5 Unconventional Ways to Generate Sales Leads

Leads translate to $$$.

Most of us have tried out many different methods of inbound and outbound lead generation.

We keep experimenting with new ways of lead generation. Also, we keep learning about clever ways of lead generation from our customers. Here are some of the unconventional ways of lead generation that’s worked well for us and our customers -

1. Find people using complementary products

Complementary products and other related products used by your target audience. Example, if a company uses product-A then they are likely to use your product (or something similar to yours).

Also, what are the other products your target audience typically uses? These may or may not be related to your product.

Make a list of all these products, and try to find people using them. One place to find these people is on the Twitter follower list of these products.

2. Find your competitors’ prospects

These are the people who have the need for the solution that your product provides. They are engaging with your competitors in some or the other way. And they may be at various stages of their purchase decision-making. Again, you can find some of them on the Twitter follower list of your competitors.

3. Target customer lookalikes

Make a list of your customers, prospects and qualified leads. Get detailed information about them — enrich the profile data you have on them (LeadCandy can help with this), so that you can create a detailed persona. Once done, you will have info like —

• Title — like, 41% of your customers are VP of Marketing, 9% are Director of Sales..
• Industry — like, 38% of your customers are from Consumer Goods, 19% are from FinTech..
• Location
• Company Size (employee count)
• Revenue

These are the kind of people interested in your product, and you need to target more of them. So, your advertising and marketing dollars need to be targeted towards this kind of profile. Your marketing content, messaging, etc needs to clearly speak to this audience.

4. Find where your target audience hangs out

What kind of blogs they typically read, which influencers they follow, etc. Make a list of twitter handles of these blogs, influencers. You can find more of your target audience — and subsequently, more leads — in the follower list of these twitter handles. You can do this manually, or use LeadCandy to build this list for you.

5. Leverage your team’s existing relationships

We all do this in some form or the other — mostly manually. We were looking for a way to do this in a structured and scalable way. Even in small teams, you can find a few thousand potential prospects in the combined network of all the team members.

For some, you can request mutual contacts for introductions — clearly gives the best success rate. And for others, you can mention about the mutual contacts you have with these potential prospects, and warm your outreach emails — this gives a much better success rate as compared to cold outreach.

Would love to hear about your unconventional lead generation idea — leave a comment here, or drop us a mail at hello@leadcandy.io.

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