7 Keys to Lead Generation & Sales Prospecting for Business Development and B2B Sales

- Lead generation is one of the most important aspects of sales. If you can't generate meetings with your dream clients, well, you can't really sell anything. And over the years during my time at Oracle, at startup and also running my own business, I've uncovered seven keys that you have to know when it comes to lead generation so that you can start generating more appointments with your dream customers and close more deals.

And you wanna make sure you watch this video until the end, because these are gonna be the seven biggest lessons that I've learned over the years in my sales career. And just by watching a quick video, you're gonna be able to shortcut years of your time if you apply these lessons and really just take your sales and lead generation game to the next level. (casual music) What's going on everybody?

My name is Patrick Dang. Make sure to give this video a like, subscribe, and turn on notifications if you wanna see more lead generation videos like this. And let me know in the comments what's your number one challenge when it comes to lead generation, so I can make future videos helping you guys out.

So let's go ahead and dive into the seven keys you need to know when it comes to lead generation. The first key lesson that we have to cover is that when you are sending your cold emails or LinkedIn messages, you wanna send about 75 outreach per day, right? So if you're doing email, you wanna do 75 emails per day, and if you're doing LinkedIn, you wanna send 75 LinkedIn messages per day as well.

Now these numbers will change over time and over time, honestly, they will continue to decrease because the platforms don't want you to be spamming people. But right now the number is around 75. So if you wanna maximize your potential outreach and keep your pipeline full with potential opportunities, make sure you're doing this every single day or at least five days a week for the working days.

And if you send more than 75, if you're sending cold emails, you take a risk of burning your domain address and your emails aren't gonna be able to send using that domain, or if you're doing LinkedIn and you're sending more than 75, especially over 100, then you might get banned from LinkedIn and you have to start all over. So make sure that doesn't happen to you and do 75 consistently every single day. And if you're doing cold email and LinkedIn, you can do 75 here, 75 here, combining that into a total of 150, and that should be good.

Key number two is to write like you are writing to a friend. Now I review a lot of cold emails and LinkedIn messages that people send to me and I coach them through how to write this better, and the common mistake I see is that a lot of people they write very formal. They'll say something like, Hello, Sir.

My name is. I'm from this company and I would like to schedule a meeting with you. And it's very like robotic and businessy and corporatey, and people don't really respond to that kind of talk that well.

Instead, what you wanna do is keep it more casual, but professional, and talk like you are talking to a friend about a professional matter. Let's say you're giving career advice to a friend. That's essentially how you want to talk to another person, right?

So an example, let's say an email, you can say, Hey, John. I just saw that you wrote an article about XYZ and I really enjoyed and I loved your perspective on XYZ. So it's kind of casual but professional at the same time.

You definitely don't want to write super formal because it's really strange, right? If you were to write really formal to a friend, they would think it's weird. And same with a cold email, they would also think it's weird as well.

So keep it more casual, write as if you were giving professional advice to a friend, and you're gonna be good to set when it comes to the tonality of your outreach. And key number three is when you are sending your outreach, don't give too much information. So if you're doing cold email or LinkedIn messages, you only wanna give enough information to get someone to agree to a meeting.

If you're giving too much information, you're sharing all the different things you can do, you're sending PDFs and white papers and video links and things like that, people don't really want to spend time to click on it and watch it, you know what I mean, 'cause they don't understand the value prop, but in your email or LinkedIn message, you want to keep it tight, simple, very clear, one call to action, which is just to book a meeting, right? Book a meeting, book a meeting, book a meeting. So don't give too much information.

Just understand what the prospect's problems are, show a little teaser on how you might be able to solve that problem, and just ask for the meeting and that's gonna be it. And key number four is to have a clear call to action. And like I was just saying before, when you're sending a lead generation, piece of outreach, whether it's a cold email or LinkedIn message, at the end of it, you want to have a call to action.

What is it that you want the prospect to do at the end? And typically what I would always recommend is to book a meeting, whether it's sending a link to your calendar, asking for when they are available and you just accommodating it, you always wanna have a clear call to action, typically at the end of the email, so that the prospect knows exactly what to do if they're interested. They know the steps they can take to communicate with you and move forward with the deal.

And you wanna make sure you avoid things like let me know, or let me know if we can get a coffee 'cause it's so vague. A lot of people don't wanna respond to that. Make it extremely clear on what the next step is and just make it simple.

Book a meeting. Key number five is to follow up. So a lot of times when I talk to people and I ask them do they do cold email, they say yeah.

