7 ways to generate leads for your remote business
Being able to work remotely is one of our age’s best advantages. Being able to create an online remote organization and generate jobs for others is beyond awesome.
One of the most common questions I received while growing a remote consultancy company was how to generate new leads in a remote environment. Online remote hustling can have a whole range of challenges and there are a number of creative approaches.
These were some of the initiatives we were involved with that generated the best results for us:
- Generate value first
It is always a good practice you give value before trying to sell your services. Think about how you feel when someone tries to sell you something out of nowhere. It feels a bit awkward and out of place.
A great approach is to define your niche and create content you know your client is looking for.
Start and maintain a blog. Position your company as experts in the technologies and skills you work with.
Before you start writing your content put yourself in the reader’s shoes. Who is your audience? The most targeted the blog is the more successful it will be. Define whether your blog will be read by potential clients or by potential hires. Both answers are valid and powerful but you might want to have two separate environments to properly target each.
Tell your stories. Blog about your experiences. What you learn in different projects and case studies. Your success working with different clients. New technologies and how they benefit users.
Create inbound websites where you generate content around a specific topic. Don’t forget to always add some sharing links so the site is easy to share. Some examples: https://nearshore.softwarecriollo.com, https://engagement.softwarecriollo.com
Define a call to action and always include it in the piece of content you are creating. What do you want the users to do when they read this piece? Add links to other of your web properties, website, other blog posts, and inbound pieces as well.
You can also create simple web applications around a specific business need your client might have. For example, in Software Criollo we built a video recording application to practice some skills using a specific technology. We made this application available in the App Store and to our clients. The free version of the app had our brand and call to action in the sharing page so everyone that shared a video would also be able to contact us.
People will not read and arrive to these pieces of content by coincidence so make sure you have a distribution strategy. Partner and collaborate with people. Share them in relevant blogs and comments, forums, Quora, Reddit, Facebook groups, Pinterest, etc.
👉🏼 Remember that the most important aspect is to be sharing value not selling a service.
2. Apply to job marketplaces
Online job marketplaces are a powerful resource to generate new leads for your business. Some of these potential clients are looking to make a hire right away and some are getting a sense of the industry but will hire later. In any case, it is a good resource to generate leads.
In order for these to be effective you will need to apply to a lot of jobs. When I say a lot I mean it. Set a pace and stick to it. Have a weekly goal and make it happen.
Keep in mind these clients and projects receive hundreds of applications. Make sure you differentiate yourself. How do you present yourself and what can you bring to the table that no other freelancer can. What previous experience is relevant to the project? What successful story can you tell the potential client? Try a couple of different pitches or cover letters and measure the response rate you receive. Chose the ones that get a better response and improve upon them.
Sometimes the amount of new jobs and projects might become overwhelming if you try to apply to everything. In these job marketplaces there are good projects but there are a lot of spam projects as well. Think of what type of project you would like to work on? What would make you happy? What piece of portfolio would be great to add? What budget you are comfortable working with? What skills do you have? Define these search parameters and use them as guidance to know which projects you should apply to.
👉🏼 Be honest. Never lie. You never want to start off a relation with anybody by lying. Be clear about your experience and willingness to learn. Clients always appreciate being able to trust the people they work with.
Your reputation or reviews are crucial in order to get new jobs in online marketplaces. Who came first the chicken or the egg? How can you have good reviews if you have not had your first client yet? Be creative. Offer some testimonials and previous client contact info in your profile. Be open to work in smaller projects in the beginning for the sole purpose of receiving a great review. Ask your current clients if they could hire you through one of these marketplaces just to get the good review in. Once you do get hired for a project through an online marketplace make sure you ask for a good review and explain the importance in your business.
Your portfolio is also super important. This is the visual representation of your work. Potential clients will see your portfolio as your ability to perform in their project.
Some job marketplaces have tests you can take in order to prove your knowledge. Invest time in these. It is very powerful if you could make it to be in the top 10% — 15% of a relevant skill for the client’s project.
Don’t be afraid of paying for a membership or commission. Think of it as advertising money. Sometimes these marketplaces will give you for 5 applications for free but 20 weekly if you pay a membership. Sometimes memberships will give you better visibility over free accounts. These are worth it.
3. Have an outreach program
Contact companies you think might be in need of your services. Have a target number you want to contact weekly and make it happen.
Define some niches and target your cover letter. You will contact a lot of companies to receive just a couple of responses. Include success stories in similar projects so that potential clients can see the value of your work and how you can help them. Understand the technologies they work with before reaching out to them. For example, if there is a company that has its e-commerce built in Shopify, include Shopify samples and success stories in your pitch.
