#65 – How to do b2b lead generation as an entrepreneur?

You’re listening to the podcast Deals on Heels by business mentor Lotje Euser episode number 65

Welcome to this 65th episode. My name is Lotje Euser and I’m a business mentor who helps entrepreneurs to fall in love with sales and create customers for life. I’m super passionate about feminine sales. Feminine sales is a way of doing sales that matches your identity, and your talents and that feels great in your body. It’s a way of sales that respects other people’s spaces, and does not include pushy sales or spamming people just to get new clients. It involves a lot of feminine energy, but also balances the masculine energy. I believe sales should excite you to your core! Because that’s how you will become successful as a business owner. As a sales coach with a decade of experience, I’ve closed over 500 deals myself and I’ve sold all kinds of products: from fashion accessories to IT software. That what made me decide to become a business mentor, and I’m now helping other people and companies to become great at sales as well. 

Today I’m going to talk about a very important subject: lead generation. And I’m going to share about lead-generating strategies that can help you as an entrepreneur to create more leads in ways that actually feel like fun and don’t need any advertisement.

When people talk about lead generation they often immediately think about advertisements. Like they need to put in money in Facebook or linked in or google ads to do lead generation. But I know from my own experience that ads aren’t needed to do any lead generation. 

And if you don’t set up a solid business foundation first, you can actually waste a lot of time, money, and energy on ads. Because just because you throw money at advertising, doesn’t mean it will be successful for your business. 

So what I would recommend to you first is that you first focus on building a solid business foundation first.

That foundation would consist of the following subjects:

Get really clear on who you want to serve here. Who is your ideal client? Who would benefit the most from your expertise? Who are those people? What do they do in their lives? What challenges do they struggle with in their life or business?

Then get very clear on: how can you help those people? And what can you help them with? And what not? What is the result they can expect from working with you? 

And to then create a clear and powerful marketing message that speaks directly to your ideal clients.

And of course, you have to have a clear offer that will help your ideal client to solve their problems. Now I can really dive deeper into each of these subjects, but I feel like that would be better to discuss in separate episodes. Because today you’re here for more information on lead generation.

So what is lead generation?

Lead generation is a way you can attract potential buyers to you and buy from you. You create the opportunity to buy from you basically.

And lead generation is super essential to generate more sales and grow your business. Because welcome to my world: more sales equals more money. So if you want to grow your business, you will need to create more sales and lead generation is basically your BFF. 

I’ve done numerous of ways to generate more leads and in this episode I want to share my own lessons and tell you what worked and what didn’t.

So when I started this business a few years ago, I didn’t have an email list filled with potential clients. I had to built that from scratch. And I didn’t really have any expert positioning on that point so I used my way of doing lead generation to build my expert positioning and to attract more potential clients.

One of the ways that a lot of coaches and consultants use lead generation is through free stuff. Or free-bies. 

And I’m a big fan of free stuff because it allows you as the expert to give lots of value to your potential buyers in a very low-key way. People can get a hint of your expertise, and your vision through the free materials you provide.

But you need to be really diving into: “What would my ideal buyer love to get from me? What are they looking for and how can I grab their attention for my freebie?” 

One of the things I started with as a lead generation way was an e-book. It wasn’t really mind blown or super genius but nonetheless: it helped me to build my email list. 

I think the title was like: 5 marketing tips that will easily help you attract more buyers. Something like that. I was basically focussing on attracting entrepreneurs who wanted to know how to do marketing in a very easy way.

E-books don’t really sound like of-the-chart genius products, but they can do the trick and are really easy to create.

They don’t need to be very long or extensive, so it doesn’t take a lot of effort to create one. And they can trigger the curiosity of your potential buyers if you give your e-book an interesting and SEO proof title. 

In my first e-book I gave away 5 tips that were easy to implement and I used that e-book also to tell people a little bit more about who I was and how I could help them with their marketing challenges.

