawn to your growth course. That is why you have to actively go find your qualified leads. Now, there are a lot of ways to gather attention and find them, like social media marketing, or the classic mailing list. But, for now we want to focus on the way that has proven most convenient in our experience: LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
LinkedIn is one big pool of profiles filled with people’s professional data. What (kind of) company do they work at? What is their current position in this company? Or even: how many years have they been working at the company? Sales Navigator is a tool with the option to apply these filters to a search and roll out a list of Qualified Leads. Get ready to connect with them and sell your 6-week course to every developing startup founder on LinkedIn!

Step 3: Reach out and test
The final and most yielding step: connect with your Qualified Leads! Go down the list and add them to your network. Don’t forget to add a message to your connection request and start a conversation with them. If you find out what it is they are looking for, you might just have that perfect 6-week course for them to get their startup to the next level in their growth process. Right?

To perfect your outreach, we would advise to keep testing the response you get from your generated leads. Be flexible and ready to adjust your strategy. Also, don’t lose hope. If Steve Startup is not interested in your course, then who says George Growth is also not looking for a tailored 6-week course? Just keep linking!

Are you also not a nut salesman at a local market? Then Qualified Lead Generation will help you grow your business and increase your conversion ratio. And, let’s be honest, who doesn’t want more sales and greater development? Reach out to us to discover how we help you achieve this, we’d love to hear your story!