8 Quick Ideas to Generate More Leads

Lead generation is the lifeblood of sales, but what happens when you run out of ideas to generate new leads?

Finding new prospects for your sales pipeline can be a case of boom and bust: one quarter your sales team and inbound marketing strategy might unearth opportunities at every turn, while the next your pipeline declines to a painfully slow drip.

What separates the active sellers from the opportunists is a broad-based plan to unearth potential customers across multiple channels and the marketing tools to ensure they enter your sales funnel without delay.

This article looks at eight easy ways to widen your lead generation and reliably add prospects to your pipeline every month.

Affordable and Efficient Ideas to Generate More Leads

Without further ado, here are eight pretty quick ways to make more work for your sales team (in the best possible way!)

1. Increase your speaking engagements and event attendance: More exposure means more opportunity to connect with targeted audiences who need to hear more from you. Establishing your expertise on stage (or on podcasts and radio interviews) also helps to boost word of mouth marketing, as well as future offers to speak.

2. Add email sign up to the most popular parts of your site: Never miss an opportunity to turn a web visitor into a subscriber. Email marketing is a great way to turn passing interest into future leads, so make sure the high traffic areas of your website have opt-in boxes that include a compelling offer or value proposition.

3. Increase your call volume: One of the best ways to win new business is over the phone, which means you're going to need more phone calls to generate more leads.  There are many ways to drive more inbound calls, with the main one being to use a memorable phone number that provides the basis for most of your calls to action, online and off. When you lead with a phone number that people notice and remember, it's only a matter of time before the calls come rolling in and your pipeline starts to swell with valuable new prospects.

4. Add referral incentives: Encourage current customers who love your products or service to pass on your contact information to others. Adding a small reward is often a good way to make this happen, although your best customers will be happy to spread the word simply because they love your business. Word-of-mouth is one of the most important ways to generate more leads, but you need to play an active role in making it happen!

5. Join (good quality) Linkedin groups: When it comes to social networking, Linkedin is more professional than most. This makes it a more natural place to connect for business ends. To get more from the platform, try to find groups in which you can offer advice and add value. These can be industry groups to build relationships with others in your sector or groups that serve a vertical in which you often find high-value prospects.

6. Use content to offer an expert view: There are many online spaces you can use content to share your expertise. Blogging and guest-blogging are the first port of call, but you can also use social networks to provide "microcontent" - aka quick tips and tricks - and video platforms like YouTube to provide step-by-step guides relevant to what you sell. Become known for your area of expertise, answer the common questions asked by your target audience, and you'll quickly find more people will come calling for your advice.

7. Throw in some freebies: Reports, research, ebooks, and white papers are all great examples of content that you can offer to potential customers. In return, you receive the information that you ask for, in order to target future market communications to these new leads. If you can identify the kind of incentive that adds a lot of value to your target audience, this is the epitome of a win-win situation!

8. Zero in on ideal customers: Perhaps most importantly of all, do everything you can to identify your ideal customer and make sure your marketing efforts are most active in places that those people gather. Everyone involved in the effort to generate more leads needs to understand the profile of your perfect customer and target their efforts at those who fit the bill. Use this idea as a filter for the recommendations above, weeding out any that aren't a good fit for your audience so that you only spend time on those ideas that bring in highly qualified leads.

Don't leave your sales prospecting to chance!

Use the ideas above to generate more business leads and give your company's best sellers a fresh batch of qualified prospects every month.