Three Lead Generation Techniques for Non-Traditional Target Markets
Lead generation is one of the tasks that salespeople dread the most. It can often be very drab and time consuming. With that being said, there’s no escaping the fact that it’s important to the livelihood of a healthy pipeline. Referring back to the 5 steps of Agile Sales, once your understand your leads, you need a mechanism in order to collect them at scale. Lead gen done right is the root activity to enable all positive downstream results.
Fortunately, there are a ton of tools out there to help speed up the process. Companies like Zoominfo, Hoovers or Discover offer hundreds of thousands of leads with seemingly endless filtering capabilities. These platforms work to provide a large quantity of quality leads for most companies but as startups become more and more niche, their target markets follow suit, which makes the traditional B2B lead gens tools less useful.
This is not a reason to give up on lead gen or prospecting activities for niche markets, as there are a number of solutions available. Here’s a list of three techniques to help with lead gen for a non-traditional target market:
1. Web scraping
If you stumble across a web page that lists your prospects, you can apply tools to collect all data and organize them onto a spreadsheet, which is referred to as web scraping. Whether it’s a google chrome attachment or a short script that you create for tougher pages, there are plenty of ways to do it.
When done right, web scraping is extremely cost and time efficient. The downside is that it can take time to learn the basics and it’s very difficult to master. Web scraping also only works for specific scenarios where leads are collected onto an existing web page, which is not always available.
Lastly, It is important to understand the ethics behind it. Although most pages online are meant for public consumption, there are many others that are not intended to be collected. If there is explicit language on the page stating that scraping is not allowed or if it just does not feel right, it’s best to move on.
TL;DR
2. Traditional Outsourcing
Traditional outsourcing refers to the act of paying another party to carry out tasks which are normally handled internally. Naturally with lead gen, there are tasks that are repetitive and time consuming. These tasks are best carried out by an outside party rather than someone internally, as it is much more efficient from an organizational standpoint.
There aren’t many better things in lead gen than having a great outsourcing partner who understands your target markets and where to find them. Getting to that point can be time consuming as you will need to first find the partner and then educate them. Outsourcing is also the most expensive option compared to the other lead gen techniques.
The good thing is that there are plenty of platforms like Upwork, which makes finding the right freelancers easy.
TL;DR
3. Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk)
MTurk is an outsourcing marketplace that takes an innovative approach to outsourcing. Rather than partnering with one or two freelancers and training them on the entirety of your lead gen activities, MTurk allows you to program your tasks and then they employ hundreds of workers to carry out each task concurrently. See below for a diagram on how it differs from traditional outsourcing:
The result is that a large amount of manual work gets done in a very short amount of time at a very low cost.
Using MTurk for the first time can be daunting, however, once you get one or two jobs under your belt, it becomes much easier to navigate.
TL;DR
—
Sales activities are often heavily informed by process, especially when a prospect enters the first pipeline stage in their customer journey. Lead gen, however, is the part of sales that requires the most creativity and the change of pace can be very beneficial.
