How to Build a Lead Machine

I had an interesting conversation the other day with a fellow accounting firm owner. She had hired a few different firms to do lead generation for her – cold emails, LinkedIn outreach, and some paid ads. None of it worked. At all.

The interesting part was that she was complaining that the marketing agencies she was working with wanted to spend front end time asking her a lot of questions like “What makes you different from other firms” and “Who is your target market” and “What is your unique selling proposition”?

These seemed like reasonable questions to me and I could very much understand why these firms were asking. But her response was essentially “I don’t know – we do bookkeeping – what else is there to say?”

You can probably see why none of the marketing efforts worked. Under the best of circumstances, accounting can be a hard sell!

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Most business owners don’t want to think about it much and when they do it’s not associated with positive vibes or good outcomes. But if you add on top of that a very boring offer that is in no way better than your current option, why would you expect people to respond?

Suppose you had a dental appointment coming up and you were not looking forward to it. A shocking and unlikely scenario, I know, but let’s go with it. Then, all of a sudden, in the mail you got a big shiny postcard from a dentist that said “Come see us instead of whoever you might currently be seeing. We are also dentists that do dental work.” Or the same thing, but it comes in your email. Or in your LinkedIn inbox.

Not very enticing, right? You may not be thrilled with your current dentist (or mechanic, or landscaper, or fill in any other service provider) but switching to a new one is a risk – they may be worse! They may charge more! They might not have any convenient appointments.

That is essentially the only marketing message that went out for my accounting friend’s firm. They didn’t have anything special to offer or any compelling reason someone may want to switch. That is not going to work. 

Building a lead machine starts with having a reason for a person to want to contact you in the first place because you have something they aren’t currently getting. Then you have to target the right people. And then you have to be very consistent in reaching out.

Let’s review the steps in detail:

Steps to Building a Lead Machine

1. Determine who you are targeting as specifically as possible. Not just generally, but as focused as possible. If you’re not sure, look at who your current customers are which of those are the biggest spenders and most loyal and committed – what do they have in common? That group is who you want more of!
2. Determine what you are offering them that is different and better than what they are currently getting and address those points in your marketing message. Avoid generic claims (we have great customer service!) that literally anyone can say. Try to zero in on very specific benefits of working with you that they won’t get elsewhere. Or, offer them something no one else is offering that they would find valuable – especially if it’s free, like a review, checklist, audit, consultation, etc. that may save them money or improve their situation.
3. Create a marketing piece (email, flyer, postcard, mailer, pay-per-click ad, social ad, etc) that speaks to this one big benefit and talks directly to the ideal prospect who has this issue that you want as a new customer. Before sending a million of them, try running it by some current clients or potential clients who can give you some feedback. Tweak as necessary until they are 100% clear on the message and benefits you are pitching.
4. Send it out to a sample list of real potential clients. You can get this list from a list broker, your own harvesting efforts, or by collaborating with partners who will let you market to their lists. The easiest (I think) is to use a reputable list broker because then you can build a very specific list of target contacts and the best chance of success you have is when your target is the closest possible match for your offer.
5. Once you find a level of success, continue sending out messages. Send new and different takes on the same basic message to contacts that haven’t become customers yet and then keep adding new names and taking off the oldest names from your list. You will rarely get conversions on your first attempt – it takes quite a few “touches” for a lead to respond to your offer and get in touch with you. Response rates vary but even with the best lists and best offers, you will likely be well under 10% response rate over the course of 5-6 messages per contact. It might be just 1-2% depending on what you are offering and how competitive the space is and how many similar offers those potential leads are getting.
6. Keep careful track of how much you are spending on this and how many positive responses and conversions you are getting – the cost to get each new client has to be less than that client is worth to you or else this doesn’t make sense. If your typical customer buys from you once and the product cost is $20 then this isn’t going to work. If a customer may stay with you for five years on average and spend $50,000 with you over that time, you can afford to spend $1,000 per new client. Whichever one it is you need to make sure you know what this math is.

That’s the basics of this, but of course, many people have written whole books on this process and even on just parts of this process (for example – on the specific writing style that makes a lead decide to take action – this is called copywriting). 

But the above is a good starting point and you need to have all the pieces in place – a unique and valuable offer, a list of people who fit your very specific customer target, and a consistent delivery of that offer to those folks.

The good news is, done well and done over and over you will be able to build a steady stream of new customers for your business that delivers every month year and year out so you can reach whatever growth goals you have set. Like most things in business, it’s not really hard but for some reason, most people just never do it. Be one of the few and you’ll never regret it!