Then, starting a lead generation business may be a great way to use your expertise and generate substantial income by connecting companies with quality leads.
Below, we’ll share how to start a lead generation business, its challenges, and how to actually find leads and clients.
What is a lead generation business?
A lead generation company specializes in finding potential customers (leads) for other businesses.
The goal of lead generation is to collect information from people who have shown some level of interest in a product or service.
The leads are then sold to other companies that can convert them into paying customers.
These businesses pay handsomely for these leads because it means that they don’t have to spend time and resources looking for leads themselves.
Challenges of lead generation businesses
Starting a lead generation business has a low barrier to entry.
However, just as with any business, it comes with its own set of challenges.
Cost
Even for starting a one-person lead generation business, you’ll need some money to get started for:
A domain
A professional website
Hosting
Subscriptions to lead generation tools
The cost of starting a lead generation business increases exponentially for larger-sized lead generation agencies.
Lack of lead quality
Businesses purchasing leads expect to receive good quality leads.
Adequately filtering out bad leads requires ongoing optimization and refining of the lead generation process.
Competition
Because of lead generation’s low barrier of entry, it has become a competitive field.
One of the challenges lead generation businesses have to afghanistan phone number list deal with is standing out among their competitors.
Differentiating your service and niching down to create a unique value proposition is increasingly important in the lead generation business.
Laws and regulations
Being aware of relevant laws and regulations is essential when starting a lead generation business.
Applicable laws could include:
GDPR
CAN-SPAM
CCPA
Consult a lawyer before starting lead generation, as failing to do so could result in significant fines.
Where to find leads
To start a lead generation business, you need to be able to find, well… leads!
There are several methods you can use and in this section, we’ll discuss some of them.
Cold email
When done right, cold email can be highly effective for generating leads.
It allows you to reach out to a specific set of customers and filter your contact list based on factors like industry, job title, and much more.
In other words, you start with a targeted list and then take the most responsive leads and sell them to your clients.
Since everyone with an email address has already received thousands of cookie-cutter outreach emails, it’s important to personalize each one.
Fortunately, that doesn’t mean you have to write each email by hand.
Cold outreach tools like lemlist can do most of the work for you.
lemlist allows you to run highly personalized multichannel outreach campaigns.
lemlist allows you to personalize at scale like no other outreach tool. Your emails will look just like a manually written email.
With lemlist, you can use the usual (custom) text replacements, but it goes much further than that.
Take its feature liquid syntax, for example. It allows you to display different content based on specific conditions, such as the recipient’s location, interests, or campaign interactions.
__wf_reserved_inherit
If you’re looking for leads for a B2B audience, you can’t go wrong with LinkedIn. It’s the best social media platform for generating leads.
With LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can run more advanced searches than with regular LinkedIn search. It allows you to zoom in on the most relevant leads.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator even recommends leads based on your saved searches and activity, bringing you new leads you might not have discovered on your own.
Once found, you can quickly push the leads to any lemlist campaign with lemlist’s Chrome extension.
__wf_reserved_inherit
With the leads in your campaign now, you can start your outreach.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Have SEO skills? Can you rank a website on a specific topic?
If so, you can capture leads through sign-up forms on your website.
If people sign up, you know those leads are already pre-qualified and probably in the market for your client’s product or service.
Obviously, it takes time to build a website, get it ranked, and maintain those positions, but in terms of monetary costs, you can’t beat having a lead-capturing website.
Leads databases
One of the easiest ways to find leads is through a lead database.
Now, you might be asking: why wouldn’t potential clients use such databases?
The answer is simple: your clients want ready-to-go leads delivered to their “doorstep.” They certainly don’t want to spend hours per week filtering and tweaking lead databases’ search results.
lemlist comes with a 450M+ B2B leads database. its advanced filters allow you to find the specific leads your clients need.
__wf_reserved_inherit
Best of all? You can add them to any lemlist campaign with just one click.
How and where to find clients
Define your offer
The first step to finding clients is defining your offer.
Start with a narrow niche focus instead of being a general lead supplier. This allows you to get a foot in the market’s door.
For example, you could target SaaS companies in a specific industry and then expand to other industries as you grow.
Define your ICP
Your Ideal Customer Profile helps you define who your customer is.
Knowing their paint points, where they hang out, and what kind of language they use helps refine your marketing.
Our AI-powered ICP generator will help you generate an ICP in just a few minutes, giving you an advantage over the competition, which might take weeks to develop one.
