What is your target market?
What is your Ideal Customer Profile?
What are the problems that your customers have which your business can help solve?
What are you customers most common fears? Frustrations? Desires?

Once you have answered all the above questions, you will be able to understand your market better, you are looking to identify the NEED which your business satisfies, its easier to approach potential customers if you know why they need YOU.

Whenever you feel like you are overwhelmed or lost, go back to your answers to the above questions. Your second step will be to create and maintain a customers Database, set a goal for the number of leads you want to have in your Database. The Database can be in the form of a CRM software such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, HighRise or can be a simple Excel spreadsheet.

Having a Database will help you:

1. Maintain all your contacts in one place.
2. Keep Important notes on each contact
3. Keep track on your activities with each contact.

Now you are ready to start adopting some lead generation strategies, here we go:

Ask your past clients for testimonials and referrals

Have your previous clients write testimonials, this can help your business establish credibility and enhance your public image. you have to know that your clients may not know how to write a testimonial, therefore it’s worth your time if you guide them through it, a good testimonial template can be like the following:

-(open)

My name is ____(X), I am ___ (age), I live in ___ (location), I’m a ____ (profession)
I used to experience _____(problem/ I had _____ (pain)
I thought that ______(myth #1)
And I had to _______(myth # 2)

(Transition)
After working with {your company name)
I _______(quantifiable desired benefit)
and ______(secondary quantifiable desired benefit)
Now I feel _____(emotions related benefit)
I’m excited to ______(opportunities that are now opened up)
(Close with thanks)

Do you like what you read so far? Keep on reading and don't forget to LIKE & SHARE with your connections..

Ask you current clients for referrals.

This strategy also works for existing businesses, If your current clients are happy with the product/ service you are providing, call them and ask if they can refer you to their friends, this strategy could generate good leads for your business and you will take advantage of using social proofing, since his friend is using your product/ service then you will face less resistance

Turn your bills into buyers

Check out your bills, who are the people you currently pay money to? Check if you can exchange your service with theirs instead of paying them hard cash.

Networking

Networking is by far one of the best ways for lead generation, it allows you to build rapport and get warm leads, your goal during any networking event is to get as many good quality business cards as you can get. You can keep good leads cards in your left pocket and business cards that are not relevant in your right pocket, make sure to fill the data from those business card into your database as soon as you get back to office, don’t let those cards pile up, otherwise they just become a stack of meaningless business cards. Follow up with an email or a call within 3 days of event date, you have to make sure the lead still remembers you and build on that. A good place to find out about new networking opportunities is meetup.com

Public speaking

People love to do business with “experts” and public speakers are viewed as experts, find out about events and ask if you can schedule a chance to speak. It’s important that your speech focuses on offering value to your audience, do not try to sell your product or promote your business, seize the opportunity to educate your audience about your subject matter.

Offer a free Report/ Free consultation

You can get more leads from your website if you offer your website visitors with value in exchange for contact information, provide people with something like:

• E-book
• Exclusive content
• Reports
• Infographic
• Templates

The Facebook referral system

Each one of your friends knows at least 3 people who can benefit from your product/ service, if you have 250 FB friends and you asked each one of them to refer you to 3 of their friends, this has the potential to generate 750 leads, assume that your conversion rate was 1 % then you have the chance to make 7-8 new customers from this strategy.

A good message template for Facebook referral can be like:

Hi, (Name)
I am looking to build my business with referrals. A good referral for me is {target market}
I want to offer them a {free consultation/ Ebook/ audit report (add value})
If they say “Yes”— great. if they say “No” — No problem.

If you can message me back with 3 referrals today, I will enter your name in a contest where I am giving {25$ Amazon gift card/ Coupon}. I really appreciate your help, it will make a big difference.

Recycle old Leads

Check your database, am sure you will find some old leads who asked you to contact them again in the future, it maybe worthy of your time to follow up with them every 90 days to see if they are ready to buy your product/ service.

Referral Partnership

Find complementary businesses, these are business that are selling your same target market however are not a competitor to you. you can create partnerships with these businesses where you promote his services to your network in exchange for referrals for your business.

Internet Marketing

Google, Facebook, Email Marketing and Video Marketing are great ways to convert traffic to your website and generating new leads, they are mostly free as well, except for the pay per click ads of course, you should utilize these tools to generate leads, It is not possible to cover the whole topic of Internet Marketing here, however I wrote down a few tips on how Internet marketing can help:

Google Business

97% of Internet users look online for local goods and services, therefore If you haven’t listed your business on Google business Directory, I suggest you start now.

Get an Email Marketing system

The good side of having an Email marketing system is that you can automate the process, you do not need to send every email by yourself, you can set up automatic replies to your leads and let the system are care of the process, another benefit is that you can measure your success and failure rates then be able to revise your emails accordingly.

Some good Email Marketing platforms are:

• GetResponse
• Campaign Monitor
• MailChimp

Video Marketing

The main advantage of Video marketing is that its free, other benefits are it engages, educates your customers and drives traffic to your website.

Pay per Click Advertising

Great, low-cost way to drive business to your websites or business page, you can use google Adwords and Facebook Ads to drive your target audience to your website. Don't waste any time, start applying some of these strategies right away to get more leads, If you are already implementing some of these strategies then please let us know which in the comments section below, what worked best for you? what didn't work best?

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor