How To Find Leads For Sales: 8 Tried-And-True Ways to Improve Lead Generation

Leads are the moving force to your sales department and your business as a whole. 

Without a steady flow of new prospects entering your sales funnel regularly, your company will struggle to secure its place in the market and expand its customer base.

Now:

It’s important to note that lead quality is also a huge determining factor when it comes to lead generation. You can attract thousands of generic prospects each month and still not see good results since your sales team is wasting time on pointless outreach attempts.

This guide will teach you how to generate targeted leads for your business and keep your sales funnel flowing. You’ll discover eight sales tactics to find the best quality leads to increase sales and keep up with the competition.

Ready?

Let’s jump in…

What is a Sales Lead?

A sales lead is an individual or organization that might express interest in your products and services. It refers to any potential customers that are fit to work with your brand and benefit from your solutions.

You can attract sales leads to your business using a variety of marketing and sales strategies. For example, you can run targeted advertisements on social platforms to generate awareness around your offers and convert new clients.

Is It a Good Idea to Buy Sales Leads?

To be honest:

Buying leads from a reputable partner can be a great way to jumpstart your sales cycle and close more deals quickly. That’s especially true if you’re just getting started in a highly competitive market where you must do everything to stay relevant.

However, there are quite a few problems with lead purchasing.

The leads you buy from a third party come nowhere close to those generated by your sales team. They don’t match your ideal customer profile, and they’re rarely in need of your products and services. 

As a result:

These generic leads will be harder to communicate with, nurture, and convert due to their lack of interest. Your sales representatives will then waste countless hours trying to convince prospects that were never meant to convert.

Most importantly:

For a lead selling platform to stay profitable, it has to sell the same leads repeatedly to different companies in the same industry. So that only makes it harder for you to stand out among the dozen other businesses reaching out simultaenously.

That in turn will create a negative customer experience and get all your outreach attempts ignored in the future.

How to Find Good Sales Leads for Your Business

Now that you understand the importance of finding targeted prospects, it’s time to jump into some of the best strategies you can use for lead generation.

Before we get into that:

Start by planning out a prospecting strategy to help you stay on track and meet your business objectives faster. It’s also crucial to know who your ideal customers are and what makes them interested in working with your business.

Here are 8 brilliant sales and marketing techniques to drive more targeted leads into your sales funnel: 

1. Maintain a Strong Presence on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the top lead generation platform with over 810 million users and over 57 million companies around the globe. It’s the best social platform for businesses looking to find quality leads to fill their sales pipeline. 

If you’re not already on LinkedIn, create a new company profile and optimize it for sales. Be sure to also complete your personal profile with a professional profile picture, correct contact information, and more details about your background and company’s work.

Once you have that in place, start joining relevant groups so you can engage in discussions with potential leads and provide them with value. You should also publish industry-related, educational pieces as well as news about your company to show expertise and boost engagements.

Looking for quicker ways to generate leads with LinkedIn?

Try LinkedIn Ads!

LinkedIn advertising is a great solution for expanding your reach and driving business growth with targeted leads. You’ll be able to establish strong relationships with decision-makers who might be highly interested in your offers.

2. Share Valuable Content

A value-first approach is key to the success of any marketing and sales tactics you want to use to generate and convert new leads. It’s an excellent way to gain an edge over the competition and leave a lasting impression.

How does that relate to lead generation?

Creating informational content helps you attract interested prospects who are yet to interact with your brand. You can expect a lot of new leads coming to your website through organic search results, social media, or direct links from other sites.

On top of that:

This type of content is key for nurturing new leads as it helps them understand their problems and learn how to solve them. More importantly, educational pieces allow you to prove your expertise and gain the prospect’s trust from the go.

There are endless ways for your business to create and share informational content. Here are some of the most popular formats you can focus on:

• Blog articles
• Infographics
• Ebooks
• Case studies and whitepapers
• Audio podcasts
• Videos

3. Optimize Your Company’s Website for SEO

Search engines have become the most important tool in our daily lives. Whether we’re looking for the best nearby coffee shop, the most reliable bookkeeping and payroll service, or just the difference between “complement” and “compliment.”

Therefore:

Getting your website ranking high on Google will help you generate many valuable leads. Most of the time, these prospects will come with a high buyer’s intent, which makes them the easiest to nurture and convert. 

SEO is a also sustainable strategy for attracting new leads to your business in the long term. And it costs nothing compared to what you’d spend on other lead generation techniques such as paid advertising. 

