The most important thing that a startup can do to accelerate success is to increase the rate at which the company is able to generate leads. Lead generation is key to success because sales leads are how you grow your revenue. If you don’t have any leads, your company simply can’t grow.

How to Generate Leads for Your Business

In this post, we are going to help you navigate the challenge of generating your first qualified leads. After reading this, you should have a new outlook on how to get your product/service seen by the people who want it and can make it grow into a fruitful business.

To lay the foundation for your business in your early days, it’s important to be authentic, but you also need to be a little aggressive. If you’re not straightforward with your sales leads you will close less deals. It’s also important to remember that in the early days of a startup, everyone is a sales person. Each employee should be talking with customers, potential customers, and networking like crazy.

The more that you communicate with the people that matter most to your business, the more genuine you’ll appear and the more sales opportunities you’ll uncover.

Focus on Getting the Right Eyes on Your Company

When you’re getting started, you don’t want to get as many eyes as possible on your company. You want to get the right eyes on it. Getting the rights people to look at your product is how you gain traction. You will gain traction faster when the correct audience is on your website because you’ll waste less time talking to unqualified leads. The valuable leads that can grow your revenue will be filling out your lead generation forms and engaging with your brand. To make sure you are targeting and reaching the right people, you should do tons of research and track website engagement with tools like Google Analytics or LeadBoxer.

Nurture Your Leads

Collecting leads is just the start of the revenue generating process. You need to nurture your leads to build trust and relationships with potential clients. To nurture your leads, you can use a sales Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool. We use Pipedrive and highly recommend it. Using your CRM tool, you can work on nurturing your leads by keep track of important information about each lead, sort your leads, rank your leads, and get an overall picture of the quality of your leads. Once you have sorted, ranked, and learned about your leads you can really begin the nurturing process. Nurturing doesn't mean giving the lead just one email or call, but rather building a relationship with the person that turns into a sale over time. Keep track of your contacts, engagements, and other important notes that you believe will help you close the deal.

Have Conversations

Pitching in a "sales-y" way doesn’t work. Focus on having genuine and personable conversations. Make people a friend of your company, and they’ll naturally feel inclined to support your efforts. This is great news for most startup founders who aren’t good at being high-pressure sales people. Simply focus on being a friend with an interest in the other person's business, and success will follow.

What Is the Simplest Way to Generate Quality Leads?

The simplest way to generate high quality leads is to get the right traffic to your website. Once you have qualified traffic on your website, you need to capture visitor information. The best way to do this is to use a tool like SumoMe for email addresses and LeadBoxer to see exactly who is visiting your website. Quality leads turn into quality sales. Find yours and you’ll find startup success.