Now this was back in the days when I wasn’t really focussing on sales, I was more focused on marketing, but sales is my current niche as a business mentor.

Another way is to organize free webinars. And this is one of my favorite ways to collect new leads. Because you can interact with people, they really get to know you when you’re doing it live and you can answer questions if you want to.  But I must admit: I just love teaching and doing webinars. I never did the pre-recorded webinar thing, just because I love doing webinars and I’m always repurposing the content for other programs. That’s probably a topic for another episode, on how to build and repurpose assets for your sales.

A lot of companies also create playbooks or white papers on certain topics, and those can work great as well.

The most important thing is: your freebee must be super relevant to your ideal client. And you must market it in the right way, otherwise nobody will sign up for it.

So the next question is: how are you going to make people sign up for your freebees?

There are so many ways you can use here, but what I would advice you is to use all of your free channels to the fullest. Like post about it on social media, drop it in stories, do a live video. Post about it in groups. Make a reel. Send an email to earlier leads who might be interested as well. And invite people to leave their details in order to receive the freebee. You can use an automated form for that, but it’s not really needed. 

When I started this busness I didn’t really have a great form on my website, so I collected email addresses through social media. And I’m pointing out Email addresses as the most valuable input here, because you can sign people up for your newsletter and make the most of their attention.

And what a lot of entrepreneurs forget is that repetition is gold here. Even for your free stuff, you need to put in the effort to make people enthousiastic to sign up for it. Don’t expect people to act directly when you offer something for free. It takes a lot of repetition.

So what are other lead generation ideas?

Next to webinars or e-books & white papers, you can also use video to collect leads.

What I currently do on my website is encourage people to subscribe to receive a free video on how to attract ready-to-buy buyers. A year ago I also made posts about a free video and people had to drop their email in the DM or through stickers in order to receive the video.

This is also a great way to collect email addresses and leads. People love to watch short videos that provide them with a lot of value. 

Never be too concerned about sharing too much value in those videos. I know some of my clients were dealing with this. They use their podcast as a lead generation tool, which works also great! I use my own podcast as a lead generation tool as well. It wasn’t on purpose but I found out that my podcast generated leads for me, without me even being aware. Still some of my clients feel like they give away too much value. I don’t believe in that. 

I don’t agree that you could ever give too much value. I asked them: would you still feel like you are giving away too much value if right now 3 people would sign up for your program through your free stuff? The answer is: they did not. Then it would justify the amount of value for them. But in order to achieve that of course, you must go first. So go first and add lots of value.

But at the same time, I do think that giving lots of value alone is not enough. You must find the sweet spot to enable people to take further action, just like stepping into one of your programs.

And that’s where most lead generation fails: in the follow-up phase. Always follow up on leads generated by your free stuff. It’s not even a question. It’s something you MUST do.

Because leads don’t convert themselves. You must take action and make use of the attention your freebee generated.

So whether you’re creating a funnel that leads to one of your products, or that leads to a sales call – I don’t really mind how you set it up. But be very intentional about where that lead generation should lead your leads to.

You can’t create a funnel without a clear goal. So where does your lead generation way need to lead to? Decide for yourself. There is not any right or wrong here. Some of my clients let their lead generation lead to free calls. Some use it for their low-end programs. Some use it for their high-end programs. And some just do it to grow their email lists.

The clearer your goal is, the more successful your lead generation will be.

So I hope this episode will give a lot of inspiration about how to organize and use lead generation in your business. Let me know how this episode resonates with you, I love if you’d subscribe to my podcast and give a 5-star rating (only 5-star ratings is what I like, if you want to give 4 stars or lower, then never mind, and forget what I just said)

And don’t hesitate to dm me on Instagram or LinkedIn about your feelings or thoughts on lead generation. If you have any questions, feel free to dm me as well and I hope that next time you will listen again to a new episode!

I wish you a great day and hopefully till next time!