And then they say it doesn't work, and I ask them do they follow up, and they say no. And I'm like, okay, that's probably why. So when it comes to the cold email, so let's say you're sending to 100 people, you wanna make sure that you follow up two or three times, right?

I would recommend three times, so the total would be four. So you send the first initial email, maybe you get a 5% response, send another follow up email three to seven days after that, you might get another 4%, send another email three to seven days after the first follow up, then you might get more percentages. So overall, you might get, let's say, a 10 to 25% response rate using this kind of follow up formula.

Now, you always wanna make sure you have a follow up sequence whether you're doing it manually, or if you have software to do it for you, I would recommend the software. And that's because the magic is in the follow up. You're not always gonna get the meeting on the first go.

You have to have ways to keep following up with your customer because maybe they were busy when they read your email the first time, and the second one, they're like, oh, this is kind of interesting and then they take the meeting. So always make sure that you follow up. Key number six is when something is working, double down.

And what I mean with this is that when it comes to outbound lead generation, there are many different methods you can use whether it's cold email, LinkedIn, cold calling, or even if it's inbound, like writing a blog, SEO, video marketing, right? So there's basically an infinite number of ways to generate leads. Now my recommendation for you, if you're starting out and you're getting something to work, really double down on that.

So for example, if you're trying cold email for the first time, and you're getting a bunch of meetings from cold email, there's no real need to try LinkedIn and cold calling. If you wanna experiment, sure, but there isn't really a need because if you're getting a ton of meetings using cold email, just keep doing it. Go even harder and use what you already know that works and just scale it out.

So let's say, for example, you're getting 15 meetings a week from cold email, you're getting five on LinkedIn, and you're getting five on cold calling, right? If you try to split your time doing all three at the same time, these numbers aren't going to increase that much because it's difficult to scale and you only have so much mental capacity and good hours of work you can do per day. So if you're getting, let's say, 15 meetings a month on cold email and the other one's five, five, well, I would just forget the other ones and double down on cold email and get that 15 to a 30, get that 30 to a 60, and your calendar will be booked to the brim.

So if something's working, I really recommend you just figure out why it works and double down and just scale it out. You don't need to keep adding different channels. If one channel works, why would you need to do anything else?

So especially if you're starting out, you don't have the bandwidth and you can't hire people to do the work for you, double down on what's working. And key number seven is to have fun. And now this one's a little counterintuitive, it might be a little different, but when it comes to prospecting and lead generation, I know a lot of times, it's not that fun.

A lot of times you're going on LinkedIn, you're just clicking these buttons, and you're collecting emails, writing emails, and sending them out, and it's kind of a lot of work and labor, and you might only get one or two or five meetings from doing hours and hours of work. Totally get it. However, you got to make it fun.

You got to find ways to make it fun, almost like a game, because if you don't enjoy it and it's just a grueling process and you hate coming to work every day, well, you're just gonna hate your life and you won't even be successful in sales because it just takes such a mental toll. But if you start getting excited and creative on how you find the emails, how fast you can do it, how optimized your system could be, how to increase your response rate and you AB test and do all these crazy things, well, suddenly it becomes this fun science experiment and it becomes enjoyable. So no matter what product or service you're selling and how you're generating leads, you've got to make sure you're having fun and you enjoy the process somewhat, or at least you understand how this is beneficial to your life and your business and how you can generate income for yourself.

So find a way to make it fun. If you hate your job every day, maybe what's the point of even doing it, you might probably just find a different career, but if you're in sales, you're doing lead generation, and you wanna make this work, stick it out, find ways to make it fun, whether it's to gamify, experiment with different things, and really just enjoy the process. Don't always just look at oh, I'm only gonna have fun when I generate a bunch of meetings.

Although that's great, but you want to really enjoy the process because some campaigns are gonna work great, some campaigns aren't gonna work at all, and that's just how things go when you're trying things out in sales. So enjoy the process, have fun, and it's really gonna help you stay consistent on a daily basis, so that you can actually start getting some real results. And so with that said those are gonna be at the seven keys to lead generation that you can use right now to start generating more leads and blow your calendar out with dream clients.

So if you enjoyed this video, make sure to give it a like, subscribe, and turn on notifications, and let me know in the comments, which key you found most valuable and most applicable to your business. Also let me know, again, if you have any challenges around lead generation, so I can make future videos on that. And if you wanna see more lead generation videos on cold emailing and LinkedIn, make sure to check out my other videos.

With that said, my name is Patrick Dang, and I will see you guys in the next one.