Tom Smith of Complete On The 5 Proven Strategies for Increasing Lead Generation
An Interview with Rachel Kline
Target the right persona.
Our lead generation techniques allow us to target specific groups based on our client’s ideal customer. This is the foundation for your lead generation efforts.
Generating quality leads is crucial for businesses in today’s competitive landscape, and finding innovative and effective ways to attract potential customers has become a top priority. In this interview series, we are talking with marketing experts, industry professionals, and thought leaders who can share insights and stories from their experience about the best strategies for effective lead generation. As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Tom Smith.
Tom Smith is a digital marketing expert with over 20 years of industry experience. Tom is the Managing Director of two successful agencies, operating in the UK (Complete.) and Dubai (Complete Dubai). Both agencies offer a wide range of digital marketing services to support businesses with their online growth.
Thank you for doing this with us! Before we begin, our readers would like to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us the “backstory” about what brought you to this career path?
I started my career in the digital space doing an apprenticeship at a large agency in Preston, UK. In this role, I built my way up to be their head developer and SEO analyst. During this period, I was developing my own client base through freelancing in my spare time. As time went on, I gained enough clients to start up my own digital agency, and so Complete was born. I continued to work for the agency on a retainer basis, which allowed me to start my own agency with less risk. This was a fantastic opportunity that I am grateful for.
Can you share with our readers the most interesting or amusing story that has occurred to you in your career so far? Can you share the lesson or takeaway you took from that story?
As an agency owner, I’m always looking for ways to develop the business and myself. In 2021, I visited Dubai. After just one visit, I knew I wanted to create something special there one day. The next year, I put everything into researching and creating a business plan. Complete Dubai was founded in 2022.
Within just one year, we have a number of clients and are successfully growing the business in Dubai through our partnership approach.
The key takeaway from this experience is that if you can dream it, you can most definitely do it. Being able to trust my gut has allowed me to grow both personally and professionally, and it makes me feel even more excited about the future of my agency.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
The rise in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been particularly prevalent in the digital landscape. To stay up to date with current demands and trends, we have integrated and built our own software that uses AI to help in generating, nurturing and closing leads. This not only helps our agency’s marketing and sales processes but also our clients.
New products and strategies using AI are appearing every day, so it’s essential that we keep on top of this fast-moving industry. We always want to offer the best service possible to our clients and make sure they are hitting their goals. Utilising AI has allowed us to do this at consistent levels. A huge win has been the launch of our marketing automation CRM, Prospecting Pilot. This automation CRM helps our clients cut down their “speed to lead” and has helped them increase their contact and conversion rates massively!
For the benefit of our readers, can you tell us a bit about your experience with Lead Generation? Can you share an anecdote or two that illustrates your experience in this area?
We have been running lead generation campaigns for several years now with great success. Some of our clients have seen 200–300% return on their investment from the campaigns we have set up.
More recently, we have focused on refining our lead generation methods. We’ve achieved this by harnessing the use of landing pages and pre-qualification questions to ensure the lead data passed through is exactly what our clients are looking for. We have also recently implemented 2-step pin verification on all phone numbers to ensure the best possible contact rates. Taking these extra steps allows us to ensure that we can provide our clients with quality leads.
How do you determine which channels to invest in for lead generation, and which ones have been most successful for you?
The digital landscape is always evolving, which means it’s important that we monitor trends and adapt accordingly. We frequently complete market research and competitor analysis to determine the best investment channels. Especially when it comes to new clients, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel initially. Providing consistent, positive results allows us to build trust and deliver the best service we can. So, loosely following where already established competitors are at the start of any new campaign allows us to better learn the market and create our own strategies for particular clients.
It’s extremely important to understand who your clients’ clients are, where they hang out, what they do and how they behave online. There are many levels of market awareness, so mapping out where to generate leads and what to say allows you to position yourself in a way that guarantees success.
How do you balance lead quantity with lead quality? What metrics do you use to measure the quality of your leads, and how do you ensure sales and marketing are aligned?
We believe in providing our clients with quality over quantity, so we focus on nurturing leads and not just an ad with a form. Our lead-generation strategies allow us to identify the leads that are genuinely interested in what our client offers. A lot of pre-qualification and data validation is done before we send any leads to our clients, so the path to a lead is longer at the front end but allows us to shorten the back-end process for our clients.
We use a range of metrics to measure lead quality and our funnels, but the main metrics we focus on are cost per lead, revenue per lead and profit per lead. This view of 3 simple metrics allows us to focus on what matters to our clients and to our agency’s efforts. You can focus on vanity metrics like Clicks, CTR and lead numbers, but they don’t add value to your clients unless they are adding revenue to their business.