There are databases you can buy online. Usually you can buy leads that are related to the service you are offering, try to be as niche as possible.
Find out who the person that will make the decision is. This will most likely be a person within the department you are applying to. Your effort will be in vain if you contact somebody that has nothing to do with the role you are applying to. Build a profile in your mind of who this person is, read their LinkedIn, Twitter, or Medium properties. See what you have in common so you can create empathy.
Don’t go for the biggest fish in the sea. Chances are that if you are trying to contact Twitter or Facebook, they won’t respond. Bigger companies have almost unlimited budget to hire and build local teams, so most likely they won’t need your services. Go for more accessible companies. Startups that are in their initial rounds of funding most likely won’t have the budget to build an in house team just yet. You can do a great job and if everything works out you can even become one of their first hires or even help them build their future team. Do a search in sites like AngelList to see startups that are currently funded.
👉🏼 Some people are glad you contact them and some will get mad. Don’t take it personal, whether you receive a positive or negative response. You are hustling and making it happen for your business.
4. Sales partners
Establish relations with people that would like to sell your services. These sales partners usually know a lot of people and can make referrals and sales for a commision on the project.
Most successful sales partner relations are people you know. Think of your friends and family members that love to hustle, attend events and that are very much involved in their communities. These people most likely will find these sales and referrals very easy to do and will be very motivated to leverage their social circle.
5. Paid Advertising
Create a couple of offers within your company and be as detailed as possible. Create a funnel for these offers. A landing page where you generate the lead. Don’t try to automate the process too much. Focus instead on generating the lead versus creating a system where the client will hire and pay you automatically. When you generate the lead you can follow up multiple times and close the sale with more information.
Think of how the potential clients will arrive to the landing page? Run paid advertising that matches with the landing pitch through Google, Facebook Ads, etc. Create personas and try to figure out where your potential clients spend their time in the internet. Be smart in targeting these ads to reach your potential customers. Try to empathize with their needs creating a compelling message.
👉🏼 Try different approaches and don’t be afraid of iterating your overall pitch and design of the experience.
6. Retargetting
This is a very powerful tool. After you have sent your potential customer to your landing page or main website, you can retarget and show them more ads across different internet properties.
The pitch you use in your retarget ads should be different from the ones you initially used in your ads. This time the customer has already visited your site and is seeing your brand again in the internet. Think about how you want to empathize this time.
7. Stay in touch
Your potential client is most likely shopping around, studying their options, hearing different pitches and they are just not ready to make the commitment yet.
Differentiate yourself by staying in touch. Generate value for them (going back to the first point of this blog post). It is not sufficient to just follow up because this is repetitive, nobody likes to receive a message making a sale every week or so. Following up is very time intensive because you manually need to understand who the potential customers are, what the last pitch you sent said, etc.
The best way to keep in touch is to create Cadences. Cadences are mails that you schedule in the life cycle of the potential customer. You prepare a set of emails, let’s call it 10 emails generating value. Explain more of your work process, how you can help them achieve their goals, success stories, relevant articles you have written, why they should hire you, among others. Every time you add a new potential customer to your database, you start by sending the first email. Set the pace, after certain amount of days you send the second email, and so on. All your customers will receive the same information regardless of when they give you their contact information. There are different software applications that will allow you to schedule and send these emails automatically.
After you have sent your first on boarding email set you can design and create a different set if the customer did not buy from you yet. These emails could be sent maybe once a month or so. Offer a way to opt out or tell you they do not wish to receive more emails from you and respect that.
👉🏼 It is important to stay in touch with all your potential customers because this will be the only way they will remember you and start creating trust in your business.
Having tried many of these, I have to say that the best way to getting a new client for us was by referrals. Generating trust is always challenging when working remotely. If a new client contacts you because someone they know had a great experience working with you, you are already ahead of this. Don’t just wait for your clients to magically give you referrals. Ask for them! Happy clients love feeling that they are involved in your business and that growth is reciprocal.
All of the methods discussed in this blog post are time consuming and most definitely a whole job in itself. These are time intensive processes. Out of 100 applications for a project you might end up getting 1. If you run a one or two person business you might want to sit a define roles within your organization so that you can either delegate some parts of the sales process or the creative process. It is difficult to do everything and most likely will end up in burning you out.
It is important to say that there is no right or wrong way of building a business and making it happen. Make it happen. Keep it up. Never take a negative response personal, turn this into a feedback and learning experience.
Generating leads is crucial for any type of business. What other ways of generating remote or leads are you familiar with? 👇🏼