Here’s how to optimize your business site to attract the most leads with SEO:

Publish SEO-friendly content on a regular basis

Conduct thorough keyword research to identify high-volume, low-competition keywords

Generate backlinks from high-authority, industry-relevant websites

Optimize your site for mobile-friendliness

Improve your site loading speed and user experience

Use visuals and infographics to boost relevance and improve dwell time

Optimize your business for local search

4. Run Targeted Campaigns on Social Media

Social media has been a game-changer for companies of all sizes in many industries. Because it helps you to increase brand awareness, reach newer audiences, and also learn more about your target audience.  

You can run targeted ads to capture new leads on most social platforms today — including Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. And with the huge data these websites have, you can launch hyper-targeted ad campaigns to grow a new audience and get it interested in your solutions.

There are different types of advertising campaigns you can run, depending on your marketing and sales objectives. 

For instance:

You can aim to grow your business profiles and get more followers on the platform. You can also drive direct traffic to your landing pages and convert them directly using lead capture forms. Or you may use retargeting campaigns to promote your offers to potential customers who have already shown interest in your brand.

Now…

While advertising on social media is a great way to find new leads fast, building an engaging presence on different platforms is of no less importance. So be sure to share new posts on social media regularly to keep your brand alive and stay on top of your prospects’ minds.

5. Ask Your Happy Customers for Referrals

Despite it being one of the oldest tricks in the book, asking customers for referrals has always been a brilliant way for companies to generate new business. Because no matter how much you think you know about your industry, there are always new leads and big accounts you’re going to miss in your prospecting.

Who’s better to ask for a referral than a client who’s currently happy with your service?

Every satisfied client you have already trusts your brand and knows what you can deliver. So they’ll be glad to help your company survive and thrive by referring quality sales leads to you — sometimes for nothing in return. 

Ask your happy clients for referrals by first explaining how that can help your business and why it matters. You can do that either by sending a personalized email or picking up the phone to talk about the referral process and how the information is going to be used.

6. Guest Post on Reputable Industry Websites

Guest posting is one of the best ways to communicate with your target audience and establish yourself as a thought leader in your field. It’s also a highly effective technique for building quality links to your site and improving your SEO rankings. 

How do you get good guest posting opportunities?

Reach out to authentic blogs or authoritative websites in your industry, then pitch them ideas of unique topics you can talk about on their sites. You must do your best to match their blogging guidelines and write in an informational tone that isn’t too salesy.

Your guest post content must be high-quality and demonstrably written by a human expert, so before submitting, make sure to check your content through AI Detector. Because reputable websites are likely to reject content that has been spun or solely created by AI.

Now:

It may take you dozens of attempts to land interesting guest posts at first. Because the question inside any webmaster’s mind is “Why should my audience listen to you?” But as you carry on with it, this powerful strategy can generate amazing opportunities for your company in the future.

7. Create and Promote a Newsletter

A newsletter refers to any emails you send regularly to your subscribers’ list to inform them about your latest offers and news. It’s a super-efficient strategy to engage your current customer base and attract new leads to join you on your growth journey.

You can use your newsletter as a lead magnet by encouraging visitors to subscribe to your list and receive new offers exclusively. But it can also work as a lead nurturing tool as it enables you to educate your audience through different email sequences based on where they sit in the sales funnel.  

To be honest:

Your subscribers probably already receive dozens of new emails every day. So you should expect to have low open rates at first — especially considering all the competition. 

However, there are ways you can improve your email newsletter performance:

• Write compelling subject lines and first lines to improve open rates
• Segment your audience and personalize your content based on interests and recent behavior
• Close each email with a strong call to action to boost engagement
• Automate your newsletter to save yourself time and ensure an optimal customer experience

Most importantly:

The emails you send to your subscribers must actually be valuable. Whether it’s to educate, increase conversions, or stay on top of your prospects’ minds — make sure that each email has a clear goal behind it.

8. Get Listed on Popular Business Directories

Let’s face it:

No matter how strong your SEO plan is, you’re never going to rank for most of the competitive keywords in your market. And because of that, you may be leaving lots of leads on the table for your competitors to grab.

Now…

If you take the time to scan the results for some of the best buyer intent keywords in your niche, you’ll notice that there are a lot of third-party sites ranking on the first page of Google.

That’s what we refer to as “business directories.”

A business directory is an index of companies that are grouped by category, location, or industry. It helps online consumers find the best products and services based on reviews and different search criteria.

Getting your business listed on online directories allows you to generate dozens of monthly leads for your business easily. It’s a cost-effective way to engage and convert highly targeted prospects for your business.

Here’s a list of some of the most popular online directories:

• Yelp
• Google My Business
• Clutch
• Superpages
• MapQuest
• FourSquare
• Facebook

Get your business listed on any relevant B2B online directories, and make sure to use consistent information across all websites. It’s also essential that you gather positive reviews to enhance trust and improve your rankings on these platforms.