
Ask HN: Sales Lead Generation Best Practices? - JSeymourATL
What&#x27;s been your most effective&#x2F;ineffective Sales Lead Gen effort:  Marketing (automation platform, or Old School Cold Calling&#x2F;Cold Emailing? Others?
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bradleysmith
We're in an antiquated industry (oil & gas) providing a B2B data-subscription
service, so this may or may not be relevant. I've seen similar methods work
for B2B direct services in manufacturing, and in B2B and B2C product
development services as well.

Anywhere we can find up-to-date titles on executives in organizations is very
effective for leads generation. Linkedin, Manta, Businessweek biz listings, or
ASKINT (cold-call with sole intention of finding out "who's in charge of XXX",
build the lead and get the name only for concentrated calls later) all have
been effective. We have identified companies of a particular genre previously,
and targeted particular titles in those orgs. I personally like running a
Manta scraper and vetting results by hand with Linkedin to confirm current
titles. I strongly suggest getting Rapportive for Gmail for snooping networks
associated with email addresses. If you want to get really snoopy, Maltego is
a great tool for looking for connections elsewhere on the web.

We have also found trade-shows to be fairly effective at having companies
self-identify as needing our service and providing contacts that you have
early rapport with to help you find your guy in their company. More effective
for bigger business development deals (which can distract as much as help, in
my experience), but was moderately successful for us.

Bonus of tradeshows: company listings of all the competitors. Generally these
will be great lead-list starting material that you can vet down to be high-
quality leads (again, in our industry)

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JSeymourATL
Kudos-- much appreciate your insights into the B2B Sales Lead Gen space!
Follow up question: are there any authors, thought leaders, or bloggers on
this subject you like to follow?

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pallavkaushish
We are trying two approaches which may or may not work for you considering we
are still in process:

* We select a niche say Cloud Hosting Providers, we then make a personalized yet generic landing page which contains placeholders for the name of the person we are going to cold call/email and his company. Once we contact them we also send them the URL which seems personalized and thus increases the chances of conversion or at least better response. Change the name of the person and company name and you have yet another landing page for a different company.

* Make a short 1-2 min video and clearly explain what's in it for them if they take up your product. Video should be made preferably by the CEO. Upload it to youtube and make it private. Send out the link to the concerned person.

These two tactics can be accommodated in many different scenarios so keep your
mind open if you try them.

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JSeymourATL
Thanks for your thoughts! How do you initially connect with your target
customer phone or email?

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pallavkaushish
Depends. I prefer email because it feels less intrusive. Moreover it's easier
to tag a URL in email. If you're going to have a call, you would anyways have
to send them an email later on, with the link.

Contrary to what I said above if you have good convincing skills, you should
have a call first.

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raminassemi
It very much depends on current situation of your company, but general good
resources:

MarketingProfs - Outbound is most effective way of lead gen
[http://www.marketingprofs.com/chirp/2013/12161/b2b-lead-
gene...](http://www.marketingprofs.com/chirp/2013/12161/b2b-lead-generation-
trends-for-2014-whats-hot-and-whats-not)

Aaron Ross [http://predictablerevenue.com](http://predictablerevenue.com)

Steli Efti [http://blog.close.io/how-to-develop-a-first-sales-process-
fo...](http://blog.close.io/how-to-develop-a-first-sales-process-for-your-
company)

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JSeymourATL
Much appreciate the links, all NEW to me... thank you~!

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notduncansmith
Cold mailing (snail, not electronic) has worked for me in the past. Hand-
written letters converted way better than printed, IME (I used an online
service to get them written, since my handwriting is terrible).

One of my favorite tricks was to include something slightly heavy in the
envelope (I've used keys and pairs of dice), with enough weight that it would
be delivered as a "package" rather than a piece of normal mail. This makes it
stand out from the rest of their mail, it's a practically guaranteed open. You
tie it into your letter copy somehow: "unlock the potential of the web" or
"don't roll the dice with your website". It doesn't matter if it's corny, it
sticks out in peoples' brains, and they'll probably call.

You can get miscut keys for free at Walmart, Home Depot, etc, just ask for
them. It helps if you bring a kid and say they need them for a school project
(or if you can't find a kid, the employee will most likely sell a good number
of them to you for $5-$10).

Another tactic I've used with varying success is to have 3-4 fake LinkedIn
accounts (grow them for a few months before you start), and then when you have
some cold leads (you should be connected to them via your real account), start
using the accounts to tell people they really need to upgrade their website
(one every few days or so). Roughly a week after the last message, hit up the
lead with your real account and let them know that you're running a special
deal on a full website redesign, and that you're starting out with your
LinkedIn network since there's limited availability. This one netted me 4
contracts in a month a little over a year ago, with maybe a total 15 hours of
work (creating and growing the accounts was the most time-consuming part, and
I still have them if I ever wanted to repeat it).

Finally, one sales tactic that I've always wanted to use (but haven't gotten
around to using yet), is to suit up and rent a Lamborghini for a few hours,
and drive around town making high-pressure, high-profit deals. "You could have
a car like this", etc. Who's going to say no to a handsome guy in a sharp suit
with a Lambo? Make as many deals as you can and then return the car. No clue
if this would actually work, but it sounds like a lot of fun :)

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JSeymourATL
Hand-written snail mail letters-- I like it, Old School!