What are the biggest challenges you see companies facing when it comes to lead generation, and how do you suggest they overcome them?
One of the biggest challenges that is often identified with lead generation is the follow-up processes. For example, once the lead has been generated and validated, they are passed on to the client’s sales team, who are required to close the lead.
For the lead generator, the process is then out of their control. If the sales team fail to contact the lead in a timely manner and doesn’t continue nurturing the lead, they risk losing them. At this point, the lead may turn to competitors to support them.
By working closely with your clients, you can assist them with closing leads and keeping a positive relationship between you both. Assisting with their processes and tailoring your leads and services to their teams helps in the long run.
The one problem we tend to see with some agencies is that they are not working on their client relationships and building partnerships. This ultimately leads to a high churn rate of clients and stuns your attempts to scale.
What role do marketing automation and CRM systems play in your lead generation strategy, and how do you use technology or AI to streamline the process?
Automation is a vital part of any lead generation agency. Without it, your time can be wasted on small tasks that don’t affect your bottom line.
We are so invested in improving our processes for ourselves and our clients that we built our own CRM and marketing automation system, Prospecting Pilot.
Simple things to automate, such as first contact when a new lead comes in, workflows to nurture leads at different touchpoints and utilising AI to qualify prospects can all help and allow our clients to free up their time on admin tasks that would usually be either forgotten or acted on too late.
For some of our clients in industries where prospects are scanning for quotes, a missed call can mean a loss of business as the prospect moves on to the next company in the search results. So, utilising methods and software that assist with this can be the difference between a growing business and a failing business.
Can you share an example of a successful lead generation campaign you’ve led? What made it so effective?
One of our clients, who has been with us since 2019, has seen a 200% increase in their ROI year-on-year since we took over.
Utilising our lead generation strategies to generate, pre-qualify and validate the data of all the incoming leads for the client attributed to this.
The process integrates with their CRM. Utilising multiple methods of AI automation and various touch points to nurture the leads helped us to pre-qualify the leads before the client was sent the lead, meaning less wasted time speaking with tyre kickers and more time closing!
Here is the main question of our interview. What are your 5 proven strategies for increasing lead generation?
1 . Target the right persona.
Our lead generation techniques allow us to target specific groups based on our client’s ideal customer. This is the foundation for your lead generation efforts.
2 . Tell the prospect what you can do for them, not what you do (e.g., we help you close more deals, not, our tools are shiny and fancy).
For example, if you were selling toothpaste, you wouldn’t lead with the ingredients, you lead with how much brighter it will make your smile! We can entice users in the first instance by focusing on the benefits.
3 . Make the user journey pleasant with minimal friction to submit their details — this encourages users to engage.
On average, we try to limit a user journey (through Google Ads) to 3 steps. Click the ad, read the content, and submit the form. Sending prospects to more landing pages, mixing up content and giving them hoops to jump through will lead to page drop-offs. Make the journey easy for the prospect to get in touch/request your services.
4 . Nurture prospects
Not all leads come in with the same level of market awareness. Ensure there are multiple touchpoints and follow-ups, and you speak to each stage of a prospect’s potential awareness level. Someone who already knows about the product doesn’t need to be educated, and vice versa.
5 . Solid analytics and reporting tools — Monitor what works and double down.
This ties back in with our main KPI tracking. You could have an ad that has a CTR% of 100%. But, does it lead to the primary goal? You could have an ad that generates leads at £50p! But, does it lead to a sale? Know your numbers and focus on things that contribute to your main goal.
What trends do you see emerging in this space that businesses should be paying attention to?
As we previously mentioned, the digital landscape is constantly evolving, which only makes it more exciting. The development of AI tools and software is something we see being integrated into more and more businesses in the future. You can see this now with most major ad channels. Removing the hands-on tasks and using their in-built AI and tools to manage the bulk of the work means a lower barrier of entry for most businesses.
That being said, it’s also a risky time to lean on AI as it’s still in an unknown phase of whether it’s more beneficial. In time we will see!
We are nearly done. You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the greatest amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
I believe that it’s so important to continue being the best version of yourself. As an agency owner, life can get pretty busy, so it’s been essential for me to take time out to focus on myself. Whether that be through a meeting with my mentor, getting some exercise or spending time with loved ones — it is so important.
Taking time out has allowed me to support everyone around me better. For example, I can make more time for my team and focus on growing the business. The movement I would work towards is being the best version of yourself and taking time out to achieve that.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
You can check out our websites here:
Or follow us on social media:
LinkedIn: Tom Smith, Complete & Complete Dubai
Instagram: CompleteOnline & CompleteOnlineUAE
Twitter: CompleteOnlineS
Thank you for the interview. We wish you only continued success!
